Jack White Recalls How Eddie Van Halen Made Playing Guitar Easy For Him
The White Stripes frontman Jack White did a brand new interview with Guitar World. White talked about how Eddie Van Halen and the EVH Wolfgang guitar series, named after his son, made it easy for him to play the guitar.
Considered one of the greatest guitarists of all time by the metal community, Eddie Van Halen founded the EVH brand in 2007. Sharing many guitars and accessories with guitarists since 2007, Eddie launched the EVH Wolfgang guitar in 2009.
For the EVH Wolfgang guitar named after his son, Eddie Van Halen said: “Everything that I’ve built, destroyed, stumbled onto, learned and experienced is in this guitar”. Eddie Van Halen used Wolfgang guitars on Van Halen‘s 2012 and 2015 tours.
In the interview, Jack White reflected on Eddie Van Halen‘s 2015 Chip Ellis-designed EVH Wolfgang guitar and his relationship with Eddie Van Halen. White admits that he found the Wolfgang guitar while looking for the easiest guitar to play.
“We had a bit of a relationship,” White says of his interactions with Van Halen. “What happened was, when I was doing my last album, Boarding House Reach, I found that the songs took weeks of rehearsal, which was something new to me. I thought, ‘I want to get the easiest guitar there is to play,’ which is the opposite of what I normally do.
“I saw an interview with Eddie Van Halen and [EVH Master Builder] Chip Ellis in which they talked about building the Wolfgang EVH guitar. Eddie talked about how he didn’t want to fight the guitar, and I thought, ‘OK, that might be the one for me.’
Jack White Says ‘Eddie Van Halen Thought Me a Couple Things’
Stating that the guitar is really easy to play after purchasing it, White says that he customized the design according to his taste. He also says that even though they haven’t met Eddie face-to-face, they keep in touch and have learned a few things from him.
“I bought one, and sure enough, it was so easy to play,” he continued. “It practically played itself. That’s when I got into customizing it to my liking. I took his design, and I customized it to some specs that I like – pickups, switches, material and stuff, the paint job.
“But yes, he and I had a little bit of a relationship, talking back and forth, and he taught me a couple things. There were some texts. It was nice, although we never met in person, which is a shame.”
Last week during the final episode of The Nightly Nuge, Ted Nugent was asked to choose the best guitarist in rock history. Rock legend Nugent named Eddie Van Halen as the best guitarist.
“There’s so many,” Ted said. “I’m gonna go ahead and give it to Eddie Van Halen because he was so diverse in not only his histrionics but his groove. He had an unbelievable organic sense of rhythm in his delivery of not just exciting lead guitar parts but his grind of a grooving rhythm as a white kid.
He really defied the history of who can groove like that. ‘Cause I come from the world of The Funk Brothers of Motown, so I know what the gods of groove look and sound like. And Eddie Van Halen, the times I jammed with him and just listening to the records, you can tell he had an unbelievable, uncanny Superman sense of rhythm beyond just his outrageous athleticism on the guitar neck.”
