When Eddie Van Halen first picked up a guitar, there wasn’t a single soul on the planet who could have been a bigger guitar hero than Eric Clapton.

Even though Eddie pushed the guitar forward in many different ways once he started making his tracks, Clapton was the one who set everything in motion when he began delivering the blues to countless generations of players when he formed bands like Cream. But there were always going to be people out there who were willing to give Clapton a run for his money whenever Eddie started looking elsewhere.

Then again, not everyone was looking at Clapton as their model for what a guitar hero could be. Jimi Hendrix had reshaped what the world of guitar could be like when he began writing his own tunes, and even when you look at some of Eddie’s friends, it’s not like Allan Holdsworth was trying to make the same kind of tunes that Clapton was doing back in the day. There were many different methods to becoming a guitar hero, and it’s not like Eddie took the typical route to become the greatest of all time or anything.

There was no reference point for guitarists that tapped the fretboard when Eddie burst out onto the scene, but if he was going to play his favourite Cream solos, it was going to be hard to live up to the artist many people considered to be the almighty god of guitar. If you looked at where Clapton had gone since the days of Cream and Derek and the Dominos, he was a lot more mellow by the time Eddie came out.

He wasn’t as interested in the Clapton records from the 1970s, and even if he had some great licks on tunes like ‘Wonderful Tonight’, nothing was better than hearing him play tunes like ‘Crossroads’ back in the day. That was the young and hungry version of ‘Slowhand’, but if you wanted to hear him truly in his element, you would have had to go back to the days of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, where he truly felt at home.

The Yardbirds weren’t treating him well at all, and when he worked with Mayall, Clapton finally had a more constructive outlet for his tunes. He could never have got away with making a song like ‘Steppin’ Out’ on one of his older albums, but he felt like a fish in water when he first started blazing through every one of his old Buddy Guy-style licks. But when Cream came calling, Peter Green was the next best thing once he started to play his own rendition of those blues classics.

Replacing someone like Clapton was no easy feat, but Eddie felt that what Green did on guitar managed to outshine some of what Clapton had done in the band, saying, “It’s funny, though, because when I did dig back to the John Mayall Bluesbreakers days, I found Peter Green, who’s actually more Clapton than Clapton himself. He was a little smoother and more tasty, you know? I don’t know what ever happened to him.”

But to say that Green is another iteration of Clapton would have been underselling what he could do. He was willing to push himself into territory that no other blues guitarist had gone before, and while Fleetwood MAc gave him a better outlet to work on his licks, there isn’t a soul on this Earth that would have been able to play the kind of lead lines that he could, especially when he started to truly fly across the fretboard on tunes like ‘Oh Well’ and ‘Black Magic Woman’.

There was a lot more ground for Green to cover, but any guitarist good enough to make Eddie forget about his idol for a second was beyond typical lip service. This was someone that was one of the most individual guitar players that the world had ever seen, and it didn’t take long for the rest of the world to pay attention, even if Green’s time at the front of the stage was all too short-lived.