Eruptions: Heavy Metal Appropriations of Classical Virtuosity Author(s): Robert Walser Source: Popular Music, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Oct., 1992), pp. 263-308 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/931311 Accessed: 25/01/2009 13:26 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. 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Copyright? 1992C ambridgeU niversityP ress Eruptions: heavy metal appropriatioof nscl assical virtuosity ROBERT WALSER We have now heard him, the strange wonder, whom the superstition of past ages, pos- sessed by the delusion that such things could never be done without the help of the Evil One, would undoubtedly have condemned to the stake - we have heard him, and seen him too, which, of course, makes a part of the affair.J ust look at the pale, slender youth in his clothes that signal the nonconformist;t he long, sleek, drooping hair . . . those features so strongly stamped and full of meaning, in this respect reminding one of Paganini, who, indeed, has been his model of hitherto undreamt-ofv irtuosity and technicalb rilliancef rom the very first moment he heard him and was swept away.1 In the liner notes for his 1988 album, Odyssey, heavy metal guitarist Yngwie J. Malmsteen claimed a musical genealogy that confounds the stability of conven- tional categorisations of music into classical and popular spheres. In his list of acknowledgments, along with the usual cast of agents and producers, suppliers of musical equipment, and relatives and friends, Malmsteen expressed gratitude to J. S. Bach, Nicolo Paganini, Antonio Vivaldi, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jimi Hendrix and Ritchie Blackmore.2 From the very beginnings of heavy metal in the late 1960s, guitar players had experimented with the musical materials of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European composers. But the trend came to full fruition around the time of Malmsteen's debut in the early 1980s; a writer for the leading professional guitar magazine says flatly that the single most important develop- ment in rock guitar in the 1980s has been 'the turn to classical music for inspiration and form' (Stix 1986, p. 59). Heavy metal, like all forms of rock and soul, owes its biggest debt to African- American blues.3 The harmonic progressions, vocal lines and guitar improvisations of metal all rely heavily on the pentatonic scales derived from blues music. The moans and screams of metal guitar playing, now performed with whammy bars and overdriven amplifiers, derive from the bottleneck playing of the Delta blues musicians, and ultimately from earlier African-American vocal styles. Angus Young, guitarist with AC/DC, recalls, 'I started out listening to a lot of early blues people, like B. B. King, Buddy Guy, and Muddy Waters' (Szatmary 1987, p. 154). Such statements are not uncommon, and heavy metal guitarists who did not study the blues directly learned second-hand, from the British cover versions by Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, or from the most conspicuous link between heavy metal and black blues and R&B, Jimi Hendrix.4 But from the very beginning of heavy metal there has been another important influence: that assemblage of disparate musical styles known in the twentieth 263 264 Robert Walser century as 'classical music'. Throughout heavy metal's twenty-year history, its most influential musicians have been guitar players who have also studied classical music. Their appropriation and adaptation of classical models sparked the develop- ment of a new kind of guitar virtuosity, changes in the harmonic and melodic language of heavy metal, and new modes of musical pedagogy and analysis. Classical prestige and popular meanings The classical influence on heavy metal marks a merger of what are generally regarded as the most and least prestigious musical discourses of our time. This influence thus seems an unlikely one, and we must wonder why metal musicians and fans have found such a discursive fusion useful and compelling. Musicologists have frequently characterised adaptive encounters among musical practices as 'natural' expansions of musical resources, as musicians find in foreign musics new means with which to assert their innovative creativity. Yet such explanations merely reiterate, covertly, a characteristically Western faith in progress, expansion and colonisation. They do little to account for the appearance of specific fusions at particular historical moments, or to probe the power relations implicit in all such encounters. We will need more cogent explanations than those with which musi- cology has traditionally explained classical exoticism, fusions of national styles and elite dabblings in jazz. I should emphasise too that my discussion of the relationship of heavy metal and classical music is not simply a bid to elevate the former's cultural prestige. Attempts to legitimate popular culture by applying the standards of 'high' culture are not uncommon, and they are rightly condemned as wrongheaded and counter- productive by those who see such friends of 'low' culture as too willing to cede the high ground. That is, such projects leave untouched the assumptions that under- pin cultural value judgments, and the dice remain