By ANDY GREEN
âMy father, Edward Lodewijk Van Halen lost his long and arduous battle with cancer this morning,â Wolfgang Van Halen wrote. âMy heart is broken and I donât think Iâll ever fully recover from this lossâ
Eddie Van Halen, the legendary guitar innovator and virtuoso who led Van Halen through five decades and three lead singers, establishing himself as one of the all-time great players in rock history, died Tuesday after a long battle with cancer. He was 65.
âI canât believe Iâm having to write this, but my father, Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, lost his long and arduous battle with cancer this morning,â his son Wolfgang Van Halen wrote. âHe was the best father I could ever ask for. Every moment Iâve shared with him on and off stage was a gift. My heart is broken and I donât think Iâll ever fully recover from this loss.â
Were it not for his titanic influence, hard rock after the late 1970s would have evolved in unimaginably different ways. He may not have invented two-handed tapping, but he perfected the practice and introduced it to a mass audience. Yet despite his complete mastery of the electric guitar, he never learned to read music.
âI donât know shit about scales or music theory,â he told Rolling Stone in 1980. âI donât want to be seen as the fastest guitar in town, ready and willing to gun down the competition. All I know is that rock & roll guitar, like blues guitar, should be melody, speed, and taste, but more important, it should have emotion. I just want my guitar playing to make people feel something: happy, sad, even horny.â
Even through original frontman David Lee Roth was replaced by Montroseâs Sammy Hagar in 1985, Van Halen ruled the rock world from their explosive self-titled LP in 1978, perhaps the most perfect debut by any group in rock history, all to way to the mid-1990s when they parted ways with Hagar. The 2000s were marked by battles with alcohol, erratic public behavior and nostalgic reunion tours with Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth, but very little in the way of new music. Still, no matter who was fronting the group or when they had their last hit, fans never stopped flocking to Van Halen concerts to worship at the altar of Eddie Van Halen. âI suppose what bothers me is that often the kids donât even notice when Iâm bad,â he told Rolling Stone. âI come offstage and get compliments up the ass. Thatâs so frustrating.â
Edward Lodewijk van Halen was born in Nijmegen, Netherlands on January 26th, 1955, a year and half after his older brother Alex. His father Jan was gifted at the clarinet, saxophone and piano. âIt was difficult to make money playing his type of music,â Eddie told Rolling Stone in 1995. âSo he joined the [Dutch] air-force band, and he played marches. Every morning at 6 oâclock heâd have to go up there freezing his ass off and play marches. Weâd listen to all those march records, and Al and I would parade around the table in the living room and take pots and pans, doing all that kind of stuff. And at night weâd hear him playing classical music downstairs. He loved classical and jazz.â
The family emigrated to America when Eddie was eight and settled in Pasadena, California. An infatuation with the Dave Clark Five caused Eddie to take up the drums, while Alex tried his hands at guitar. One fateful day, frustrated that he couldnât nail âWipeoutâ on the drums, Eddie swapped instruments with Alex and the change stuck. They formed a series of bands in the early 1970s with names like The Broken Combs, the Trjoban Rubber Co and Genesis, but never got significant traction until they came across the charismatic son of a wealthy doctor named David Lee Roth. âRoth was the only guy who had a PA,â Eddie said. âWe were renting his PA every weekend for $35 and getting $50 for the gigs. So it was cheaper to get him in the band.â
With Roth at the helm, Van Halen â which also featured Michael Anthony on bass â became one of the most popular groups on the Pasadena rock circuit, playing backyard parities, strip clubs and everywhere in between. Their repertoire consisted largely of covers, but slowly they began to assemble a collection of original tunes like âRunninâ With the Devilâ and âSomebody Get me a Doctor.â Kiss frontman Gene Simmons recorded a demo with them and tried to land them a deal, but they wouldnât sign anything until Mo Ostin of Warner Bros. caught one of their gigs and gave them a record contact in 1977.
