Van Halen

Jimi Page, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Van Halen.  Yep. Those are the 4 best in the world.  The Michael Jordan, Labron James, Dr. J, and Koby Bryant of music.  Oh yes, I know I have a Christian Rock fan base here... so how about this... Van Halen was their Stryper. 

The band sold more than 80m albums worldwide. Eleven of their studio albums reached the US Top 10, and four reached No 1. In 2012, Van Halen was ranked top of Guitar World magazine’s list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. 

The guitarist Eddie Van Halen, who died on Tuesday, of cancer, at the age of sixty-five, was the sort of musician who only seems to appear once every generation: a true savant. His ability was second to none... a true gift from above. Whatever sorts of chops gets a person voted “The Best Guitarist in the World” by Guitar World magazine, Eddie had those and then some. He understood that an electric guitar could generate an extraordinary range of sounds, some of which were deep and percussive, and others that were shrieking and nearly feral. He perfected a bespoke technique in which he tapped along the neck of his instrument, an idea he once said he lifted from Jimmy Page’s solo in Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker,” though their styles feel distinct. Page, who came of age listening to American blues, is a looser and perhaps gentler guitarist; plus, Eddie didn’t play like anyone else. By the nineteen-eighties, as part of the hard-rock band Van Halen, his name had become synonymous with otherworldly shredding. When he started to rip, every guitar nerd in every small town in America stopped what he or she was doing, and whispered one word: “Sick.”

If this all sounds show off-y or bloodless or not very fun, I invite you to revisit the video for “Panama,” in which Eddie, wearing a red bandana and a tank top decorated with dice, gets strung up by his ankle and then later his midsection, grinning and making goofy faces, taking the situation very seriously and yet not seriously at all. When the camera cuts to the crowd, people are melting down with excitement—Eddie is ravishing them. “Panama” is so extravagant—so plainly dumb, so gorgeously jubilant—that when I’m listening to it I often feel my leg involuntarily rising into a high-kick before the vocals even start. The tension between what Van Halen was usually doing (making precise, harmonically sophisticated rock music that was indebted to the Western classical canon) and what its audience was usually doing (pounding beers, going nuts) is part of what makes the band so compelling.

The death of Eddie Van Halen from throat cancer this past Monday brings to a close one of the most colourful and lucrative sagas in American rock music. If Aerosmith was the premier US hard rock band of the 1970s, it was Van Halen who stepped into their shoes during the 80s. Formed around the Van Halen brothers, the guitarist Eddie and the drummer Alex, the band rode a tidal wave of multi-platinum albums over a 15-year period. Few other acts have come close to matching their commercially combustible mixture of spectacular and addictive rock, flamboyant stage performances and outsized personal behaviour.

The band sold more than 80m albums worldwide. Eleven of their studio albums reached the US Top 10, and four reached No 1. In 2012, Van Halen was ranked top of Guitar World magazine’s list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.