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Eddie Van Halen’s death from throat cancer at age 65 ends one of the most colorful and lucrative sagas in American rock. If Aerosmith was the premier American hard rock band of the 1970s, it was Van Halen who stepped into their shoes during the 1980s. Formed around the Van Halen brothers, guitarist Eddie and drummer Alex, the band rode a wave of multi-platinum albums over a 15-year period. Few other acts have come close to matching his commercially combustible mix of spectacular and addictive rock, outlandish stage performances, and outsized personal behavior.
The band sold more than 80 million albums worldwide. Eleven of his studio albums made the US Top 10. and four reached No. 1. In 2012, Van Halen ranked # 1 on Guitar World magazine’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time list.
When Jan Van Halen brought his family to Pasadena, California, from the Netherlands in 1962 – Eddie once remarked that they arrived “with $ 50 and a piano” – he could hardly imagine the havoc his offspring would wreak on American popular culture. Jan was a freelance saxophonist and clarinetist versatile enough to find work in various styles of music, from classical to big band, although in California he had to supplement his musical earnings by washing dishes. Meanwhile, his Indonesian-born wife Eugenia (née Van Beers) initially worked as a maid. His sons, Eddie and Alex, both born in Amsterdam, had learned classical piano since the age of six, but it was inevitable that, finding themselves on the west coast in the late 1960s, they would be drawn to rock’n’roll.
The brothers attended Pasadena City College, as did future Van Halen vocalist David Lee Roth, and Eddie and Alex also took piano lessons in San Pedro with the venerable teacher Stasys Kalvaitis. Eddie originally played drums and guitar for Alex, but by the time they formed their first serious group, Mammoth, they had switched instruments. They initially called themselves Genesis, before learning about the British band of the same name.
Eddie’s first guitar was a six-string Teisco Del Rey purchased from Sears for $ 110. They began by renting a public address system from Roth, then the lead singer for the Red Ball Jets, but soon concluded that they could kill two birds with one stone by recruiting Roth for their own band. Roth brought an outgoing flamboyance, which would be a key factor in his subsequent rise to stardom. Mammoth’s line-up was completed when bassist Michael Anthony joined another local band, Snake. However, they later discovered that there was another team calling itself Mammoth. After briefly considering the unattractive nickname Rat Salade, the quartet called themselves Van Halen.
Through three years of playing clubs and bars in Pasadena, Hollywood, and Santa Barbara, Van Halen gradually became one of the most popular acts in Southern California. Having started out performing covers, filling their shows with material from the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Bad Company and many more, they began to develop a songwriting style of their own, with Roth contributing lyrics to the music of the other three.
By now, Eddie was playing his handmade guitar, nicknamed Frankenstein, known for its red body crisscrossed with black and white stripes. The group gained support with bands like UFO and Santana, before being discovered by Gene Simmons of Kiss at the Starwood club in Los Angeles. Simmons produced a demo tape of various Van Halen tracks, but despite his help, no major label would play it.
Their luck changed in 1977, when a Warner Brothers producer, Ted Templeman, saw them again at the Starwood. Impressed by Eddie’s explosive guitar style and Roth’s insane stage performances, Templeman persuaded Warner supreme Mo Ostin to sign the quartet (his contract allegedly contained paternity lawsuit insurance, a wise precaution considering the style archetypal rock’n’roll life of the band).
Their debut album for Warners, Van Halen (1978), instantly put the band on the map. Fueled by a version of You Really Got Me by the Kinks, released as a single and true to the original but somehow sounding a thousand times bigger, the album broke the United States Top 20 and sold over 12 million copies.
On the tour, fans went wild over Roth’s antics on stage, while more music watchers were spellbound by Eddie’s astonishing guitar work, his innovative technique allowed him to fire dazzling notes and effects at incredible speed. Inspired by the sonic innovations of Jimi Hendrix and a passionate devotee of Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, Eddie would patent several devices that enhanced the guitar’s capabilities and became famous for developing the technique of two-handed “tapping” that is heard with a dizzying effect on (among other places) Eruptions, from the debut album. The band added another little footnote to the rock mythology by stipulating that they should be provided with bowls of M & Ms backstage, but with the coffees removed.
From now on, it seemed like nothing could stop Van Halen’s career from exploding, and his American success was quickly repeated around the world. They launched a world tour in 1979 on the back of the Van Halen II album, and although at the time the so-called new wave had caused shock waves in the music industry, Van Halen simply ignored it. Press reports of orgiastic and drug-taking behavior simply added to the band’s aura as wild men of rock and roll.
The album Women and Children First (1980) was followed by the box office hit Fair Warning (1981), the year Eddie married actress Valerie Bertinelli. The band was on the threshold of its most important period, preceded by their album 1984, released in January of that year.
It would join his debut album to earn a diamond certification for sales of over 10 million copies in the US and contained his most memorable hit single, Jump, featuring Eddie on synth and smashing guitar. the eardrum. It was her first and only Hot 100 on the US charts and a No. 7 in the UK.
Van Halen had grasped the importance of MTV’s new medium and its diet of pop videos, and the accompanying clips to Jump and its sequels Panama and Hot for Teacher were influential in conveying the band’s greatest appeal to an audience. even wider audience. The band had also been fueled by Eddie’s short but sensational guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit Beat It, in which he put an encyclopedia of electric guitar virtuosity in 32 seconds. He played the Jackson session for free, but reaped huge dividends from the exposure it earned him.
At the peak of his success, Van Halen suddenly found himself in crisis when Roth, seemingly unhappy with Eddie’s burgeoning profile, resigned in 1985 to pursue a solo career. The other three, however, quickly recruited Sammy Hagar, and were relieved when his first post-Roth album, 5150 (1986), grabbed the No. 1 spot in America for four weeks. OU812 (1988) and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (1991) continued the multi-platinum Hagar-flavored streak, with the live album Right Here, Right Now (1993) also doing a great deal.
With Hagar pursuing a solo career alongside his commitments to Van Halen, the band’s work pace slowed, but they continued to sell healthy amounts of tickets and albums until the mid-90s. Then in 1996, Hagar’s departure apparently Annoyed by rumors that Roth was about to return, she turned the apple cart upside down again. Hagar issued a statement describing the separation as “a devastating, stab in the back, I don’t get it, a great disappointment.”
At the event, the band found themselves temporarily working with vocalist Gary Cherone. When he resigned in 1999, the first signs appeared that Eddie Van Halen’s health had suffered from years of unbridled living. In November of that year, he underwent hip replacement surgery in Los Angeles, and in 2000 rumors spread that he had cancer of the tongue. Eventually, they surgically removed about a third of his tongue, and he later speculated that his habit of holding metal guitar picks in his mouth might have caused it.
In 2004, Hagar reunited with Van Halen for an 80-date North American tour, but ended up with the band members at odds, amid stories that Eddie had been drinking heavily. In 2007, Van Halen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and they reformed with Roth for a North American tour in 2007-08, now with Eddie’s son, Wolfgang, on bass. In 2012, a new album, A Different Kind of Truth, reached number 2 on the Billboard album chart. The band played their last dates at the Hollywood Bowl in 2015.
Eddie and Bertinelli divorced in 2007, although she and her son, Wolfgang, attended her wedding to Janie Liszewski in 2009. She is survived by Janie, Wolfgang and Alex.
• Eddie (Edward Lodewijk) Van Halen, musician and composer, born January 26, 1955; died on October 6, 2020
