Virtuoso, innovator, hater of brown M&Ms: Eddie Van Halen, the man and the myth
Eddie Van Halen may have been the most technically gifted, exuberantly talented and boldly inventive guitarist in rock history, if not always the most universally admired. His death, aged 65, from cancer, is being lamented in north America as the passing of a rock god.
In the USA, his name is bandied about in the company of Hendrix, Clapton and Jimmy Page. He was that good.
Yet for many people in Ireland, Europe and the rest of the world, he may have been better known as the guitarist who lent his name to a band fronted (for a while) by rock pin-up David Lee Roth.
Let there be no question on this matter, however. For better or worse, Eddie Van Halen stamped his super proficient style and musical DNA on rock guitar playing and helped shaped the sound of our times.
If you want a blast of what that style is, you might start with Eruption on Van Halen’s self-titled debut album, released in 1978. It is an instrumental, only 102 seconds long, created in a studio jam with his brother, Alex Van Halen, the band’s drummer. And it is an astonishing blizzard of notes and sounds that frankly just sounds impossible for one human being to play.
He often used it as a warm-up live, which tells you something in itself, because he was just getting warmed up for a career in which his astonishing virtuosity became a musical benchmark for other guitarists.
Over 12 albums in 24 years, with Van Halen line-ups that featured three different singers, he kept whipping up riffs and solos that push the very limits of what a guitar can do. In so doing, he unleashed a torrent of imitators, helping push heavy rock towards a shredding excess that valued speed and impact over sensitivity and tone, and technical virtuosity over melody and feeling.
If Eddie Van Halen never gained quite the same critical gravitas as other pioneers of the instrument, it is probably because he will forever be associated with a particularly trashy, flashy and over the top brand sometimes disparagingly referred to as hair metal. It was a triumph of style over substance, and it has been ever present on the musical landscape since Eddie opened the floodgates. But there was more to Eddie himself than that.
Strangely, his best-known solo is not even on a Van Halen song. It was Eddie who lent his dexterous skills to Michael Jackson’s Beat It in 1982, creating the tough, dirty riff and flaring superspeed solo that brought the pop soul singer some rock crossover grit. He never even took payment for it, instead asking Jackson to give him dancing lessons.
For another glimpse of the span of Eddie’s talents, you might take a listen to Spanish Fly from Van Halen II (1979), a minute-long classically inspired piece for soft stringed acoustic guitar that is sonorous and audacious and quite breathtaking.
Or Cathedral from Diver Down (1982), another short instrumental in which he played with volume and effects to create a piece that sounds like an organ reverie in a place of worship. Original Van Halen singer David Lee Roth was so entranced by it, he told the guitarist it reminded him of Bach. “Who?” was allegedly Eddie’s response.
Although adept at styles that encompassed classical and jazz, he did not read music and really, at heart, he was a rock player.
Van Halen’s biggest ever hit was 1984 single Jump, which ironically was driven by a synthesizer riff and features an absolutely mind-bending keyboard solo. But that is Eddie too, who was almost equally proficient on keyboards as guitar.
He wrote the song in 1981, but the band refused to record it for years, telling Eddie he was “a guitar hero” and that keyboards were a mistake. Eddie’s response was to tell the band: “If I want to play a tuba or a Bavarian cheese whistle, I’ll do it.”
However, he did add a stonking guitar solo for good measure. It went on to give them their only US number one single.
Van Halen were beyond huge in America, where they sold over 56 million albums, had two albums that sold in excess of 10 million copies each, and scored more Billboard Hot 100 hit singles than any other hard rock or heavy metal band. In Britain, their classic album 1984 only reached number 15 (in the
‘Eddie Van Halen never even took payment for the Beat It solo, asking Michael Jackson for dancing lessons instead’
year of the same name), and Jump was their only big hit.
They rarely toured outside of their home territory, and even when they did visit Europe, it was usually on bills featuring other rock bands, including AC/DC, Metallica and Bon Jovi. They weren’t exactly a flop either, selling about 15 million albums in the rest of the world across their career and headlining Monsters of Rock at Castle Donnington in 1988.
Indeed, Van Halen’s other notable achievement in rock history was the invention of absolutely absurd concert riders. The band’s concert contracts had a clause inserted that required venues to supply a bowl of multicoloured M&Ms to their backstage dressing room, with all the brown ones removed.
It is often cited as an example of grotesque rock hubris, but actually, there was a practical reason for such silliness. In his 1998 memoir, Crazy From The Heat, Roth explained that as Van Halen tour productions became bigger and more complex, the technical requirements to stage them led to contracts expanding in size and detail. “We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks full of gear… the contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment… When I would walk backstage, if I saw brown M&Ms in that bowl, well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract.”
Eddie spent much of his fame in a relatively reclusive way, becoming dependent on alcohol and cocaine before he became sober in 2008. He cast a shadow over every player that followed. Whenever you hear fret tapping, effects-laden electric guitar, you are listening to the spirit of Eddie Van Halen. You might as well jump.