Ken Burns: I'm not sure that I respect Eddie Van Halen

[danielleesale]

From Guitar Player

Interview with Ken Burns and Vince Gill about the guitars featured in the Country Music documentary.

Interviewer: Perhaps the ultimate player quote in Country Music is when John McEuen says, "The same thing that Eddie Van Halen brought to rock and roll shredding guitar, Earl Scruggs brought to the banjo. It was so fast that it excited people. He wasn't the first person to play with a three-finger roll, but he was the first guy that came to Nashville with it."

Burns: I don't like that Van Halen analogy. I'll refer to the analogy I made earlier, which is that bluegrass is the equivalent of modernist instinct that took swing music and permitted Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to create bebop. String-band music was too predictable to contain a talent like Bill Monroe, and what he fashions out of it is Bluegrass, which has the same kind of propulsive virtuosic speed. It takes a certain player to do it. Earl then comes in on the banjo and represents that same impulse. I'm not sure that I respect Eddie Van Halen that much to put him in the same discussion. I'd rather go back and say that what Dizzy Gillespie is doing on the trumpet and Parker on the sax is the better comparison to what Bill Monroe is doing on the mandolin and Earl on the banjo.

[It's Mike]

Thats a BS clip of a quote.

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

[Get The Show On The Road]

Ted Templeman disagrees as he compared Eddie to Charlie Parker directly.

I'm gonna guess Ted knows a little more about music than Ken Burns.

[Number 47]

Ken Burns obviously never saw CVH live.

[evhintexas]

May the Gods of Wrath defecate on Ken Burns soul....

[speedtruckermf]

His civil war doc was trash.(showed only one perspective and intentionaly left out everything that didn't fit the narrative he wanted to tell.) I can't bring myself to watch the Country Music doc because of him. I've heard he leaves out a lot of key people, events.

[japeape]

What an idiotic statement.

If you can't hear the innovation Edward brought, changing the guitars vocabulary & sound,
if you can't hear his swing in the phrases of things like "so this is love?" or the fusion elements
in things like DDL....

Man, i agree with Ted.

Eddie was a killer rock guitar player, but his imagination & playing stretched beyond that into
these unknown territories.

Add to that, he was a phenomenal rhythmic player, too.

[japeape]

Christ, even my parents could hear Edward was different!

Even my pretentious, Segovia loving classical guitar teacher in High School,
who thought Hendrix was over rated, agreed that Eddie was excellent (we played
him Spanish Fly & something else from II).

I remember my Dad hearing the ICM solo, and saying:
That guy is better than Santana! (and he loved Santana).

I even played them Lynch, and they said:
No...he doesn't sound musical like Eddie does.

Eddie just has that thing, the swing, the control, his guitar speaks.

[LAD-1972]

I think this is one that Ken forgot to add to his Doc and a fitting response to his assertion regarding EVH:

[bklynboy68]

What a dickhead statement from Burns

[I Coulda Hada VH]

Yeah, Eddie Van Halen really wasn't all that good …

[ArtyBoy]

First, I'm really amazed John McEuen said the same thing I've been saying, that there are HUGE parallels between Eddie Van Halen and Earl Scruggs. It's pretty much the exact same phenomena in a different genre and 30 years earlier.

Past that, Ken Burns is some dickhead marketing documentaries to the PBS/NPR, upper middle and upper class crowd. He'd be more likely to draw parallels between Bob Dylan or even Lou Reed over Eddie Van Halen, because that crowd thinks Van Halen is low brow hair metal music and would never give Eddie credit for anything. But I bet Ken Burns secretly hops in his Mercedes and cranks "Hang `em High!"

[Nickdfresh]

Fuck Ken Burns. You could also say that he made a Civil War Documentary that fed into the myth of "the lost cause" and glossed over slavery. Or his Vietnam biopic was vastly flawed. But whatever, fuck him and the very white paladin he road in on...

[DFVH5150]

Fuck 'em in the ear.

[DFVH5150]

Fuck 'em in the other ear!