In Memoriam: Eddie Van Halen 1955-2020

 

   

Remember when somebody was really good on a guitar, particularly an electric guitar, that person was referred to as a "god"? First time it happened was with Eric Clapton, in between stints with The Yardbirds and Cream, when he played for John Mayall and the Bluebreakers. In fact, Clapton was more than a god but the God, as when "Clapton is God" was seen, and, more importantly,  photographed, scrawled on a wall in the London Underground. Afterwards, monotheism gave way to polytheism, and a whole series of "guitar gods": Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix, Robbie Robertson, Peter Frampton, Angus Young, Brian May, Joe Perry, and so many, many others that I'm skipping over so I can get to the man who appeared not just on the cover of the above magazine but also this publication:

The last one? Well, Slash did come after him, and more recently, Jack White. There's probably been a few others. Nevertheless, Eddie Van Halen spent as much time in the axeman equivalent of Heaven, Mount Olympus, and Valhalla as anyone. Odd that he should end up in that other Heaven before Clapton, Richards, Beck, and Page, all of whom are quite a bit older (not that I want any of them to go!) Maybe that other God is gradually, very gradually, making His own list of the greatest guitarists of all time. "Number One is Hendrix, Number Two is..."

As tastes in pop music change, you don't hear the term "guitar god" much anymore (I keep waiting for somebody to come up with a "synthesizer god". Any of you graffiti artists in the London Underground want to take up the challenge?) Before the guitar is reduced to the pop equivalent of the triangle in a symphony orchestra, let's listen as Eddie gives us a few divine tricks of the trade: 

In case you're wondering about the "What's it means to be an American?" in the background, I can assure you, though others might insist otherwise, the answer is not "Trump voter". Rather it was a series of lectures and interviews conducted by the Smithsonian Institute in 2015 (the Obama era.) Eddie Van Halen wasn't there just to talk about his guitar playing, but also his unusual background. A naturalized citizen, he spent his first eight years in The Netherlands, a country his mother has emigrated to from Indonesia.

In case you're also wondering about the closed captioning, I have no idea.

The two best known versions of the heavy metal band Van Halen. There were others. In 1972, Eddie and his older brother Alex, a drummer, formed a Pasadena, California-based band named Genesis, a name they soon realized would have to be changed, and change it they did to Mammoth. At that time Eddie was lead vocalist as well as lead guitarist. That changed when the band realized a sound system they were renting from one David Lee Roth could be had for free if they just took him on as a vocalist. According to Roth, it was he who suggested the band change its name to Eddie's and Alex's last, believing it sounded way cooler. In 1974, Michael Anthony replaced Mark Stone on bass. The band soon became a familiar presence of the mid-1970s LA rock scene, getting regular gigs at the then-popular-but-now-legendary Whisky a Go Go. Eventually they were signed to a recording contract with Warner Bros. Records. Released in 1978, the band's eponymous first album Van Halen climbed to number 19 on the Billboard's pop music chart, an impressive debut indeed. Among the songs on this album was "Runnin' with the Devil", which never made it to the Top 40 but did get heavy play on every rock listener's 1970s radio alternative, AOR (album oriented rock.) I myself recall hearing it on Cleveland's WMMS when I was in high school. Not until I bought a tape cassette (remember those?) of the debut album some years later do I recall hearing "Eruption", but it may have been even more influential than "Devil", thanks to a guitar solo by Eddie which highlighted his "finger-tapping" technique. Much too technical for me to explain or even understand--hey, I'm not a musician!--Eddie explains it himself in the video at the top of this post. In 1979 came the band's second album Van Halen II and their first single to make the Top 40, "Dance the Night Away", which peaked at #15. There were several more albums, some that did better than others. Finally, the year 1984 saw the debut of...

...1984.

