"I was playing an ES-335 before we got signed, but the guys said, 'Come on, you look like Roy Orbison' – this little punk kid playing a Ted Nugent axe": Why Eddie Van Halen left Gibson's famed semi-hollow behind, and how he would've built his ideal ES-335

Eddie Van Halen is synonymous with the hot-rodded, Strat-shaped electric guitars he built for himself starting from the earliest days of Van Halen. 

Indeed, it's almost impossible to imagine a young Van Halen without one of those impossibly cool custom creations – be it the “Bumblebee,” his “Shark” Ibanez Destroyer, or, of course, the Frankenstein.

Prior to all that, though, one of Van Halen's go-to six-strings was, of all things, a Gibson ES-335. Though Van Halen himself liked the semi-hollow just fine, it's hard to picture the man who was largely responsible for the Superstrat template that took over the guitar universe in the '80s wielding Gibson's stately semi-hollow.

Though they couldn't have possibly foreseen the Superstrat revolution, Van Halen's bandmates also couldn't really see their guitarist as an ES-335 man.

“I was playing a 335 for a while before we got signed, and it sounded fine,” Van Halen explained in a 1980 Guitar Player interview. “But, the other guys would go, 'Come on, you look like Roy Orbison.' Really, here's this little skinny punk kid playing a Ted Nugent axe, you know. They said, 'You're rock and roll – you ain't Roy Orbison. Either get some dark glasses or get rid of the guitar.' So I dumped that and started playing a Les Paul again.”

That said, Van Halen, in the same interview, also expressed his desire to put together an ES-335 more suited to his needs, and style. 

“What I would like is a 335 to fit my body, and maybe not [be] quite as hollow as some 335s. I'd like a solid beam all the way to the back of the wood in there. The one I have now locks a little bit of tone – it's too acoustically toned, too hollow.”

Asked if he would put a vibrato bar on this theoretical ES-335, the late guitar legend replied in the affirmative.

“I love 335s – I can haul ass on those things,” Van Halen explained. “When I pick up a stock 335, you probably wouldn't even recognize my playing, It's more jazzy, more fluid and fast – kind of like Allan Holdsworth. One of the reasons I started using a vibrato was that my playing got so fast it was just too much. So now I break it up a little bit, It's like a race car racing down the road and then crashing every now and then.”