Eddie Van Halen obituary
The death of Eddie Van Halen from throat cancer, aged 65, brings to a close one of the most colourful and lucrative sagas in American rock music. If Aerosmith was the premier US hard rock band of the 1970s, it was Van Halen who stepped into their shoes during the 80s. Formed around the Van Halen brothers, the guitarist Eddie and the drummer Alex, the band rode a tidal wave of multi-platinum albums over a 15-year period. Few other acts have come close to matching their commercially combustible mixture of spectacular and addictive rock, flamboyant stage performances and outsized personal behaviour.
The band sold more than 80m albums worldwide. Eleven of their studio albums reached the US Top 10, and four reached No 1. In 2012, Van Halen was ranked top of Guitar World magazine’s list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.
When Jan Van Halen brought his family over to Pasadena, California, from the Netherlands in 1962 – Eddie once commented that they arrived “with $50 and a piano” – he can scarcely have imagined the mayhem his offspring would wreak on American popular culture. Jan was a freelance saxophonist and clarinettist who was versatile enough to find work in a number of musical styles, from classical to big band, though in California he had to supplement his musical earnings by washing dishes. Meanwhile, his Indonesian-born wife, Eugenia (nee Van Beers), initially worked as a maid. Their sons, Eddie and Alex, both born in Amsterdam, had learned classical piano from the age of six, but it was inevitable that, finding themselves on the west coast in the late 60s, they would be drawn to rock’n’roll.
The brothers attended Pasadena City College, as did the 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 played drums and Alex guitar, but by the time they formed their first serious group, Mammoth, they had switched instruments. They initially had called themselves Genesis, before learning of the British band of the same name.
Eddie’s first guitar was a Teisco Del Rey six-string bought from Sears for $110. They started off renting a PA system from Roth, then the singer with the Red Ball Jets, but soon concluded they could kill two birds with one stone by recruiting Roth for their own band. Roth brought an extrovert outrageousness, which would be a key factor in their subsequent rise to stardom. Mammoth’s line-up was completed when the bassist Michael Anthony joined from another local band, Snake. However, they then discovered there was another outfit calling itself Mammoth. After briefly considering the unprepossessing monicker Rat Salade, the quartet dubbed themselves Van Halen.
Through three years of playing at clubs and bars around Pasadena, Hollywood and Santa Barbara, Van Halen gradually built themselves up into one of the most popular acts in southern California. Having started off performing cover versions, packing their shows with material by 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 music by the other three.
By now Eddie was playing his handbuilt guitar, dubbed Frankenstein, known for its red body criss-crossed with black and white stripes. The group earned themselves support slots with bands including UFO and Santana, before being spotted by Gene Simmons of Kiss at the Starwood club in Los Angeles. Simmons produced a demo tape of several Van Halen numbers, but despite his help, no major label would touch 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 berserk stage performances, Templeman persuaded the Warners supremo Mo Ostin to sign the quartet (their contract allegedly contained insurance against paternity suits, a wise precaution considering the band’s archetypally rock’n’roll lifestyle).
Their debut album for Warners, Van Halen (1978), instantly put the band on the map. Boosted by a version of the Kinks’ You Really Got Me, released as a single and faithful to the original yet sounding a thousand times larger, the album breached the US Top 20 and went on to sell more than 12m copies.
On tour, fans went wild for Roth’s stage antics, while more musicianly observers were spellbound by Eddie’s staggering guitar work, his innovative technique allowing him to fire off notes and dazzling effects at unbelievable 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 renowned for developing the two-handed “tapping” technique heard to dizzying effect on (among other places) Eruption, from the debut album. The band added another small footnote to the mythology of rock by stipulating that they should be supplied with bowls of M&Ms backstage, but with the brown ones taken out.
Henceforth, it seemed nothing could prevent Van Halen’s career from rocketing, with their American success rapidly replicating itself worldwide. They launched a world tour in 1979 on the back of the album Van Halen II, and although by this time the so-called new wave had sent shockwaves through the music industry, Van Halen merely ignored it. Press reports of orgiastic, drugtaking behaviour merely boosted the band’s aura as rock’n’roll wild men.
The album Women and Children First (1980) was followed by the blockbusting Fair Warning (1981), the year Eddie married the actor Valerie Bertinelli. The band were on the threshold of their biggest period, ushered in by their album 1984, released in January that year.
It would join their debut album in earning a diamond certification for sales of more than 10m copies in the US and contained their most memorable hit single, Jump, featuring Eddie on both synthesiser and eardrum-rupturing guitar. It was their first and only US Hot 100 chart-topper, and a UK No 7.
Van Halen had grasped the significance of the new-fangled medium of MTV and its diet of pop videos, and the clips accompanying Jump and its follow-ups Panama and Hot for Teacher were influential in conveying the band’s larger-than-life appeal to an even wider audience. The band had also been boosted by Eddie’s brief but sensational guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s 1983 smash Beat It, in which he crammed an encyclopedia of electric guitar virtuosity into 32 seconds. He played on the Jackson session for free, but reaped huge dividends from the exposure it earned him.
At the peak of their success, Van Halen suddenly found themselves in crisis when Roth, seemingly unhappy at Eddie’s burgeoning profile, quit in 1985 to pursue a solo career. However, the other three quickly recruited Sammy Hagar, and were relieved when their first post-Roth album, 5150 (1986), hogged the American No 1 slot for four weeks. OU812 (1988) and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (1991) continued the Hagar-flavoured multi-platinum streak, with the live album Right Here, Right Now (1993) also doing brisk business.
With Hagar pursuing a solo career in tandem with his Van Halen commitments, the band’s work-rate slackened, but they continued to sell healthy quantities of tickets and albums through the mid-90s. Then, in 1996, the departure of Hagar, apparently miffed by rumours Roth was about to return, upset the applecart again. Hagar issued a statement describing the split as “a devastating, backstabbing, I-don’t-getit, real big disappointment”.
In the event, the band found themselves working temporarily with the vocalist Gary Cherone. By the time he quit in 1999, the first signs were appearing that Eddie’s health had suffered from the years of riotous living. In November that year, he underwent hip replacement surgery in Los Angeles, and in 2000 rumours were heard that he had cancer of the tongue. Eventually he had about a third of his tongue surgically removed, later speculating that his habit of holding metal guitar picks in his mouth could have caused it.
In 2004 Hagar rejoined Van Halen for an 80-date North American tour, but it ended with the band members at loggerheads, amid stories that Eddie had been drinking heavily. In 2007 Van Halen were 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 No 2 on the Billboard album chart. The band played its final dates at the Hollywood Bowl in 2015.
Eddie and Bertinelli divorced in 2007, though she and their son, Wolfgang, attended his wedding to Janie Liszewski in 2009. He is survived by Janie, Wolfgang and Alex.
• Eddie (Edward Lodewijk) Van Halen, musician and songwriter, born 26 January 1955; died 6 October 2020