Quote Originally Posted by FORD View Post
In the long run, it comes down to whether you have a sound people will recognize and remember. You know when it's Keef, or Angus, or Iommi, or even Johnny Ramone within 2 seconds. I couldn't pick a YingYang Egosteen riff out of thin air and identify it as him, and I'd probably only instantly recognize George Lynch if Don Dokken was whining on top of it. Steve Vai?? shit I had that Public Image album with him playing on it for years before I even knew it was him... though I did know it sounded good, whoever it was (the album had no credits on it at all, probably part of the "generic" theme of the packaging)

Occasionally you get somebody who is technically brilliant AND has that unmistakable sound. Eddie certainly fits that description, as did Jimi Hendrix. I'd put Randy Rhoads in that camp too, except we tragically never got to see his full potential.
The thing about Eddie and Hendrix...they had technique/technical ability, but it's still their songs that resonate.

Randy Rhoads was a fine player. If I'm being frank, I really didn't much care for the tunes he was coming up with when he was in Quiet Riot, thus while I still think those first two Ozzy solo albums are fantastic no small part of that probably included what Daisley was contributing as well. But...yeah, even though Rhoads had kicked around for several years with Quiet Riot then a couple with Ozzy, it still felt like he was just getting started when he died in terms of realizing his potential. Rhoads, along with Van Halen, certainly demonstrated in the early 1980s that rock guitar didn't have to be endless blues pentatonic scales.