One of the biggest guitar heroes in the history of Rock and Roll, Ritchie Blackmore was an inspiration to a huge number of players around the world. With Deep Purple and his own band Rainbow, he wrote some of the greatest riffs and solos music fans have ever heard.
But besides being one of the most talented musicians of his generation, he is also known for being quite sincere. He was not very impressed by most of his peers and spoke openly about some of them, including Eddie Van Halen, who was one of the few he admired.
What is Ritchie Blackmore’s opinion on Van Halen
Ritchie Blackmore always respected Eddie Van Halen as a guitarist and called him a brilliant one who was copied by whole generations of guitar players, “reinvented the guitar” and was the “ultimate guitar hero.” He also noted that the musician was one of the nicest people he had ever met in the business and was not full of himself, despite being a legendary artist.
“Eddie Van Halen was a brilliant guitarist who started a technique of guitar playing which was emulated by a whole generation of guitarists. He was one of the nicest musicians I ever met in the music business. (He was) very shy and not at all conceited about his ability as a guitar player. Frank Zappa said (Eddie) reinvented the guitar. I agree. He will be sadly missed but his brilliant legacy will always be remembered, the ultimate guitar hero,” Ritchie Blackmore said after Eddie’s passing in 2020.
Ritchie Blackmore was also a fan of Eddie Van Halen’s keyboard playing
Curiously, Blackmore was one of the few who were impressed by and praised Eddie’s keyboard playing as well. After David Lee Roth decided to leave the band, they brought in Sammy Hagar and with the recent success of “Jump”, Eddie felt more free to experiment and add keyboards to the band’s songs. That shift was criticized by many fans, who believed Eddie should continue to focus on being a “guitar God”, but it was praised by others, including Blackmore.
When asked by Guitar World in 1991 what he thought of Eddie, he said: “It depends on my mood. He is probably the most influential player in the last 15 years. Because everybody’s gone out and bought one of those, what does he play, Charvel, Carvel … Kramer, with the locking nut. Yes, with the locking nut!”
He continued:
“So everyone’s gone hammer-on crazy! So he’s obviously done something, he’s a great guitar player. But I’m more impressed by his recent songwriting and keyboard work. I think he’s going to be remembered, he could be the next Cole Porter,” Ritchie Blackmore said. Although he admired the guitarist, Blackmore said during that conversation that he was happy the “tapping movement”, started by Eddie, had come to an end.
To a certain extent, like Blackmore himself, Eddie felt the need to reinvent himself and pursue a path he wanted as a musician. Blackmore did this in a more radical way, abandoning the electric guitar and focusing on Renaissance music with Blackmore’s Night. As Ritchie said in an interview with Classic Rock in 1995, he felt that Van Halen was tired of being “the guitar hero”. “I noticed that eventually Eddie couldn’t stand it any longer, and started playing the organ. But that fast style of guitar playing is not for me any more.”
“I don’t listen to it. I mean, I wouldn’t buy an LP anyway, but when I hear something on the radio I think: “Wow, that guy’s fast.” Like Joe Satriani – this guy really knows how to run around. But then I hear people like BB King and think: “This guy plays from the heart. But I wish he’d play more than those three notes, and a bit faster (laughs),” the guitarist said.
Eddie Van Halen didn’t have a good experience meeting Blackmore for the first time
Eddie Van Halen was a fan of Blackmore’s work, he even told Billboard in 2015, that Deep Purple’s “Burn” had one of his favorite guitar riffs of all time. However, his first meeting with the British guitarist was not a good experience as he told Jas Obrecht in 1982. “There’s one thing that bothered me so much in the very beginning, in ’78, our first tour. (It was) how people like Joe Perry and other guitarists would just give me the shaft with their eyes. Wouldn’t say hello. Wouldn’t be nice. No nothing. I’m not that way.”
“I don’t give a fuck if I’m playing a Holiday Inn lounge, I enjoy playing. But I can’t stand to see a person with Allan’s (Holdsworth) talent, because of mismanagement and people fucking him around. You know, he was ready to sell his guitar and everything and work in a factory. And that is fucking sickening. So I just think about people like Joe Perry or Ritchie Blackmore, who all hate my guts anyway. They wouldn’t go out of their way to help anybody ’cause they would feel threatened.”
He continued:
“Hey, the way I look at it is I wish there were more people that were innovative so I would have somebody to copy licks from. It might sound a little ego’d-out. But there are very few guitarists that I can listen that make me turn my head and go, “Whoa! How did he do that?” And Allan is about the only one,” Eddie Van Halen said.
The current Deep Purple keyboardist Don Airey, who worked with Blackmore in Rainbow, recalled that moment in an interview with Mulatschag TV in 2020. “There was once when Gary Moore first went to L.A he befriended with Eddie, because for the first time in his life he had someone that seriously frightened him. They came to a Rainbow gig at Long Beach. And they both looked so young, especially Eddie.”
“Eddie wanted to meet Richie. I suddenly saw Richie coming and I said ‘Hey Richie! I want you to meet two people. This is Gary Moore and this is Eddie Van Halen’. Richie kind of stormed off (laughs). I don’t know what he thought. (That maybe) I was trying to set him up or something,” Don Airey said (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).