Eddie Van Halen might faucet, shred and customarily make a guitar do issues that appeared bodily not possible. However based on nation guitar legend Albert Lee, there was one model that had the rock virtuoso briefly questioning whether or not he might pull it off.

That second got here when Van Halen joined Lee’s Biff Child’s All-Stars for a handful of gigs. The unlikely supergroup introduced collectively some severe guitar expertise, and through certainly one of their reveals, Van Halen discovered himself tackling Lee’s nation traditional Nation Boy – full with its chicken-pickin’ passages.

Talking in a brand new interview with Guitar World, Lee remembers, “On a few gigs, we had Eddie Van Halen taking part in with us. He stated, ‘I can’t play on that!’ I stated, ‘Sure, you may – you are able to do all that tapping!’ And naturally he was nice.”

Van Halen apparently didn’t see nation selecting as a part of his standard vocabulary, although Lee was fast to persuade him in any other case.

“He didn’t assume it was his model. I stated, ‘In fact it’s!’”

That stated, Biff Child’s All-Stars was by no means actually a band within the conventional sense. Put collectively by Ernie Ball’s son Sterling Ball, the group featured a rotating solid of the period’s high guitarists together with Lee, Steve Morse, Steve Lukather and, every now and then, Van Halen for impromptu performances and the occasional “odd gig”.

That included a memorable look at NAMM with Van Halen and Morse, a efficiency Lee says followers nonetheless convey up a long time later.

“We did one on the NAMM present, which individuals nonetheless discuss,” says the guitarist. “They used to say, ‘That present you probably did with Steve Morse and Eddie Van Halen was nice. Any likelihood of any extra?’ I’d say, ‘I don’t assume so!’”

Watch the total interview under.