loaded against popular culture. An attempt to legitimate heavy metal in terms of the criteria of classical music, like prior treatments of the Beatles' and other rock music, could easily miss the point, for heavy metal is in some ways antithetical to today's classical music. Such a project would disperse the differences between metal and other musics, accom- plishing a kind of musicological colonisation that musicians, fans and cultural historians alike would find alienating and pointless.5 But in the case of heavy metal, the relationship to classical modes of thought and music-making is not merely in the eye of the beholder. To compare it with culturally more prestigious music is entirely appropriate, for the musicians who compose, perform and teach this music have tapped the classical canon for musical techniques and procedures which they have then fused with their blues-based rock sensibility. Their instrumental virtuosity, theoretical self-consciousness and studious devotion to the works of the classical canon means that their work could be valorised in the more 'legitimate' terms of classical excellence. But more import- antly, metal guitarists' appropriations of classical music provide a vital opportunity for examining criteria for musical significance as they function in cultural contestation. The history of American popular music is replete with examples of appropri- ation 'from below' - popular adaptations of classical music. As I discuss examples drawn from heavy metal, I will be describing a number of ways in which classical Eruptions 265 music is being used, all of which have antecedents in other twentieth-century popular music. The sorts of value popular appropriators find in classical music can be grouped around these topics: semiotics, virtuosity, theory and prestige. I will explore these topics as I discuss the work of several of the most influential and successful heavy metal guitarists. But before examining the classical influence upon metal, I must clarify my understanding of the term 'classical music', particu- larly my attribution to it of prestige and semiotic significance. The prestige of classical music encompasses both its constructed aura of transcendent profundity and its affiliation with powerful social groups. Although the potency of its aura and the usefulness of its class status depend upon the widespread assumption that classical music is somehow timeless and universal, we know that 'classical music' is a relatively recent cultural construct. The canon of the music now known as 'the great works of the classical tradition' began to form early in the nineteenth century, with revivals of 'ancient' music (Bach and Mozart) and series publications of composers' collected works. Lawrence W. Levine has care- fully detailed the process of elevation and 'sacralisation', begun midway through the nineteenth century, whereby European composed music was wrenched away from a variety of popular contexts and made to serve the social agenda of a powerful minority of Americans. Along with the popular plays of Shakespeare, German music was elevated by an elite that was attempting to impose a singular 'moral order', repudiating the plurality of cultural life (Levine 1988). By the twen- tieth century, institutional and interpretive structures came to shape musical recep- tion so completely that what we know today as 'classical music' is less a useful label for a historical tradition than for a genre of twentieth-century music. The most forceful critique of the institution of modern concert music is that of Christopher Small, who argues that this process of sacralisation has almost com- pletely effaced original social and political meanings (Small 1980, 1987).6 Musical works which were created for courts, churches, public concerts, salons of connois- seurs, and which had modelled and enacted the social relationships important to those specific audiences, have become a set of interchangeable great pieces. All the vast range of meanings produced by these disparate musics are reduced to singularity in the present. That single meaning, Small maintains, is one of defence - specifically, defence of the social relationships and ideologies that underpin the modern industrial state. Cultural hierarchy is used to legitimate social hierarchy, and to marginalise the voices of all musicians who stand outside of the canon, representing those who stand at the margins of social power. Small's critique is important because it is essential to realise that classical music is not just 'great' music; it is a constructed category that reflects the priorities of a historical moment, and that serves certain social interests at the expense of others. Classical music is the sort of thing Eric Hobsbawm calls an 'invented tradition', whereby present interests construct a cohesive past to establish or legitimise present-day institutions or social relations (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). The hodgepodge of the classical canon - aristocratic and bourgeois music; academic, sacred and secular; music for public concerts, private soirees and dancing - achieves its coherence through its function as the most prestigious musical culture of the twentieth century. Once established, though, classical music can be