“Eddie was acting crazy and bouncing off of walls in his underwear. Randy was like, ‘Oh okay… not the best time to meet this guy’”: Quiet Riot’s Kelly Garni says Randy Rhoads didn’t have a rivalry with Eddie Van Halen, rather a “fascination”
As the legend goes, Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen were like two ships passing in the night. Despite both earning their stripes on the 1970’s Sunset Strip, the pair of iconic guitarists rarely crossed paths. But that didn’t mean they didn’t know about each other.
With Quiet Riot and Van Halen both on the rise, Randy and Eddie became some of the hottest guitarists on the strip. It was impossible not to compare the two – especially when both bands would often play just doors down from each other. “We became well aware of Van Halen,” Quiet Riot’s original bassist Kelly Garni tells the Booked On Rock Podcast [transcribed by Ultimate Guitar]. “Especially when we’d [perform] at the Starwood… we knew they were playing down the street at Gazzarri’s.”
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Garni notes that Van Halen existed in very different circles, frequenting venues that weren’t exactly Quiet Riot’s “type of a club”. However, their differences didn’t mean there was a rivalry between the pair. “There was no competition,” Garni explains. “Most certainly, there was no competition in Randy’s world. Because Randy didn’t compete.”
“It just wasn’t in Randy to try to compete,” he continues. “He couldn’t! The way his brain was wired… he could not form a thought like ‘Oh, I’m gonna be better than that guy!’”
In fact, rather than a rivalry, there was a fascination; Rhoads was curious to see just what Eddie Van Halen had to offer. “He went down to Gazzarri’s because people were talking about this guy,” Garni recalls. “Randy said, ‘I’ll go see what the deal is’… So he went there, he saw him play, and he went, ‘Yeah, OK, the guy’s good.’”
Apparently Rhoads even got himself backstage to meet his supposed ‘rival’. “Randy was trying to get backstage to meet him, and he did get back there…” the bassist says. “But Eddie was acting kind of crazy and bouncing off of walls in his underwear. And Randy was like, ‘Oh okay… not the best time to meet this guy.’”
So, rather than leaving with a burning sense of rivalry, Rhoads only thought: “‘He was really good, but he looked kind of nutty.’”
The pair went on to perform on just one bill together on 23 April 1977 at California’s Glendale Community College. It’s unknown just how many times the pair crossed paths beyond that… but many musicians have claimed that Rhoads and EVH developed more of a ‘rivalry’ in their later years.
Ozzy Osbourne in particular sensed some competition between the pair. The Black Sabbath legend referenced an archival 1982 Guitar Player clip to prove his point, noting how Eddie claimed “everything [Rhoads] did he learned from me”, and later adding “he was good, but I don’t really think he did anything that I haven’t done”.
“I heard recently that Eddie said he taught Randy all his licks … he never,” Osbourne told Rolling Stone in 2022.
Alongside the strange claim, he also claimed that Rhoads “didn’t have a nice thing to say about Eddie”, either. “Maybe they had a falling out or whatever, but they were rivals,” he said.
The archival Eddie clip was also briefly mentioned in a 2022 documentary, Randy Rhoads: Reflection of a Guitar Icon. One of Rhoads’ friends, Kim McNair, explained: “This was the years of guitar heroes. To a large degree, bands were judged on their guitar player. I think all the guitar players in town kept up on each other.”
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