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LOS ANGELES: Eddie Van Halen, one of rock music’s greatest guitarists and a founding member of the best-selling hard rock band named after him and his drummer brother, died of cancer on Tuesday (October 6). He was 65 years old.
Van Halen’s death was announced on Twitter by his 29-year-old son, Wolfgang, himself a bassist who joined the band in later years. Eddie Van Halen’s representatives directed Reuters to his son’s statement.
“I can’t believe I have to write this, but my father, Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, has lost his long and arduous battle with cancer this morning,” Wolfgang Van Halen said in the tweet.
“He was the best father I could ask for,” said young Van Halen. “Every moment I’ve shared with him on and off stage was a gift.”
Wolfgang Van Halen plays Panama with his father Eddie Van Halen (right) at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 17, 2015 (Photo: REUTERS / Mario Anzuoni).
Actress Valerie Bertinelli, Eddie Van Halen’s ex-wife of 26 years and Wolfgang’s mother, retweeted her son’s Twitter statement.
“My heart is broken. Eddie was not only a guitar god, but a genuinely beautiful soul,” Gene Simmons, lead singer of the band Kiss, said on Twitter.
Eddie Van Halen was born in Amsterdam in 1955 and studied classical piano after moving with his family to the Pasadena suburb of Los Angeles in the early 1960s.
After switching to guitar, he and his older brother Alex, who had taken up drums, formed the first bands that would eventually become Van Halen in the 1970s, with lead singer David Lee Roth and bassist Michael Anthony.
The hard rock band, with Eddie Van Halen’s explosive guitar solos, quickly became a staple of the famous Sunset Strip music scene in Los Angeles before releasing their self-titled debut album in 1978.
That album shot to number 19 on the Billboard charts, becoming one of the most successful debuts of the decade.
Eddie Van Halen or Van Halen perform at Tiger Jam XI in Las Vegas on April 19, 2008. (Photo: REUTERS / Mario Anzuoni)
It was the first in a series of best-selling albums that would make Van Halen one of the biggest rock groups of the late 70s and early 80s with hits like Ain’t Talkin ” Bout Love, Jump, Panama and Hot for Teacher.
Eddie Van Halen’s virtuous and pioneering technique earned him a place alongside the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page as one of rock’s greatest guitarists. In 2012, a Guitar World magazine reader poll voted him the greatest guitarist of all time.
Roth parted ways with the band in 1984 and was replaced for a decade by Sammy Hagar.
“Heartbroken and speechless. My love to the family,” Hagar said in a tweet.
