Throughout the course of musical history, there have always been rivalries, some manufactured, some bitter. Specifically, the world of guitar music seems to be particularly competitive. As a result, the age-old question ‘Who is the greatest guitarist of all time?’ elicits a plethora of different answers, but two names always seem to stand out: Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. Although the two figures were complimentary of each other, it hasn’t stopped many guitar obsessives like Eddie Van Halen from pitching them against each other.
Van Halen has his own claims to guitar greatness, of course. The American musician and songwriter helped to revolutionise the ways in which many people play the guitar. For instance, Van Halen was among the first figures in rock music to employ the ‘tapping’ method of guitar playing, in which he used both hands on the fretboard in order to play riffs faster than anybody else. The guitarist has adorned guitar magazine covers and the walls of young six-string junkies for decades, and he owes a lot of that to Eric Clapton.
The songwriter once told Rolling Stone, “What attracted me to [Clapton’s] playing and style and vibe was the basic simplicity in his approach and his tone, his sound,” explaining, “He just basically took a Gibson guitar and plugged it straight into a Marshall and that was it. The basics. The blues. […] Basically Clapton is the only one that’s influenced me.”
Conversely, Van Halen apparently did not rate Jimi Hendrix very highly at all. A fellow disciple of blues and psychedelia, Hendrix is inarguably the most iconic and beloved guitarist of all time, whose unique compositions and improvisational techniques made him a force of nature within the counterculture rock scene of the 1960s. Only a fool or a deliberate contrarian could denounce the brilliance of Hendrix – we’ll let you make up your mind as to which one Van Halen is.
Back in 2020, Kylie Olsson – who spent a lot of time with Van Halen – reflected on their time together to Ultimate Guitar, “We didn’t really play-play, we just were there with guitars on the left,” she said before dropping the bombshell, “And he asked me who my favourite guitar player was. I said, ‘Well, it’s Jimi Hendrix.’ And he thought Jimi Hendrix was too sloppy; his favourite was Eric Clapton.”
Calling the awe-inspiring tones of Hendrix ‘sloppy’ is like calling the Sistine Chapel a ‘rushed job’. It seems particularly ridiculous coming from Van Halen; as an incredibly proficient guitarist himself, you would assume that he could understand the profound intricacies and deeply emotional quality of Hendrix’s playing style. Nevertheless, Van Halen always maintained that Clapton was the only guitarist worth listening to.