The new album sounded a bit different from the previous ones, as Eddie now had taken a liking to the keyboard (so maybe he's a synthesizer god, after all!) 1984 yielded four Top 40 songs: "Panama", "I'll Wait", "Hot for Teacher" and the only Van Halen song to go all the way to Number One, "Jump". Though I'm quite familiar with the tune (I bought the album soon after it came out) I just now found out that the lyrics to "Jump" was inspired by a suicide attempt that David Lee Roth had heard about on the news. But the actual song that resulted is the age-old one of a boy meeting and wooing a girl (maybe the attempted suicide was the competition.) Thanks to MTV, heavy metal was making a major comeback in the early 1980s, and though from a purist's standpoint 1984 might be viewed as a slight step away from metal, for the more casual listeners that make up the bulk of the Top 40 audience (AOR   on life-support by this time, WMMS even having abandoned it) Van Halen was the first band they probably would have thought of when they heard the term. Though Eddie and Roth were hardly the first rockers to wear their locks down to their shoulders or more, Van Halen also was arguably a precursor to the many "hair metal" bands of the '80s like Poison and Cinderella. David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen, the early '80s answer to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Except we all know how the latter two rockers get along. Actually, as well as ironically, Jagger and Richards got along swimmingly compared to Roth and Eddie. For it was at the height of all this success that David Lee Roth either quit or was fired by Eddie Van Halen. Obviously, stories vary.

It may just be that they were two very different people, Roth a lover of show biz and master of tongue-in-cheek razzle-dazzle, Eddie more of a committed artist heavily influenced by his father, who had played both classical music and jazz in his native Holland. There's the question of who was running the band. Eddie and Alex started the band, and eventually lent it their surname, but I don't know how legally binding that is, especially if there is a notarized piece of paper (which I can only assume there was) stating that all four band members have equal say. However, equal say doesn't mean everybody is contributing equally to the band's success. Mention a band's name, and it usually the frontman, or lead singer, that quickly comes to the mind of the casual fan  (actually, you don't have to be a fan at all, as my mother wasn't, when she expressed surprise as I told her there was no such group called "Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones".) But for the more ardent fan, the one who will keep going to see the live performances even if the latest record offering fails to chart, it's the person responsible for the band's sound, and, in a hard rock band anyway, you can make more of a sound with guitar chords than vocal chords. The creative control balance was further tipped in Eddie's favor when he built his own recording studio. And Eddie did some things outside the band, such as play guitar on Michael Jackson's "Beat It" (reportedly for free as a favor to producer Quincy Jones) that made Roth fear that the axeman was going to strike out on his own. But the oddest point of contention may have been Eddie's marriage to One Day at a Time star Valerie Bertinelli, which seemed to flummox Roth. According to Eddie, Roth was less than welcoming to her. Meanwhile, one former Warners Bros record exec has complained that she exerted a Yoko Ono-like influence on the guitar god, which I kind of doubt. I mean, there's never been a Plastic Bertinelli band, has there? Finally, Roth tentatively struck out on his own when he released Crazy from the Heat an EP (Extended Play) of cover songs, none of which, in their original form anyway, would qualify as hard rock songs, or, in the case of "I'm Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" would qualify as a rock song at all, revealing a love for early 20th century jazz and blues that sold quite well. Well enough to quit or get fired, it seems. 

It's said that Eddie Van Halen met Sammy Hagar through a mutual Ferrari mechanic (it must be nice to be a rock star.) Hagar, formally the lead vocalist of a band called Montrose, already had a pretty successful solo career going, culminating with the hit single "I Can't Drive 55", which reached #26. But Van Halen was more successful than that, so it must have seemed like a smart career move at the time to become that band's frontman. The resulting album 5150 (named after Eddie's studio, which in turn was named after the California code which allows for the involuntary commitment of a mentally ill person.) It was soon a smart career move for all concerned when the album became Van Halen's first to hit number one on the Billboard's chart, then going on to yield four hit singles including "Why Can't This Be Love?" This album album differed even more so than the previous partly because Hagar was a much more wordy lyricist than David Lee Roth. In literary terms, it was like going from Hemingway to Henry James. Hagar was also a much better singer than Roth, which I imagine accounts for the increased vocabulary. In retrospect, Roth's role in the earlier albums seems ornamental,  an excuse to keep the records from becoming totally instrumental. On this album, Hagar's vocals get equal time with Eddie's guitar (and keyboard.) Share and share alike. One for all and all for one. And Eddie seemed to like that. In interviews to support this album and the three albums that followed, all which topped the charts, Eddie had nothing but good things to say about Hagar and bad things to say about Roth. Until one day Hagar was let go.

