“If we guitarists could just get our Variacs on the right setting, we could finally all get Eddie’s mythical tone. I’m only gonna tell you one ti-ii-ime… AHHHHHHHH YAAAAAHHHH!’
And don’t forget David Lee Roth lines like, ‘Goddamn it, baby. The best thing to do was just go see the live show – to laugh, scream and join the party. “Nobody knew what to do when this album came out. Eddie’s innate musical genius ears, combined with the athletic prowess he got from eight-hours-a-day bedroom practicing, along with an indestructible rhythmic groove developed from jamming with his brother, results in a record of non-stop jaw-dropping awesomeness. The whole band was great as well, the songwriting was crazy.” Then, all of a sudden I heard Van Halen and thought, ‘What is going on here?!’ It was a whole different world. Before that I loved Queen and Led Zep and you knew that was guitar. “The sound of that album was so alien to me that it might as well have been a spaceship flying over my house. That wasn’t the first guitar album that I loved but it was so important in terms of tone.
That album was a breakthrough for me and for a lot of people from my generation. “It has great playing but also amazing tone. That showed me the kinds of sounds you could get out of an amp. But, I think from a guitar sound perspective Van Halen affected me a bunch of times. “For me what I always loved in a record was a mix of the guitar work but also great work from the whole band. It wasn’t just for the sake of being a virtuoso, though, because everything Eddie did was so musical.” Now I could suddenly imagine myself on a stage playing lead guitar and doing just that. Before then, I sort of hoped to be a singer-type guitar player. “I’d already been playing guitar for a few years, but hearing the first Van Halen record made me want to be a lead guitarist. It just kind of reached out and grabbed me like nothing else had before. I never knew a guitar could sound like that. “When I heard the sound of Eddie’s guitar, just the pure sound he made, it was magical. So that would definitely be way up on my list, for sure.” It just blew my mind, the way he approached the guitar. He’s one of the #1 reasons why I picked up a guitar. He changed the way guitar was played, and he became a huge influence on me.
#Eddie van halen guitar full
Keep an eye out for our full interview with him in the coming days.“I just love it - Eddie is one of my biggest influences ever. Though Bratta would leave White Lion – and the music business entirely – shortly after the release of Mane Attraction, he remains one of the most highly-regarded guitarists of his era. That might make me sound like a dick, but after being told I sounded like him, that I was copying him, and all this shit, it meant a lot to hear that he liked what I did, and that he respected it." "Eddie said a lot of nice things to me that day," Bratta went on, "and I’ll take them to my grave, but I’ll tell you this, I was touched enough to where I had to leave the room, go to the bathroom, and cry. Here I am, standing in the studio, watching Eddie Van Halen sitting on my amp, jamming out on guitar. He came in, and he was sitting on my 5150 amp. I got to meet him once when he came into the studio during the recording of Mane Attraction. "What I will say is that when I talked to Eddie, he didn’t agree.
"Now, I’m not the type to use Eddie’s name for whatever – especially since he passed away – but I will say that Eddie complimented me, and that he didn’t agree," Bratta shares. Van Halen, Bratta tells GW, was dismissive of the notion that the latter player was merely an EVH clone. It got to the point where I met Eddie once, and I asked him, ‘Does it freak you out that I play like you?’ I thought that because it had been drilled into my head by magazines and stuff." "Once I became established with White Lion in the ‘80s, I got a lot of shit from people who said I was aping his style," Bratta says. His admiration of Van Halen aside, though, Bratta was, understandably, less than thrilled when accusations of stealing Van Halen's style were lobbed in his direction upon White Lion's commercial breakthrough in the mid-1980s. Eddie Van Halen performs with Van Halen in Chicago, Illinois on Ma(Image credit: Paul Natkin/WireImage)
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