Years of relentless road work had turned the group into an unbelievably tight unit, which producer Ted Templeman expertly captured on tape. The guitar solo âEruptionâ is a perfect spotlight for Eddieâs jaw-dropping chops, while their cover of âYou Really Got Meâ by the Kinks shows their ability to make even the most familiar rock standard fresh and exciting. But itâs the originals like âAinât Talkinâ âbout Loveâ and âJamieâs Cryin’â that helped the album reach Number 19 on the Billboard 200 and got them a stint on the road opening up for Black Sabbath. âJust three years ago I was fitting me way up front with the rest of the kids to see Aerosmith,â Eddie told Rolling Stone in 1980. âThen a year later weâre playing with them. That boggled me to death. I mean, I knew Iâd always play guitar, but I had no idea Iâd be in the position Iâm in now.â
They followed it up the next year with Van Halen II and the hit singles âDance The Night Awayâ and âBeautiful Girls.â The next five years were a blur of sold out arenas, wild parties and smash albums, even if they didnât land a ton of big radio hits and many of their singles were covers like âDancing In The Streetâ and â(Oh) Pretty Woman,â which Eddie later explained were a result of tension within the band. âDave and our producer, Ted Templeman, were threatened by [my new studio, 5150],â he later told Rolling Stone. âThe first thing I did up here was âJump,â and they didnât like it. I said, âTake it or leave it.â I was getting sick of their ideas of what was commercial. Thatâs how we ended up doing all those covers on [1982âs] Diver Down. I never wanted to be a cover band.â
The band may have been descending towards chaos, but offstage Eddie found peace when he married One Day at a Time actress Valerie Bertinelli in 1981. The guitarist said that David Lee Roth was unhappy with the marriage since it interfered with the groupâs reputation as wild, single partiers. âI remember once he said, âTell your old lady not to come to Detroit, because weâre doing a Life magazine interview,’â Eddie told Rolling Stone in 1986. âHe was afraid they were going to corner her and ask her some real things. So she ended up not coming to the show. I put up with it. But it hurt my wife. How do you think she felt? She was a newcomer, and not to be accepted in that way hurt her.â
When it came time to record a follow-up to Diver Down, Eddie insisted they record âJumpâ and incorporate synthesizers into other tracks. The result was the smash 1984 turned that them into MTV superstars as videos for âJump,â âPanamaâ and âHot For Teacherâ went into heavy rotation and the album began selling by the millions, reaching Number 2 on the Billboard 200. The tour took them all over the world, but Eddie and Roth were barely speaking offstage. When the tour ended, Roth left the group and began working on a solo album. âI cried,â Eddie told Rolling Stone, âthen I called my brother and told him the motherfucker quit. I felt like Iâd put up with this guyâs shit for all these years just for him to walk.â
Eddie briefly considered cutting a solo album with a parade of guest singers like Phil Collins, Joe Cocker and Pete Townshend, but he quickly realized the band should simply carry on with a new singer. Ferrari dealer Claudio Zampolli arranged a meeting with former Montrose frontman Sammy Hagar, whoâd just had a huge solo hit with âI Canât Drive 55,â and they tried jamming together. âThere was such chemistry and it was so exciting,â Hagar told Rolling Stone in 2016. âWe played until midnight, about 12 hours without stopping .I went to sleep, woke up the next morning and went, âWow, Iâm joining that band.’â
Warner Bros. were unsure about the change and suggested they consider calling the band Van Hagar to separate it from what came before. âIt would have been interesting,â said Hagar. âLooking back now, itâs sort of a way to divide the two eras up. But we were so fearless when we realized what we could all do together.â
Anyone that doubted Van Halenâs ability to carry on without David Lee Roth were proved wrong in March of 1986 when 5150 hit shelves and became their first Number One album. That run at the top of the charts continued with 1986âs 0U812, 1991âs For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge and 1995âs Balance. Even though many hardcore fans preferred the David Lee Roth era, it couldnât be denied that Hagar made the band even more popular and brought them huge hits like âDreams,â âWhy Canât This Be Love,â and âPoundcake.â
Things fell apart, however, when the group got into a fight over, of all things, a contribution to the Twister soundtrack. Theyâd just completed a long tour and Sammy wanted to take a break with his wife and new baby, but the group wanted to go right into the studio. âI said, âSam, if you want to make another record or do another tour, youâve got to be a team player,â Eddie told Guitar World. âVan Halen is a band â not the Sammy Hagar show, not the Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen or Michael Anthony show. He finally said, âYeah, goddammit, Iâm fuckinâ frustrated. I want to go back to being a solo artist.â I said, âThank you for being honest.’â
A brief reunion with David Lee Roth to record two new songs for a compilation album blew up when the group quarreled backstage at the MTV Video Music Awards. Extreme frontman Gary Cherone, who shared management with the band, was brought in to become their third singer. âThe guy got out of the car, and immediately I could tell he was real,â Van Halen told Rolling Stone in 1998. âNot a hint of bullshit, no ego.â
But their 1998 effort Van Halen III failed to connect with fans and the tour was soft in some markets. When it wrapped, Cherone was given his walking papers and the group went into an extended period of hiatus. When they reemerged in 2004 with Sammy Hagar for a reunion tour, Eddie was deep in the throes of alcohol addiction and acting extremely erratically. âHe told me he cured himself [of tongue cancer] by having pieces of his tongue liquified and injected into his body,â Hagar wrote in his memoir. âHe also told me when he had his hip replacement, he stayed awake through the operation and helped the doctors drill a hole. What a fruitcake.â
The tour was marred by sloppy performances and bad reviews. A little over a year after it wrapped, Valerie Bertinelli, filed for divorce. When the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, Eddie didnât make the ceremony, reportedly because he was in rehab. Later that year, the group finally reunited with David Lee Roth, though they pushed Michael Anthony out of the band to make room for Eddieâs teenage son Wolfgang on bass.
In 2012, they finally released the new LP A Different Kind of Truth, though many of the songs originated as demos in the 1970s. They promoted it with a tour in 2012 and three years later they went out again and played outdoor amphitheaters in America. But Eddie said that writing new music with Roth was almost impossible. âItâs hard, because there are four people in this band, and three of us like rockânâroll,â he told Billboard. âAnd one of us likes dance music. And that used to kind of work, but now Dave doesnât want to come to the table.â
He also said that any sort of offstage relationship with Roth was virtually impossible: âHe does not want to be my friend. How can I put this: Rothâs perception of himself is different than who he is in reality. Weâre not in our 20s anymore. Weâre in our 60s. Act like youâre 60. I stopped coloring my hair, because I know Iâm not going to be young again.â
But the last time that Van Halen performed in public, at the Hollywood Bowl on October 4th, 2015, Roth embraced Eddie onstage as they both smiled warmly. âThe best years of my life,â he said, âthe high points of all my life â onstage with you, homeboy.â
“If there’s a rock and hell heaven, then they’ve got to have a hell of a band.” And they just got their newest member. RIP Edward Van Halen