Lot of different reasons given for this breakup, from Hagar wanting to spend more time with his pregnant wife to a single song that needed to be rewritten to Eddie getting a new manager after his previous one had died.. But the nub of the problem was that Warner Bros. decided to release an album of Hagar's hit songs as a solo artist, thus reminding everybody that he indeed had been a solo artist with hit songs, raising questions as to really was responsible for the success of the revised Van Halen, often dubbed in the music press as "Van Hagar". There may have been other problems. Though like most metalheads he presented himself as a party animal, Hagar, five years older than Alex and seven years older than Eddie, seemed to blink at the brothers dissolute lifestyle. This is from Hagar's own, best-selling autobiography where he paints the siblings as a couple of junk food boozehounds who would have come to no good had it not been for the yahoo-savant Eddie's guitar work. How fair is that? In the interviews I've seen on YouTube of Eddie in the 1980s, he does seem to want to portray himself as a potty-mouthed happy-go-substance abuse-lucky headbanger, but, occasionally, a deeper intelligence emerges, as well as signs that his musical genius harkens back to the high culture he was exposed to as a child (he and Alex played classical music before learning to rock.) He was complicated, that's for sure. 

Now the rollar-coster begins... 

David Lee Roth, whose solo career had its ups-and downs, was asked to contribute a couple of new songs to a Van Halen compilation album that was the band's next project after Hagar's departure, or maybe was in the works before Hagar's departure, or maybe was another reason for Hagar's departure (if you haven't figured it out by now, stories vary.) This led to all four original members appearing together onstage for the first time in eleven years at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards. But Eddie and Alex didn't really want Roth back. Instead they went with Gary Cherone, former frontman for the glam metal band Extreme. The resulting album, Van Halen III was relatively poor-selling by the band's standards (it only went Gold--*sigh*) but did yield the hit "Without You". A followup album was never completed as Cherone decided, by all accounts amicably, to leave the band (he's now back with a reformed Extreme. Van Halen then took a break for a few years as Eddie had hip surgery. In the meantime, Hagar and Roth went on tour together. It drew huge crowds, but to date has never been repeated as the two men just don't like each other. 2004 saw another compilation, a 2-CD set with three new songs with Hagar singing lead. An ominous note: Bassist Michael Anthony was not allowed to record in these sessions, though he did tour with the band. Upset with Eddie's drinking, Hagar again departed at the tour's conclusion. Anthony also left because Eddie, drunk or sober, didn't want him around anymore. Then for the next year or so both Eddie and Roth gave separate interviews suggesting another reunion. Then Roth took it back. Van Halen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 2007, but only former members Hagar and Anthony (by now bandmates in a different venture) showed up for the ceremony. A new Van Halen tour with Roth was announced (with Eddie's and ex-wife Valerie Bertinelli's 15-year-old son Wolf playing bass), then disregarded after Eddie went into rehab. The tour eventually did take place, but was interrupted due to either Eddie returning to rehab, or just as likely in the past 20 years, to deal with various physical ailments, some quite serious. The tour eventually resumed, raking in tons of money. Another absence for a few years, then in 2012, the single "Tattoo", with Roth again singing lead, made its radio debut. They've toured since then, and it's basically understood that Roth was now permanently back with the band, a permanence that, this time, only ended with Eddie's death.