Music fans around the world are mourning the loss of iconic Van Helen rock star Eddie Van Helen. And while many today honor his legacy as one of the best guitarists of all time, fans are also publishing past interviews describing his experiences with painful racism and discrimination due to his mixed race in his early years.
Van Helen, who died of throat cancer on Tuesday at the age of 65, was the son of Dutch and Indonesian immigrants and spent his childhood in the Netherlands. His former bandmate David Lee Roth, a fellow rock superstar, once revealed on the podcast “WTF with Mark Maron” how painful the experience was for young Van Halen and his brother, drummer Alex Van Halen.
In a 2019 interview, Roth described how Van Helens’ parents were treated badly in the 1950s because of a mixed-race relationship.
“It was a big deal. That homeboy grew up in a horrible racist environment where he really had to leave the country,” Roth said in the podcast.
He added that the brothers, who have always been referred to in the Netherlands as “half the race”, are U.S. citizens. Even after relocating, he faced difficult circumstances
“Then they came to America and didn’t speak English as a first language in the early ’60s. Wow,” Roth told Maron. “So that’s the kind of sparkling, that kind of stuff that runs deep.”
The brothers’ mother, Eugenia, met her father, Jan, with a traveling musician while he was under Dutch rule. Shortly after World War II, the couple decided to move to the Netherlands, where the Rock Stars were born.
Eugenia was considered a “second-class citizen,” Van Halen said in an interview with Dennis Kwan, a music journalist for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2017. Departed for the U.S.
His early days in America were difficult, Van Halen told Kwan. The family lived in a shared house with two other families. While her mother worked as a maid, her father chose a job as a janitor and also pursued a music career. The atmosphere at the time was not particularly inviting to young immigrants, and Van Halen described his first day of school as “absolutely terrifying.”
“We’ve already gone through that in Holland, you know, first day, first grade. Now, you’re in another whole country where you can’t speak the language, and you don’t know anything about anything and it was horrible,” he said. Said. “I don’t even know how to explain but I think this made us stronger because you had to be.”
He told Quan that the school he attended at the time was still different and that because he could not speak the language, he was considered a “minority” student.
“My first friends in America were black,” ADA told reporters. “They were really white people who were booming. They would tear up my homework and papers, feed me playground sand, and black kids would stop for me.”
Despite the racism and discrimination he faced, Van Helen told Kwan that looking back on his life, he was grateful for his experience as an immigrant.
“Coming here with about $ 50 and piano, not being able to speak the language, going through everything to get where we are, if it’s not an American dream, I don’t know what it is,” he said in an interview.
Indonesian social media users have paid tribute to Van Halen, a source of pride for many in the community.
