FORMER AUTOGRAPH GUITARIST STEVE LYNCH DISCUSSES THE ROOTS OF HIS TWO-HANDED TAPPING TECHNIQUE — AND, UM, WHAT VAN HALEN’S MANAGEMENT THOUGHT ABOUT IT...
By Andrew Daly
BY THE TIME Steve Lynch burst onto the scene with Autograph, he was nearly 30 — a relative dinosaur compared to some of the young bucks he was up against. But no matter, Lynch’s style — which includes a dizzying array of arpeggios, triads and intervals — stood out from the pack.
Lynch was so slick that by the time Autograph’s 1984 banger, Sign In Please, was released, his greatest foe was Eddie Van Halen, who happened to be Lynch’s brother in two-handed tapping heroics.
“When our tour with Van Halen started, I was asked by their management, ‘Are you Steve Lynch, the one who wrote The Right Touch’ [A 1982 instructional book with the full title The Right Touch: The Art of Hammering Notes with the Right Hand]? I said, ‘Yes, I am,’” Lynch says. “I was then aggressively informed, ‘That’s Eddie’s technique; you’re not allowed to play it on the tour — or else.’ I was pissed that I couldn’t play something I had created. So, later on, I confronted Eddie about it, to which he replied, ‘I had no idea they put those restrictions on you. I’ll call the dogs off.’ I graciously thanked him and played whatever I wanted for the rest of the tour. I’ll never know if he was telling the truth, but I don’t care; we hit it off well after that.”
While Autograph’s time in the limelight was short, their influence remains. Sure, they couldn’t duplicate the breakneck success of “Turn Up the Radio,” but that hasn’t stopped Lynch from making it known that — greatest hits aside — Autograph mattered.
“We’d played in other bands before our Sunset Strip days, but Autograph was different,” Lynch says. “We went from guys playing and rehearsing together for fun to opening for Van Halen. Suddenly we were driving across the U.S. in a dilapidated Winnebago to play in front of an 18,000-seat sold-out venue opening for the biggest band in the world, and we didn’t even have a name yet. On that treacherous journey, we devised a name we could use... Autograph. Then RCA signed us to a three-album deal backstage at Madison Square Garden... who would have thought? Measuring our importance is hard, but we earned the right to be there.”
Taking some time away from his ongoing solo work and potential plans for an Autograph reunion