negotiated; it has been both a bulwark of class privilege and a means whereby other social barriers could be overcome. African-American performers and composers have long worked to defeat racist essentialism by proving their ability to write and perform European 266 Robert Walser concert music. The chamber jazz of the Modern Jazz Quartet, with its cool fusions of swing and classical forms, was an important statement of black pride, however conservative it seemed amidst the turmoil of the 1960s. Duke Ellington was a crucial figure in the struggle to achieve widespread respect for African-American music, in large measure because his skills as composer, orchestrator and leader made him, of all jazz musicians, most closely match the prestigious model of the classical composer. Rock fusions with classical styles are most often associated with 'progressive' or 'art rock' in the late 1960s. With Sgt. Pepper'sL onely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles kicked off an era of self-conscious experimentation with the instrumentation and stylistic features of classical music. Producer George Martin's training as a classical oboist exposed him to many of the peculiarities that appeared on the Beatles' recordings: the piccolo trumpet (a modern instrument now associated with Baroque music), classical string quartets, odd metric patterns perhaps inspired by Stravinsky or Bart6k (or more directly by the non-Western music that had inspired them). The Moody Blues collaborated with the London Festival Orchestra for Days of Future Passed in 1968, and groups as different as The Who, Yes, The Kinks, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer composed classically-influenced rock songs, rock con- certos and rock operas. Deep Purple, eventually recognised as one of the founding bands of heavy metal, began to develop in that direction only after guitarist Ritchie Blackmore grew dissatisfied with fusions such as keyboardist Jon Lord's ambitious Concertof or Group and Orchestra( 1969) and reoriented the band: I felt that the whole orchestra thing was a bit tame. I mean, you're playing in the Royal AlbertH all, and the audience sits there with folded arms, and you're standing there playing next to a violinist who hold his ears everytime you take a solo. It doesn't make you feel particularlyi nspired. (Kleidermacher1 991, p. 62) Blackmore realised that the institutions and audience expectations that frame classical music would always control the reception of any music performed within that context; while he was attracted to classical musical resources, he found that he would have to work with them on his own turf. Discussions of 'art rock' rarely move beyond sketching influences to address the question of why classical music was used by these groups (see, for example, Rockwell 1980). Certainly one of the most important reasons is prestige. Rock critics' own preoccupation with art rock reflects their acceptance of the premises of the classical model. Performers who have not composed their own material - 'girl groups', Motown, soul singers - have rarely won critical respect comparable to those granted artists who better fit the model of the auteur, the solitary composing genius. Sometimes performers stake their claims to classical prestige explicitly. Emerson, Lake and Palmer's neoclassical extravaganzas, such as their rendering of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition( 1972), were intended as elevations of public taste and expressions of advanced musicianship. Keith Emerson's attraction to classical resources was unabashedly elitist; he considered ordinary popular music degraded, and took on the mission of raising the artistic level of rock. In such art rock, classical references and quotations were intended to be recognised as such; their function was, in large measure, to invoke classical music, and to confer some of its prestigious status, its seriousness. Other popular musicians have been attracted to classical resources for reasons of signification beyond prestige. At least since 1932, when a classical string section Eruptions 267 was featured on Bing Crosby's hit recording, 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?', classical means have been used in order to expand the rhetorical palette - and social meanings - of popular music. In Crosby's Depression-era lament, the strings invoke a particular tradition of representing feelings; they underscore the sincerity of Crosby's voice, and magnify the poignancy of his character's plight. The recorders on Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven' (1971) similarly contribute to the song's musical semiotics. They sound archaic and bittersweet; their tranquil contra- puntal motion is at once soothing and mysterious.7 Of all the stylistic or historical subdivisions of classical music, rock music has borrowed most from the Baroque. Richard Middleton has tried to account for this by arguing that there is a 'relatively high syntactic correlation' between Baroque and rock musical codes. Like rock music, Baroque music generally uses conventional harmonicp rogressions, melodic patterns and structuralf rame- works, and operates through imaginative combinations, elaborations and variations of these, rather than developing extended, through-composedf