![]() ![]() They had an uncanny musical bond, following each other’s rhythmic twists as if they shared a single musical intelligence. ![]() He and Alex played together from their preteen years all the way up to the end of Eddie’s career in their first band, the Broken Combs, Eddie was on piano and Alex played saxophone. His most unbreakable bonds were familial. Friends told tales of him picking up unexpected instruments - a saxophone, a harmonica - and playing them at a seemingly professional level. He took up the cello seriously in midlife, playing along to Yo Yo Ma recordings for hours late at night. Eddie was an award-winning piano prodigy before he hit puberty, and there were periods when he abandoned guitar altogether for as long as a year, writing exclusively on piano and synthesizers. He single-handedly gave the electric guitar an extra decade or more of cultural prominence, even as he’d try to duck blame for a generation of teased-hair shredders who “played like typewriters.”īut he wasn’t just a guitar player. Van Halen changed the way electric guitarists played, the sounds they strove for, even the physical construction of the instruments they used, with multiple patents to his name (and other technical breakthroughs, he credibly maintained, that were ripped off and capitalized upon before he learned how to use the patent office). That’s why I used to drink.” Despite years of struggle, he didn’t achieve lasting sobriety until 2008. “I’m actually a shy, nervous person,” he said in 1998. In the entire first decade of the band’s success, he didn’t have a single sober day. Like his father and brother, he was an alcoholic. “It’s like I’ve never written a song before. “Every time I walk into the studio it seems like the first time,” he said in 1996. When you do, you’ll be free.” Even as he was widely acclaimed as the most exciting guitar player alive, even as Templeman was comparing him to Bach and Charlie Parker in the same sentence, Eddie was plagued by insecurity, requiring liberal doses of alcohol and sometimes cocaine to overcome his anxiety. At that point, his mom was still convinced it wouldn’t last, and that he’d have to go back to school.Īt the height of his early success, with “Jump” all over MTV, he confessed to fearing he was “stupid,” and in another interview the same year, called himself “selfish” and a “sick fuck.” “Ed – you are a good man,” Bertinelli wrote in her memoir’s dedications. Eddie was still living with his mom and dad at the age of 25, when he had already made multiple platinum albums. “When you grow up that way, it’s not conducive to self-esteem.”Īt the same time, as chronicled in Greg Renoff’s indispensable early-years bio Van Halen Rising, the Van Halen parents were supportive enough to stretch their finances to buy Alex a drum kit and Eddie a Gibson Les Paul in 1969. “The whole time I was growing up, my mom used to call me a ‘nothing nut - just like your father,’” he told Guitar World. His mom pushed classical piano studies so hard that Eddie took to casually comparing his upbringing to the movie Shine, in which parental pressure drives a musical prodigy into a mental breakdown. There was a fair amount of self-loathing in his makeup. “It’s the universal vibration,” he told me in 2007. He went on to spend a good portion of his life in that realm of pure music, retreating into endless, meditative, alcohol-fueled jams in hotel rooms or in his studio. He avoided the ups and downs of high school social life, and sometimes school itself, by holing up in his bedroom with his guitar and a six-pack. But there were also darker currents in his emotional life he couldn’t express in words, even to those closest to him. The joy he conveyed onstage with guitar in hand was genuine and profound. Visit Our Special Tribute Package for More on Eddie Van Halen’s Music and InfluenceĮddie, who died of cancer on October 6th, 2020, was, at his core, an eternally boyish, sweet-natured prodigy. “These two ordinarily placid rockers, who usually spoke in a sort of pothead-surf patois, suddenly nose to nose, spitting and snarling and growling at each other in a foreign language, as if they had become possessed.” “It was one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen,” their onetime manager Noel Monk wrote.
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