n the same way Hoover came to represent all products that suck up dirt and Google every internet search function, it’s no exaggeration to say that Van Halen was a byword for all that is awesome about hard rock.
Formed in Pasadena, California, in 1972 by guitarist Edward Lodewijk Van Halen and his older drummer brother Alex, Van Halen are a band as synonymous with the genre as denim and leather – to paraphrase British contemporaries Saxon. The death of their guitarist at the age of just 65 from throat cancer brings an end to a band that stood as a colossus of American pop culture for almost five decades. If you were a teenager in high school in the Seventies, the Eighties, maybe even beyond, it’s likely that you were a fan of the band’s party rock'n'roll.
Eddie Van Halen’s only true peer passed away two years before the band Van Halen came to be. And yet it’s not Jimi Hendrix – an innovative player, yes, but a loose one – who sits parallel to Van Halen. Perhaps the Amsterdam-born virtuoso – who popularised the now-ubiquitous two-handed tapping technique – was closer in spirit and style to the great classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. When the Austrian died in 1791, his mentor Joseph Hayden was heard to exclaim that “posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years”. It took much longer than that.
Eddie Van Halen first heard music not long after hearing his father, a skilled clarinettist, saxophonist and pianist, speak. Indeed, upon moving to the United States in 1962, the two Van Halen brothers were given piano lessons by an elderly Lithuanian named Stasys Kalvaitis. Eddie was six. Between 1964 and 1967, Eddie consistently won first place in the yearly piano competition held at Long Beach City College, and yet his recitals of Bach, Mozart and other greats contained free-form elements, suggesting the younger Van Halen hadn’t learnt to read the compositions as much as feel them.
Despite this, the instrument didn’t take and the brothers grew bored of the piano. Alex bought a guitar. Eddie a drum set. They swapped after Alex developed a flair for performing the chaotic drum solo in The Surfaris 1963 hit “Wipe Out”. Years later, Eddie would claim he couldn’t really read music and had never had a guitar lesson other than “Eric Clapton off of records”. Eddie always put in the work. “If you want to be a rock star or just be famous,” he said, “then run down the street naked; you’ll make the news or something. If you want music to be your livelihood, then play, play, play and play. And eventually you’ll get to where you want to be.”
Which is all too simplistic in explaining the guitarist’s talent. Sure, Eddie played the guitar like it was an extension of his own body – “You have to be emotionally and spiritually connected to your instrument,” he once said – but he possessed an ability that remains scarce in its distribution and beyond comprehension to those who don’t possess it. Something that suggested Eddie could hear the notes that others could not. He had, it must be said, a strange relationship with music: in 2015, he claimed the last album he’d purchased was Peter Gabriel’s So in 1986. He never listened to the radio in his car. “I prefer the sound of the motor,” he said. It was almost like the sounds inside his own mind were enough.
En route to rock stardom, Van Halen took on many forms. The Broken Combs. The Trojan Rubber Co. Then Genesis – news hadn’t yet reached the Van Halens of the band Peter Gabriel then fronted across the pond. Then they rebranded with one of the greatest band names never to make it to mass usage, Mammoth. But it was in 1974 whereupon the band’s singer, a charismatic young man named Dave Lee Roth who the Van Halens had met while hiring his sound system some years prior, suggested the name “Van Halen”.
Years later, a further name change was suggested by Gene Simmons as the KISS bassist produced Van Halen’s first demo tape. The name? Daddy Longlegs. Wisely, the band rejected the suggestion and remained Van Halen. In 1983, at the US Festival in California, playing in front of a backdrop that sported the band’s iconic logo, the band entered the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest-paid single appearance of a band. The fee was $1.5m dollars. The idea of that band being named Daddy Longlegs is worthy of much mirth.
There were many factors behind Van Halen’s era-defining success. There was the unrivalled ingenuity of the guitarist. Eddie’s scorching solo on Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit “Beat It”, recorded in one take and for free, as a favour to producer Quincy Jones, is perhaps the most dangerous – no pun intended – that the pop icon ever sounded. There’s also the flamboyance of Dave Lee Roth, whose passion for glitz and showbiz often rubbed the workmanlike Eddie up the wrong way – Roth had stints in and out of the band, being either replaced by Sammy Hagar or Gary Cherone – despite the guitarist’s own penchant for partying, until he declared himself sober in 2008.
There is the band’s nous with melody and hooks. It’s somewhat criminal, and bizarre, that 1984 synth-pop banger “Jump” was the band’s only No 1 single, but when it came to the art of the long-player, few have done it better, delivering at least six classic albums; their self-titled debut (1978), breakthrough hit 1984 (in, um, 1984), Fair Warning (1981), Women and Children First (1980), Van Halen II (1979), and Sammy Hagar’s debut, 5150 (1986), the best they ever got without Roth fronting the band.
But ultimately, Van Halen wasn’t as much a band as a brand. A brand you could trust. One that offered near constant quality, and fun, and volume and sass. Eddie Van Halen was that brand’s CEO. He presided over some of the biggest, boldest rock'n'roll ever committed to tape, and brought the genre to stadiums it’d never leave. May he now rest forever at the head of the great big boardroom in the sky.