orms. It also tends to have a regular, strongly marked beat; indeed, its continuo section could be regarded as analogous to the rhythm section of jazz and rock. (Middleton 1990, p. 30) Middleton suggests, for example, that Procul Harum's 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' (1967), by fusing harmonic and melodic material taken from a Bach cantata with the soul ballad vocal style of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, presented the counter- culture with an image of itself as 'sensuously spiritual' and 'immanently opposi- tional' (p. 31). Here the usefulness of Baroque materials depends on both their aura as 'classical' and their present semiotic value, to the extent these meanings are separ- able. For although this music was composed long ago, it is still circulating, produc- ing meanings in contemporary culture. Metal musicians generally acquire their knowledge and facility with classical music through intense study, but they owe their attraction to the music and their audiences' ability to decode it not to the pickled rituals of the concert hall, but to the pervasive recycling of all available musical discourses by the composers of television and movie music. Classical musics, despite the best efforts of proponents of cultural apartheid - and in part due to their own missionary efforts - are alive and omnipresent in mass culture. Mass mediation ensures that there can be no absolute separation of 'high' and 'low' culture in the modern world; classically-trained composers write film scores that draw upon their conservatory studies but succeed or fail on their intelligibility for mass audiences. Classical music surely no longer signifies as it did originally, but neither are its meanings ahistorical or arbitrary. It is available to culturally competi- tive groups who claim and use its history, its prestige and its signifying powers in different ways. Heavy metal appropriations of classical music are in fact very specific and consistent: Bach not Mozart, Paganini rather than Liszt, Vivaldi and Albinoni instead of Telemann or Monteverdi. This selectivity is remarkable at a time when the historical and semiotic specificity of classical music, on its own turf, has all but vanished, when the classical canon is defined and marketed as a reliable set of equally great and ineffable collectables. By finding new uses for old music, recy- cling the rhetoric of Bach and Vivaldi for their own purposes, metal musicians have reopened issues of signification in classical music. Their appropriation suggests that despite the homogenisation of that music in the literatures of 'music appreci- ation' and commercial promotion, many listeners perceive and respond to dif- 268 Robert Walser ferences, to the musical specificity that reflects historical and social specificity. Thus the reasons behind heavy metal's classical turn can reveal a great deal not only about heavy metal, but also about classical music. We must ask: if we do not understand why his influence shows up in the music of Ozzy Osbourne or Bon Jovi, do we really understand Bach as well as we thought we did? Ritchie Blackmore and the classical roots of metal That many rock guitarists of the late 1960s experimented with classical influences in their playing can be seen as part of a widespread interest in musical exploration - itself part of the search for social and conceptual options that distinguished the decade. Jimmy Page listened to a great range of music to acquire the means to create the varied moods of Led Zeppelin, which ranged from heavy blues to ethereal ballads, Celtic mysticism, Orientalist fantasies and folkish ballads. Moun- tain's Leslie West inflected his heavy blues sensibility with classical and jazz licks, and many other early examples could be cited. But the most important musician of the emerging metal/classical fusion was Ritchie Blackmore. As lead guitarist for Deep Purple, Blackmore was one of the most influential guitar players of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though hardly the first hard rock guitarist to employ classi- cal features, he greatly affected other players; for many of them, Blackmore's was the first really impressive, compelling fusion of rock and classical music. Born in 1945, Ritchie Blackmore began playing at age eleven; six years later he was working as a studio session guitarist in London. Blackmore greatly admired Jimi Hendrix's guitar sound, and like Hendrix, he became a pioneer of flashy virtuosity (see Marshall 1986b). While young, Blackmore took classical guitar les- sons for a year, which affected his fingering technique: unlike most rock guitarists of his generation, he made full use of the little finger on his left hand. But the classical influence shows up most, Blackmore himself maintains, in the music he wrote: 'For example, the chord progression in the "Highway Star" solo on Machine Head ... is a Bach progression' (Webb 1984, p. 54). And the solo is 'just arpeggios based on Bach' (Rosen 1984, p. 62).8 Recorded in 1971 (released in 1972), Machine Head contained not only the hits 'Highway Star' and 'Space Truckin'', but also the heavy metal anthem 'Smoke on the Water'. The album came to be regarded by fans as one of the 'classic' albums of heavy metal, and it helped create great enthusiasm for classical/metal fusions. 