It sounds like something out of one of those corny classic rock-themed parodies of Renaissance paintings.
The setting is one of the most famed rock venues of all time, LA’s Whisky a Go Go, and the year is 1968.
Onstage is Harvey Mandel, the underrated guitarist who highlighted his performances with flourishes of two-hand tapping years before Eddie Van Halen put the technique on every guitar player’s radar. In the audience are, among others, Ritchie Blackmore, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison.
Now, these are rock stars after all, and so each of them is either hammered, or well on their way to being so. Morrison, as was often the case, is much further along that path than anyone else.
Already a blues-rock veteran, and soon to be a member of Canned Heat, Mandel was in fine form onstage, and confident enough to pull tapping out of his bag of six-string tricks, surprising his audience in the process.
According to Blackmore, though, the reaction wasn’t exactly one of slack-jawed euphoria.
Asked about his thoughts on tapping in a wide-ranging 1991 conversation with Guitar Worldthe always frank Blackmore first said, “Thank goodness it’s come to an end.”
“The first person I saw doing that hammer-on stuff was Harvey Mandel, at the Whisky a Go Go in ’68,” he went on to recall. “I thought, ‘What the hell is he doing?’
“It was so funny,” Blackmore added with a laugh. “Jim Morrison was carried out because he was shouting abuse at the band.
“Jimi Hendrix was there. We were all getting drunk. Then Harvey Mandel starts doing this stuff (mimes tapping). ‘What’s he doing?’ everybody was saying. Even the audience stopped dancing.”
While the lingering – and most fun, if we’re being honest – image from this scene is a belligerent Morrison getting physically dragged out of the venue, it’s fascinating to imagine Hendrix, who himself wrote and rewrote whole chapters of the electric guitar book, witnessing the technique that would help define an era that began years after his death.
That Eddie Van Halen didn’t invent two-hand tapping with his generation-defining Eruption guitar solo is no state secret. Indeed, aside from Mandel, numerous pro guitarists – even amateurs – had been trying the technique out in some form or another for years before Van Halen’s debut album dropped in 1978.
Where Van Halen got the technique from, though, is a point of disagreement.
Mandel, for his part, says that the late guitar hero was inspired by one of his performances at, coincidentally, the Whisky a Go Go.
“He (Van Halen) actually came to the Whisky a Go Go when I was playing there one night in L.A. and saw me do the finger-tapping thing,” Mandel told Guitar Player in 2023.
“Of course, he took off with it – went his own way and did it great. But he totally got the idea from me. He totally took my thing and went nuts with it and did his thing. And now, for the past 40 years, the whole world has been doing finger tapping.”
Others have claimed to have been the source of Van Halen’s inspiration as well. Brian May – who got the technique from Texas guitarist Rocky Athas, who himself is said to have taken it from Billy Gibbons – says Van Halen once told him that Queen’s 1977 tune, It’s Latewas a reference point.
As for Van Halen himself? He told Guitar World in 2008 that he got it from Jimmy Page.
“I think I got the idea of tapping watching Jimmy Page do his Heartbreaker solo back in 1971,” he said. “He was doing a pull-off to an open string, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, open string… pull off. I can do that, but what if I use my finger as the nut and move it around?’ I just kind of took it and ran with it.”
Complicated as these lineages tend to be to draw, the scene of two guitar heroes of a certain era witnessing a spark that would help light the flame of a future era is a striking one to imagine.
Someone should make a painting of it.
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