I bought that CD shortly after it came out, it is absolutely brilliant, with the Dregs ex fiddle player Mark O'Conner playing on some of it....
Love Pat Methany, he is one of my favorite players and a mindboggling brilliant composer....he went to Miami to study music and one of his classmates was Steve Morse, he said in an interview after seeing Morse play he felt like he was going to have a heart attack....Jaco Pastorius was also in that music school...can you imagine? My god....
No offense but this is patently false. I won't deny EVH is a great player but most influential? Not by a long shot...Clapton, Hendrix, Page, Gilmore, Alex Lifeson....all way more influential....Here is the thing all of those guys above, the bands they were in, their music has overcome the test of time....I really don't think Van Halen's music has as big an impact as any of those other bands....may not be your favorites but they were the more influential than EVH....
You do know that EVH wasn't the first to do the tapping technique, right? He did make it mainstream for sure. Most interviews I've seen he goes back and forth on major influences, with Clapton and the guy that developed the technique...Allan Holdsworth, who technically was superior and was more dynamic than EVH...so are Steve Morse, Paco de Lucia and a whole lot of bluegrass players...I'm not saying they are better, that is subjective, but they were capable of more on the guitar...