Eddie Van Halen
Edward Lodewijk Van Halen was an American musician. He was the guitarist, keyboardist, backing vocalist and one of the primary songwriters of the rock band Van Halen, which he founded with his brother Alex Van Halen in 1972.
Van Halen is widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists in rock history, and was well-known for popularizing the tapping guitar technique, allowing rapid arpeggios to be played with two hands on the fretboard. Eddie Van Halen was voted number one in a Guitar World Magazine poll for "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" poll. Rolling Stone ranked Van Halen 4th in its list of the "250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" in 2023.
Van Halen dealt with numerous health issues beginning in the 1990s. On October 6, 2020, Van Halen died of a stroke at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California at the age of 65.
Early life, family and education
Edward Lodewijk Van Halen was born in Amsterdam on January 26, 1955, the son of Jan Van Halen and Eugenia. His father was a Dutch jazz pianist, clarinetist, and saxophonist who worked for the Dutch Air Force and played with local acts like Jos Cleber and Snip en Snap. Van Halen's mother was an Indo woman from Rangkasbitung on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies. After six years in Indonesia, the family moved to Amsterdam and later moved to Nijmegen, Netherlands.After experiencing mistreatment for their mixed-race relationship in the 1950s, Jan and Eugenia Van Halen moved their family to the US in 1962. They settled near family members in Pasadena, California, where Jan Van Halen worked as a janitor to supplement the income he earned from playing music in venues like The Continental Club, La Miranda Country Club and The Alpine Haus. After Eddie's brother Alex had occasionally filled in on drums, Eddie played bass when the band was a member short. His mother worked as a maid to help make ends meet. Since Alex and Eddie did not speak English as a first language, they were considered "minority" students and experienced bullying by white students. They began learning the piano at age six, commuting from Pasadena to San Pedro, Los Angeles, to study with an elderly piano teacher, Stasys Kalvaitis.
Van Halen never learned to read music. Instead, he watched recitals of Bach or Mozart repertoire and improvised. Between 1964 and 1967, he won first place in the annual piano competition at Long Beach City College. Their parents wanted their sons to be classical pianists, but the boys gravitated towards rock music, and were greatly influenced by 1960s British Invasion bands such as the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five.
Initially, Alex began playing the guitar and Eddie bought a drum kit; however, after he heard Alex's performance of the Surfaris' drum solo on the song "Wipe Out", Eddie gave Alex the drums and began learning the electric guitar. According to him, as a teen he often practiced while walking around at home with his guitar strapped on, or sitting in his room for hours with the door locked.
Eddie and Alex formed their first band with three other boys. Calling themselves The Broken Combs, they performed at lunchtime at Hamilton Elementary School in Pasadena. Eddie cited this performance when he was in the fourth grade as key to his desire to become a professional musician. He described supergroup Cream's "I'm So Glad" on the album Goodbye as "mind-blowing". He once claimed that he had learned almost all of Eric Clapton's solos in the band Cream note for note. "I've always said Eric Clapton was my main influence," he said, "but Jimmy Page was actually more the way I am, in a reckless-abandon kind of way." Speaking at an event at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in 2015, Van Halen discussed his life and the American Dream. "We came here with approximately $50 and a piano, and we didn't speak the language. Now look where we are. If that's not the American dream, what is?"
