Remembering Eddie Van Halen

His fans around the world may have been saddened by his death at the age of 65, would heavy metal music be radically different without the musicianship and technique of Eddie Van Halen?

By: Ringo Bones

His death was announced by his son, Wolfgang, after a 20-year battle with cancer, fans around the world now mourns the passing of Eddie Van Halen at the age of 65. Fans who had known Van Halen since the 1970s and 1980s could be forgiven that he died too soon because there are “rock-stars” today who are twenty years older who are still touring – that is before the 2020 COVID 19 lockdown.

Eddie Van Halen, whose full name is Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, was an American musician famously known around the world as the guitarist of the band Van Halen which he co-founded back in 1972 with his brother Alex Van Halen on drums , bassist Mark Stone and singer David Lee Roth. Even though the two-handed tapping technique for the electric guitar was already demonstrated by electric guitar pioneer Les Paul back in the 1950s, this guitar playing technique was more famously associated with Eddie Van Halen during the 1970s, probably because Van Halen manage to compose better songs in which to show-off the technique than Les Paul did back in the 1950s. Without this technique, which was later dubbed as “shredding” during the late 1980s Hair-Metal era, heavy metal music would sound radically different without Eddie Van Halen’s influential technique.

During the 1980s, Eddie Van Halen’s well known collaboration with the King of Pop, the late great Michael Jackson, on the iconic guitar solo on the song Beat It was probably his most well known musical collaboration. Those dodgy Van Halen live bootleg recordings were a must-have for the aspiring guitarist back in the 1980s. add to that the departure of long time singer and frontman David Lee Roth to be replaced by Sammy Hagar had caused a Kultur-Kampf in the Van Halen fanbase back in the mid 1980s, detractors often derogatively referring the Sammy Hagar fronted Van Halen as “Van Hagar”. Eddie Van Halen is indeed no stranger to real-life musical drama. And, by the way, Eddie Van Halen was also a clever inventor with various guitar related patents credited to him, like a musical instrument support that allowed him to play his signature two-handed tapping technique while standing up on stage for prolonged periods without tiring, an adjustable string tension control allowing more precise adjustments than a whammy bar, a type of humbucking pickup and ornamental designs for guitar pegheads and pickups.