“They kidnapped me inside my own hotel – Alvin refused to leave until I showed him the tapping!”: Harvey Mandel on being a pioneer of two-handed tapping
Canned Heat’s Harvey Mandel has recalled the time Ten Years After’s Alvin Lee “kidnapped” him inside his hotel room and refused to leave until Mandel demonstrated his signature two-handed tapping.
Mandel says he first picked up his two-handed tapping technique from Randy Resnick, a former bandmate in the Pure Food and Drug Act group he was in. “He did it in a very melodic but simple way. I didn’t want to do it in front of him, but once I saw him do it, I was able to practice it.”
READ MORE: “I was actually doing it way before Van Halen”: Guitarist says he never got his dues for pioneering the two-handed tapping technique
After leaving the band, Mandel evolved the technique further. “It’s a much more melodic, fluid version, as opposed to where Eddie Van Halen took it with his wild stuff,” he explains. “I was playing at the Whisky and Starwood, where George Lynch, Van Halen, and a couple of other people saw me doing it. Next thing I know, Eddie took it off into his own world. I can’t say anything bad about him.”
Mandel doesn’t feel he was ever properly credited for developing the two-handed tapping technique. “Back then, unfortunately, I wasn’t with a known band – Van Halen had a hit record so the world got to hear him doing it. The audience that got to hear me do it was much more limited.”
One of those people was Alvin Lee, who Mandel got to meet when he was playing in Chicago and Lee came to his hotel with Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor.
“I was playing in Chicago and they came to the hotel. They kind of kidnapped me inside of my own hotel!” Mandel recalls. “Alvin refused to leave until I showed him the tapping. That was the only time a famous person actually sat there with me like that. Mick Taylor was great – but Alvin was the one who was mostly interested.”
Mandel would go on to record the Rolling Stones tracks Black and Blue and Memory Motel after Taylor left the band, but ultimately lost out on the full-time role because of a close friendship between Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. “I never got friendly with Keith Richards. If it wasn’t for him, I would have been the Rolling Stones’ replacement for Mick Taylor. He’s the one that screwed me up.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