Career
Van Halen band
Eddie and his brother Alex formed the band Mammoth in 1972. Two years later, David Lee Roth joined Mammoth as lead singer, and Mammoth officially changed its name to Van Halen. It became a staple of the Los Angeles music scene, playing at well-known clubs such as the Whisky a Go Go. At a 1976 concert at The Starwood in California, the band opened for UFO. Kiss bassist Gene Simmons saw the performance and said, "I was waiting backstage by the third song." He asked the band about their plans, and they said, "There is a yogurt manufacturer that is going to invest in us." Simmons begged them not to go that route and invited them to record some demos at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, New York City. Simmons signed them to his company, and the band recorded early demos of their songs, including "Runnin' with the Devil". Excited about the band, Simmons approached Kiss manager Bill Aucoin and Kiss frontman Paul Stanley about them, but they dismissed his desire to sign them to Aucoin's management fold. Stanley later said he "rejected Van Halen to protect Kiss", and that they made an effort to make Simmons drop the band to "keep Gene in check". The discouraging words caused Simmons to rip up the contract, and he "let them go" after feeling he may have held the band back. The next year, Warner Records offered Van Halen a recording contract.Eddie remained on good terms with Simmons. It was rumored that Eddie nearly replaced guitarist Ace Frehley after his departure from Kiss in 1982, but that Simmons talked him out of leaving Van Halen. However, neither Paul Stanley nor Eddie Van Halen remember this happening. Stanley did recall Eddie coming down to the studio, being "blown away" by their song "Creatures of the Night", and telling Stanley he wanted to get into playing keyboards. Stanley was confused at Eddie's interest in keyboards, but his interest resulted in the creation of "Jump". The band's 1978 album Van Halen reached No. 19 on the Billboard pop music charts and was one of rock's most commercially successful debuts, highly regarded as both a heavy metal and hard rock album. By the early 1980s, Van Halen was one of the most successful rock acts of the time.
Their album 1984 went five-times Platinum a year after its release. Its lead single, "Jump", became the band's first and only No. 1 pop hit and brought them a Grammy nomination. The band won the 1992 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance with Vocals for the album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. In 2019, the band ranked 20th on the RIAA list of best-selling artists, with 56 million album sales in the US and more than 100 million worldwide. Additionally, Van Halen charted 13 number-one hits in the history of Billboards Mainstream Rock chart; meanwhile, VH1 ranked the band seventh on a list of the top 100 hard rock artists of all time, and, in 2007, Van Halen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Individually, Van Halen received acclaim for his guitar work in the band.
Other work
Van Halen engaged in several projects outside of his band, including solo work and partnerships with his brother on film soundtracks such as The Wild Life in 1984, Twister 1996, and Sacred Sin in 2006, as well as musical collaborations with Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, singer-songwriter Nicolette Larson, Queen guitarist Brian May, Sammy Hagar, Black Sabbath, Roger Waters, Toto guitarist Steve Lukather, and LL Cool J.In 1982, Eddie Van Halen contributed the guitar solo to "Beat It", for Michael Jackson's album Thriller, which became the biggest selling album of all time. Van Halen became involved after The Who guitarist Pete Townshend became unavailable and recommended him. Van Halen met with Quincy Jones and Jackson. Unsure of what he could add to a pop song, he played along with the song and ended up restructuring it before adding the classic solo. In a 2012 CNN interview, he said, "I listened to the song, and I immediately go, 'Can I change some parts?' I turned to the engineer and I go, 'OK, from the breakdown, chop in this part, go to this piece, pre-chorus, to the chorus, out.' Took him maybe 10 minutes to put it together. And I proceeded to improvise two solos over it." He added, "I was just finishing the second solo when Michael walked in. And you know artists are kind of crazy people. We're all a little bit strange. I didn't know how he would react to what I was doing. So I warned him before he listened. I said, 'Look, I changed the middle section of your song.' Now in my mind, he's either going to have his bodyguards kick me out for butchering his song, or he's going to like it. And so he gave it a listen, and he turned to me and went, 'Wow, thank you so much for having the passion to not just come in and blaze a solo but to actually care about the song and make it better." Van Halen was so pleased, he refused payment for his work. Ironically, Jackson's Thriller went to the No. 1 spot on the charts, pushing Van Halen's album 1984 to No. 2.
In addition, Van Halen made cameo appearances in the music video for Frank Sinatra's "L.A. Is My Lady", an episode of Café Americain starring his then-wife Valerie Bertinelli, and an episode of Two and a Half Men.