That little flurry of notes at about 1:30 kills me. Every note is cleanly picked with beautiful phrasing and proportion. No girly-man sweep picking for Mr. EJ. :flex:
I've never actually tried to learn any of his stuff, though he was such a huge influence on me back in the day that I unconsciously absorbed some of that style. Other than his chord stretches and hybrid picking, he doesn't do anything very particularly unusual the way Jeff Beck does. It's just that EJ executes everything so perfectly and with such a strong guitar voice.
He also must have been woodshedding like a motherfucker in the mid-to-late '80s. There are now two EJ Austin City Limits broadcasts that have been released. This one from '88, and his first one in '84, a few months before Tones came out. He was great in '84, but his playing jumped by leaps and bounds in the '88 show. It probably helps that he had a better band in '88. He was still trying to do more of the pop thing in '84, which you can hear on Tones. By '88, I think the emergence of Vai and Satch had helped steer him in a more guitar-oriented direction.