'Highway Star' is a relatively long and complex song; it winds its way among several keys, and both Blackmore and the keyboard player, Jon Lord, take extended solos. The organ solo begins over a descending chromatic bassline, reminiscent of the ground bass patterns favoured by seventeenth-century com- posers such as Henry Purcell. Much of the soloing is made up of series of arpeg- gios, in the style of Vivaldi (or Bach, after he absorbed Vivaldi's influence). The members of Deep Purple abstracted and adapted a particular set of classical features: repetitious melodic patterns (such as arpeggios), square phrase struc- tures, virtuosic soloing and characteristic harmonic progressions, such as descending through a tetrachord by half-steps, or cycling through the circle of fifths. The harmonic progressions, as Blackmore asserted, are typically Baroque, as are the rapid, flashy sixteenth-note patterns organised symmetrically through repetition and phrase balance. In Deep Purple, guitarist and organist alike drew Eruptions 269 upon these materials in order to construct a new and effective style of rock virtuosity. In his 'Highway Star' solo, Blackmore begins with blues-derived licks, bring- ing in Baroque materials climactically at the end, where he overdubs a matching harmony part in thirds, with figuration that recalls Vivaldi's energetic articulation of harmonic progressions in his violin concerti (see Examples 1 and 2). As in Vivaldi, a regular and predictable (though dynamic) harmonic sequence provides the backdrop for exhilarating figuration. The harmonic cycles set up rational arti- culation of time and direction, enabling us to predict what will come next, and the guitar solo energises these patterns with virtuosic exhibitionism. As in the concerto grosso, the soloist provides the dynamic individual element, in contrast to the stable collectivity of the rhythm section.9 Vivaldi's social model transfers well to the context of the guitar hero. Example1 . Deep Purple (1972), 'Highway Star', excerptf rom Ritchie Blackmore'ss olo (transcription by Robert Walser). I ^tf/lt i Xi I- l f -i Example2 . Antonio Vivaldi, Violin Concerto in D minor (F. 1, no. 21 in the Collected Works, ed. Malipiero, Edizioni Ricordi, 1949), first movement, mm. 87-97. Am E A Dm I^trn^ir^cL"I rrm^^~~iruJJ^^ Dm Gm C F B1 Edim A Dm E6 Gm A MML- flrmTMrrfrt I Throughout the 1970s, guitarists continued their experimentation with * fusions of heavy metal and classical music. Just as jazz musicians had done in the late 1940s, some rock guitarists turned to classical music theory for new musical resources. The Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns by musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky (1947) introduced both jazz and rock musicians to harmonic and melodic possibilities such as harmonic minor scales, modal scales and diminished arpeggios.10 Ulrich Roth of the German band Scorpions advanced virtuosic standards with his fast scales and dramatic diminished chords. Jazz/rock fusion 270 Robert Walser guitarist Al DiMeola had an important influence on many rock guitarists; his music was by no means heavy metal, but he used a similar distorted, highly sustained guitar tone, and his melodic and harmonic language was close enough to that of metal that his modal explorations influenced heavy metal musicians. Other major metal guitarists of this period did not pursue the classical influence directly. Michael Schenker, who was perhaps the most influential metal guitarist of continental Europe during the 1970s, had no formal training, and no exposure to academic music theory. He taught himself to play, learning Beatles songs and Clapton solos by ear, and his virtuosity has always been primarily blues- based, grounded in the pentatonicism and timbral nuance of the blues guitar. The musical roots of Angus and Malcolm Young of AC/DC are in early rock 'n' roll and R&B, and they have stuck doggedly to them. Glenn Tipton and K. K. Downing, the guitar players of Judas Priest, also had little formal training, and it was only in the late 1980s that the classical influence became pronounced in their playing. But in spite of these exceptions, appropriations of classical music were increasingly important throughout the history of heavy metal. After leaving Deep Purple to pursue a solo career, Ritchie Blackmore con- tinued his study and adaptation of classical music. The liner notes for his first album with his new band, Rainbow (1975), include the acknowledgment: 'Inspira- tion: J. S. Bach'. A few years later Blackmore even took up study of the cello, and Rainbow's 1981 release featured a very direct use of classical music in its title cut, 'Difficult to Cure', an instrumental built around the 'Ode to Joy' from the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Blackmore begins with a distorted version of Beethoven's instrumental recitative, which he transforms into a sitar-like modal flurry over a pedal; the band then moves into the theme of the Ode itself. Initially, Blackmore simply repeats the melody without developing or embellishing it, while the band modulates to different keys in order to freshen the repetitions. The musicians eventually alter the progression for the solos, which are a blend of a boogie blues rhythmic feel with the Orientalist modality of the beginning. In 'Difficult to Cure', classical material is quoted literally, so that it is sure to be recognised; in fact, the song is self-consciously parodic. The classical model is spoofed by a bouncy 12/8 beat, an incongruous introduction and the finishing touch: as the song ends, we hear candid laughter in the recording studio. If Blackmore had drawn on Bach for inspiration, Beethoven was merely quoted, with a funny accent. For the major mode of Beethoven's tune is rarely used in heavy metal, and when it is combined with a similarly inappropriate bouncy rhythm, Blackmore's distorted guitar and heavy drums end up sounding frivolous and silly. 