Thoughts on Eddie Van Halen's Death

Man, this one hurts.

Like many of you, I was rocked (not in the good way) by Tuesday’s news of Eddie Van Halen’s death. Eddie and his band rocked me (in a good way) for many years, including my young adult ones, which are the ones that really forge lasting imprints. 

I didn’t come to the band Van Halen easily. In the beginning, I liked their hits well enough. I wasn’t immediately blown away by the band and never rushed out to buy their albums until 5150. Their songs were ubiquitous enough on FM radio that I never felt the need to do that, despite having an affinity for heavy rock. Yet there was a Van Halen song on just about every mix tape I ever made, so they obviously made an impression. 

I used to roll my eyes at David Lee Roth’s odd, high-pitched mini screams and vocal flourishes at the end of words. I’m not sure if there’s a word for that thing he did with his voice, but I found it kind of unnecessary. I warmed up to it eventually over the years, but for a while it held me back from becoming a bigger Van Halen fan. For me, his vocals in general are not a strong suit of the band’s classic lineup, but the harmony backing vocals are. Van Halen’s harmony vocals crushed it, especially on songs like “Jamie’s Crying” and “Dance the Night Away.” 

What stood out to me from the beginning with Van Halen, obviously, was the guitar work. It’s easy to laud Eddie’s solos as the band’s calling card. They were, after all, but I was totally blown away by his tone and the riffs and how they sucked me right into the songs. His power chords seemed to have twice as much power to them as those of most guitarists. While many guitar wizards tend to overplay, Eddie didn’t. His guitar work always seemed to serve Van Halen’s songs well. He got his spotlight opportunities to display his virtuosity though, like he did in “Eruption.” It seemed like everyone was posting YouTube videos of “Eruption” in my timeline on Tuesday and that song does show what Eddie was capable of, but I’d rather listen to his work in “Runnin’ with the Devil,” or “The Cradle Will Rock.” 

Eddie’s riffs always had a great mixture of crunch and melody to them. When they were played over that incredible foundation laid down by bassist Michael Anthony and drummer Alex Van Halen, the alchemy was complete. Almost anyone could sound good singing with all of that going on behind him. I’m not trying to bag on Roth, because I think he did well overall, but I wouldn’t call him a great singer. He was fine to good for what he was being asked to do.

I’d heard Van Halen’s self-titled debut (1978) many times by the time I was a senior in high school. I’d heard the band’s big hits off of Van Halen II, Women and Children First, Fair Warning, and Diver Down. I’d heard the latter album all the way through more than once, as friends of mine had it and would pay the cassette repeatedly. But at this point I still didn’t own a Van Halen album. As with Led Zeppelin, their songs were played often enough on the radio that I never felt the need to spend my limited supply of money on them. It was later that I started buying them up. 

When 1984 hit, Van Halen became the biggest band on the planet. Some of the old-school Van Halen fans weren’t a fan of how heavily Van Halen leaned into the addition of keyboards on 1984, but I was already a fan of synthesizers in music, and the band could still absolutely rock out, so I wasn’t bothered by them at all. I saw it as a feature rather than a bug.

Seemingly everyone had a copy of 1984 and played it all the time.  I graduated high school in that very year, and the album was inescapable. You never forget the albums that were big your senior year of high school. Those stay with you forever. It seemed like “Jump,” “Panama,” “Hot for Teacher,” or “I’ll Wait” were always on the radio and the first three of those tracks were in heavy rotation on Mtv. 

The band was everywhere. Their music turned up in 80s movies like Night Shift,Better Off Dead, and Weird Science. Eddie provided soundtrack work on The Wild Life too, and his excellent solo for Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” was huge news on Mtv. Van Halen was part of the biggest rock concerts in the world at that time on the Monsters of Rock tour.  The band was ubiquitous, and everyone seemed to be just fine with that. Eddie’s riffs were coming from all directions and I dug it.

Of course, the world’s biggest band parting ways with its lead singer was one of the biggest stories of the time. It wasn’t quite the Beatles breaking up, but it was huge. For many, Van Halen without Roth was unthinkable. Roth had some solo success and people used that to illustrate that the other three needed him more than he needed them. Singers often get too much credit for a band’s success. 

But for me, it simply was the band replacing its most easily replaceable part. Because I’d already been a fan of Sammy Hagar — the first concert I attended was Sammy’s VOA tour with special guest Dokken — I was ecstatic to hear that the Red Rocker was joining Van Halen. I liked Sammy as a singer a little better than Roth and I liked his songwriting, so for me this was great news, but I remember how polarizing it was at the time. Most people I knew hated the idea, even if they liked Sammy’s solo work or his time in Montrose. 

When Van Halen released 5150, it was a dream album for me. I bought it immediately and quickly absorbed it. That album became a constant fixture in my cassette deck. I wasn’t immediately enamored with the band’s first post-DLR single, “Why Can’t This Be Love,” although I remember the premiere of the song’s video on Mtv very clearly. That made me nervous, but once I had the album, I quickly loved songs like “Dreams,” “Get Up,” “Good Enough,” “Summer Nights,” “Best of Both Worlds,” and my personal favorite, “Love Walks In.” I wore that cassette out. 

The Sammy years went down from there, for me. I wasn’t as high on OU812. The title was a bit too cute, and perhaps too much of a response to David Lee Roth’s title Eat ‘Em and Smile. No one likes it when mom and dad fight, right? Still, OU812 had some great songs on it, particularly “Mine All Mine” and “When it’s Love.” Some, including Eddie, have criticized the way the album is mixed (and it was muddy as hell), but for me the bottom line is that the songs just aren’t as strong. 

The eyerolls continued with the title of the next album, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge — look, if you want to call the album Fuck, just have the balls to do it and call it Fuck. But there were again classic songs to enjoy. “Right Now” and “Top of the World” are still among the band’s most recognizable anthems. I thought the band continued a downward trend on Balance and then Hagar departed, leading to the disastrous Gary Cherone era. Some people seem to like Van Halen III, but I never warmed to it and for me the band essentially ended there, despite reunions with both Hagar and, later, Roth.

Eddie’s passing on Tuesday hit a lot of people hard, and understandably so. Many people list Van Halen as their favorite band or one of their favorites. I’m not among those people, but I did like their music quite a bit and Eddie just seemed to be constantly around in my youth. Whether his music was on the radio or Mtv, he was doing interviews for radio or television shows, or Van Halen music was popping up in a movie I was watching, he was there. His guitar provided part of the soundtrack to so many lives.

More than that, Eddie influenced rock music in ways that are still rippling outward. If you didn’t like Van Halen in the late 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, there’s a good chance that bands you did like were influenced by Eddie’s playing and his music. He changed the way guitar was played and even taught. My timeline Tuesday was full of bands and musicians I love, who were all talking about the influence he had on them. His playing was a touchstone of its time the way Jim Hendrix’s or Jimmy Page’s was in their own heydays. 

Despite Van Halen not being among my all-time favorite bands, I came to respect them and love much of their music, purchasing most of it over the years (even as a completist, I’m never buying Van Halen III). I’ll forever be grateful for the music Eddie and his band gave the world and for the influence he had over so many other guitarists and bands that I love.