San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
VanHalen helped young jump through ’80s, life
Some of us catalog the seasons of our lives not by calendar years, but by what songs were playing while we were changing the world a minute at a time.
My college friends, for example, might say we went to St. Mary’s University in the late
’80s. I say it was during the bighair arena rock era, a little more than a year and a half after Van Halen released “5150.” During my junior year, a student cover band called Onyx played its version of Van Halen’s “Love Walks In” at a talent show. I liked that opening keyboard riff, even if I was a little scared of the acidgreen spandex pants on the budding guitarist I’d known since sixth grade.
That synthesizer, though. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was Eddie Van Halen drawing me out of the house where I grew up.
Rock changes a girl, especially one raised in a Mexican American, conservative, military home where the lawn is always freshly mowed. My folks were definitely not rockers; my dad was all Frankie Valli, and my mom was Rocio Durcal and Marco Antonio Solis. And according to them, the world of long-haired men in leather pants, sleeveless shirts and old sneakers was no place for a nice girl whose impression of college was the goody-goodies on “St. Elmo’s Fire.” Rockers were unruly and peed on the Alamo.
But arena-rock era Van Halen was different. To me, it was new and exciting, even if they had been playing since the ’70s. There was just so much rapidfire guitar power and high-volume edge. For those of us with the one-can-a-week Aqua Net addiction, the love songs didn’t hurt either.
Van Halen arranged the perfect soundtrack for the fall I moved into a dorm. I was sitting in classes, deconstructing philosophy, Victorian literature, Catholicism after Vatican II, and all sorts of things that previously seemed too grown-up for me. I
was balancing work-study, a full course load and a stack of plastic cups from Oyster Bake. I was learning how to negotiate my friendships and flirtations with the other pre-adults who were also rocking out with Eddie.
I wasn’t alone. Remember when concertgoers would camp out overnight outside the Convention Center for tickets? Shows
at the rocker bar called Sneakers on Perrin-Beitel? Spending hours listening to the radio trying to win Monsters of Rock tickets in Dallas or Houston because San Antonio just wasn’t big enough? I do and, if I remember correctly, so do a lot of other young San Antonians who helped give San Antonio its ’80s rock street cred.
When you’re 18, it’s all about freedom and the future. For most, your biggest mistakes still lie ahead — along with some disguised successes. Those are the years in which we don’t need an amp; it is when we decide who we are, wherewe’re going, and what we’re taking with us when we leave Mom and Dad’s house.
In 2015, during a talk at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Eddie Van Halen told a standing-room only crowd about how his life was shaped by his musician father, piano lessons and his brother’s guitar. He talked about how his family came to America from Holland with $50 and a piano, and how he’d spent years rebuilding guitars because he wanted to create something that was completely his. The kid who didn’t speak English when he got here changed rock ’n’ roll for the MTV generation and became American rock royalty.
And when Eddie Van Halen died last week, a lot of us had to stop and take in a moment of silence. He was ours and he changed us, back when we were new and didn’t need an amp.