I wasn’t a Van Halen fan from the start, of course. I mean, I wasn’t quite 7 when the first record came out. And in 1978, there weren’t many places a little guy would encounter this music.
I have vague memories of hearing “Dance the Night Away,” from the second album, on the radio. Then, in my newly-divorced dad’s den, there was MTV, and two live videos from the Fair Warning tour in Oakland in 1981. (They weren’t around from the very beginning of MTV, but nearly so.) I didn’t pay close attention to those videos until years later. I had a young person’s prejudice against the slop of live music, and its lack of fidelity to the studio versions of the songs.
I can remember hearing “Dancing in the Streets” really loud on a car stereo, and that’s when it started genuinely clicking for me. It just about had to be on 95 Rock, which was the FM rock radio station out of Birmingham at 94.5. (There was some sort of instant legitimacy about a song if you heard it on 95 Rock.)
I don’t know what you say about a guy like Eddie Van Halen passing away. It doesn’t feel like something that should have ever happened, which is, of course, ridiculous. He was 65 when he succumbed to his cancer today. That would have made him 25 in 1980. Yeah, that’s about right.
Eddie Van Halen is a great embodiment of what I call the Garry Kasparov effect. You can assert that Kasparov is the best chess player in the history of the world, and it’s unprovable. But you can inductively observe that Garry Kasparov appears to understand chess as well as anyone has ever understood anything.
And as with Garry and the chessboard, so with Eddie and the fretboard.
Whatever else he did, the guy hijacked hard rock. Call it moving the goalposts, or reinventing the genre, or a game-changer, or whatever other cliché you want to insert. He stood up, strapped up, and said to everything that came before him “yeah, that’s nice. Listen to this.” And it seemed so unmoored from anything that preceded it. It wasn’t an obvious knockoff of (or homage to; is that nicer?) anyone. It was that one day, there was the Eddie Van Halen sound.
This is not a post to nitpick albums, lineups, or similar, and I’m not going to. What matters is that on balance, we were all hugely blessed to be here at the same time as Edward Lodewijk Van Halen. God be with his family and friends.
Thank you, sir. RIP.
You might also like:
- Rush Limbaugh dead at 70
Rush in 2019. Photo: Gage Skidmore.[/… - Casey Kasem dead at 82
Kasem in 1989. Photo by Alan Light.[/c… - Kasparov’s endgame?
I’ve admired Garry Kasparov since I was in college. His is the finest chess mind the human race has … - Review: Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock
I always liked Sammy Hagar all right in my early adolescence. MTV played “Three Lock Box” and a live… - Van Halen tour "shut down"
I’m guessing that’s code for canceled. It’s not even clear they’ll all be there when Van Halen is in…