'Difficult to Cure' is a comic anomaly, and it reminds us that heavy metal musicians are in fact very selective in their appropriations of the various styles that are usually lumped together as 'classical music', and that fusions signify quite precisely. In an interview published in 1985, Blackmore was asked about his current musical tastes: 'I still listen to a great deal of classical music . . . That's the type of music that moves me because I find it very dramatic. Singers, violinists and organ- ists are generally the musicians I enjoy listening to most of all. I can't stand guitarists!' (Gett 1985, p. 68). Twelve years earlier, Blackmore had recommended to the readers of Guitar Player that, above all, they study guitarists. He had com- plained: 'Jimmy Page says he listens to piano solos. But I don't see how that helps, because a pianist can play about ten times the speed of a guitarist' (Webb 1984, p. 57). In 1973, such technical limitations had been accepted; Blackmore's change Eruptions 271 of heart may reflect the fact that in 1978, guitarist Edward Van Halen redefined virtuosity on the electric guitar. Edward Van Halen and the new virtuosity Alex and Edward Van Halen were born in the Netherlands (Alex in 1955, Edward in 1957), but moved with their family to California while still in grade school. Their father was a professional musician (on saxophone and clarinet) whose gigging included live radio shows; he was 'constantly practicing, working and going on the road', according to Alex (Edrei 1984, p. 27). Jan Van Halen encouraged his sons to become classical musicians, and both boys started piano lessons while very young, dutifully practising Mozart until their interests in guitar and drums prevailed. After a brief period during which Edward played drums, and Alex guitar, they switched instruments and grew increasingly serious about music, playing in a series of bands that culminated in their tremendous success with Van Halen. Throughout his teens, Edward was completely absorbed in the guitar, practising 'all day, every day. I used to cut school to come home and play, I was so into it' (Obrecht 1984c, pp. 148-9). Like most rock guitarists, Van Halen was heavily influenced by the dialogic 'question-and-answer' of the blues, which for him was represented mainly by the guitar playing of Eric Clapton. 'I started out playing blues', Van Halen recalls: I can play real good blues - that's the feeling I was after. But actually I've turned it into a much more aggressive thing. Blues is a real tasty, feel type of thing; so I copped that in the beginning. But then when I started to use a wang [vibrato]b ar, I still used that feeling, but rowdier, more aggressive, more attack.B ut still, I end a lot of phrasing with a bluesy feeling. (Obrecht1 984c,p . 155)." But along with the influence of the blues, Van Halen's classical piano training taught him music theory that would later prove useful, and his continuing exposure to classical repertoires helped him to transform the electric guitar and forge a new virtuosity for it. Even after he became a rock star, Van Halen still played piano and violin, and continued to listen to classical music, especially Bach and Debussy (Obrecht 1984c, p. 159). Edward Van Halen's impact on rock guitar playing was enormous. The readership of Guitar Player elected him 'Best New Talent' in a 1978 poll, and Van Halen went on to win 'Best Rock Guitarist' for an unprecedented five straight years, 1979-83. Yngwie Malmsteen, who himself won 'Best New Talent' in 1984 and 'Best Rock Guitarist' in 1985, credits Van Halen with revolutionising rock guitar: 'When I heard the first Van Halen album, I couldn't believe how great the guitar playing was ... I mean, he totally changed the whole guitar field'. And even a decade after Van Halen's debut, Billy Gibbons (of ZZ Top) asserted that 'If you had a guitar poll, I'd put Edward Van Halen in the first five slots and then the next five slots would start opening up' (Guitar World, July 1990, pp. 51, 74). The solo that transformed rock guitar was called, appropriately enough, 'Eruption'. Released in 1978 on Van Halen's first album, 'Eruption' is one minute and twenty-seven seconds of exuberant and playful virtuosity, a violinist's precise and showy technique inflected by the vocal rhetoric of the blues and rock 'n' roll irreverence. Here and elsewhere, Van Halen's guitar playing displays an unpre- cedented fluidity, due to his skilful use of string bending, two-handed tapping and his deft touch on the vibrato (or 'whammy') bar.