“Eddie said, ‘I can’t play on that!’” Albert Lee reveals the genre that Eddie Van Halen was reluctant to play
Eddie Van Halen could tap, shred and generally make a guitar do things that seemed physically impossible. But according to country guitar legend Albert Lee, there was one style that had the rock virtuoso briefly questioning whether he could pull it off.
That moment came when Van Halen joined Lee’s Biff Baby’s All-Stars for a handful of gigs. The unlikely supergroup brought together some serious guitar talent, and during one of their shows, Van Halen found himself tackling Lee’s country classic Country Boy – complete with its chicken-pickin’ passages.
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Speaking in a new interview with Guitar World, Lee recalls, “On a couple of gigs, we had Eddie Van Halen playing with us. He said, ‘I can’t play on that!’ I said, ‘Yes, you can – you can do all that tapping!’ And of course he was great.”
Van Halen apparently didn’t see country picking as part of his usual vocabulary, though Lee was quick to convince him otherwise.
“He didn’t think it was his style. I said, ‘Of course it is!’”
That said, Biff Baby’s All-Stars was never really a band in the traditional sense. Put together by Ernie Ball’s son Sterling Ball, the group featured a rotating cast of the era’s top guitarists including Lee, Steve Morse, Steve Lukather and, on occasion, Van Halen for impromptu performances and the occasional “odd gig”.
That included a memorable appearance at NAMM with Van Halen and Morse, a performance Lee says fans still bring up decades later.
“We did one at the NAMM show, which people still talk about,” says the guitarist. “They used to say, ‘That show you did with Steve Morse and Eddie Van Halen was great. Any chance of any more?’ I’d say, ‘I don’t think so!’”
Watch the full interview below.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
