Around 1974, Kilgore started giving guitar lessons. One of his early pupils was a fourteen-year-old Chris Holmes. Holmes, later of W.A.S.P., explains, “When I was a young kid I took guitar lessons from Terry Kilgore. I could get high school credit for taking these guitar lessons.”To pay for his sessions, Holmes got a summer job. He says, “I was painting houses in La Cañada and Flintridge. One day I looked in the window of this house we were painting, and I noticed all these gold records lining the walls. I knocked on the door. I asked the lady that answered about them and she told me they were Harvey Mandel’s awards. I was like, Huh, I don’t know who that is.”
When Holmes showed up for his next lesson, he mentioned that he’d been inside the home of a musician named Harvey Mandel. Holmes asked Kilgore, “Who’s Harvey Mandel?”
“He’s a great guitarist, that’s who he is. Next time you’re there working get his phone number for me.”
Holmes says, “I did, and Terry went up there and met Mandel.”
At that time, the twenty-nine-year-old Mandel had already had a career that would be the envy of guitarists everywhere. He’d grown up a blues prodigy in Chicago. Mandel then joined the ranks of boogie-rockers Canned Heat and would perform with them at the Woodstock Festival. Not one to stand still, Mandel then became a member of John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, a band that had incubated Edward’s guitar idol, Eric Clapton. He also recorded two solo albums, Baby Batter (1971) and Snake (1972).
When Kilgore showed up at Mandel’s home, he asked the famous guitarist for lessons. Kilgore says, “I just wanted to take lessons from him, because I loved the way he played.” He didn’t hide his enthusiasm after his first session and arrived at practice raving about Mandel’s talents. “I was playing with Terry in 1974 and 1975 when he was taking those lessons,” Laidig says, “I know he was really jazzed about taking them from him.”
Kilgore, who always kept tabs on the latest guitar techniques, was particularly interested in learning Mandel’s unique two-handed tapping technique. While playing lead runs, Mandel would use his pick-hand fingers to sound, or “tap,” notes on the guitar neck in a stuttering and meandering fashion.
Mandel, it turns out, had learned the unorthodox method from a former bandmate. In 1972, Mandel had joined a Los Angeles–based blues-rock band, the Pure Food and Drug Act. Mandel shared guitar duties in that group with a wildly creative player named Randy Resnick. During the band’s long live jams, Resnick would often tap notes with his picking hand. Mandel took notice.
In the months that followed, Mandel woodshedded the technique. Mandel told writer Abel Sharp: “Randy was the first guitarist I ever saw tap, and he had his own little way of doing it … After I saw Randy Resnickdoing it, I got on it. I started doing it all over.” On his 1973 solo album, Shangrenade, Mandel showcased a style that featured the two-handed technique as the centerpiece of his lead playing.
After learning it from Mandel, Kilgore started to experiment with the method. Chris Holmes recollects, “The next time I took a lesson with Terry, he was doing finger tapping.” Kilgore also showed his bandmates and his soundman, Kevin Gallagher, the technique. Gallagher explains, “So Terry started showing up with this (tapping) stuff that Mandel was teaching him. I never really met Mandel. But they were pretty tight, and he shared a lot of this stuff with Terry. My understanding is that Harvey started that style of playing and showed it to Terry.”
It didn’t take long for Kilgore to share this novel method with Edward. Gallagher says, “I can recall at least one time when I was doing sound in Jon Laidig’s basement that Eddie was sitting on the basement stairs learning that stuff from Terry.”
Before Kilgore gave Edward a tutorial on finger tapping, it’s quite likely that Edward knew that a few forward-thinking guitarists occasionally used their pick hands in this fashion. Edward, a player who could hear a song once and then play right along, surely heard, for example, when Billy Gibbons offered up a quick tap during his solo on ZZ Top’s 1973 barnburner “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers” (a song Van Halen covered frequently in the early days).
But while Gibbons’s technique involved adding nothing more than a single-pinged note to his solo, Mandel’s approach saw him construct entire lead lines around the use of tapping. It was embedded deeply in his compositions, rather than a bit of guitar flash used to spice up a solo, and it opened up Edward’s eyes. Kilgore says, “That’s where, believe it or not, Edward picked up on the second hand style. I said check this out (and tapped), and he went, Wow. He started doing it. I had a lot of ideas that ended up in Edward’s hands. He had a few that ended up in mine for sure.”
Even though Kilgore’s demonstration made an impression, there are only a few observers who can recall Edward using his right hand on the neck onstage before 1977. Guitarist Dennis Catron, who regularly caught Van Halen live during these years, says he never saw Edward use his full-blown two-handed technique “until about the time they got signed (in 1977)” but is adamant that onstage he “did little ones, like one note,” à la Gibbons in “Beer Drinkers,” as far back as 1975. Guitarist Donny Simmons recalls he heard Edward “experiment” with tapping during a soundcheck at the Golden West Ballroom in the summer of 1975: “I’ll never forget. We’d done our set and we were headed back to the bar to get a beer. I turned around, and I was all like, ‘What in the fuck is he doing?’ Think about hearing that for the first time after you’re used to hearing Bad Company. What’s all this [imitates tapping noise]? I was all, ‘What was that?’”
Edward’s occasional single finger taps aside, there’s no evidence that between 1975 and 1976, Edward employed the flowing two-handed hammer-on and pull-off style that would become his musical signature after the release of Van Halen. During those years, Edward apparently toyed with what he’d learned from Kilgore, hitting a few pick-hand notes here and there while onstage or in practice, but wouldn’t unleash his game-changing take on the technique until the early summer of 1977, just months before Van Halen would enter the studio to record their debut.
― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, 14 March 2026 18:01 (two months ago)
