Eddie Van Halen changed the way rock music was played

Eddie Van Halen (Wikimedia)

Eddie Van Halen, the legendary guitar player who passed away on October 6 at the age of 65 from throat cancer, meant so many things to so many people that it’s hard to capture his legacy without resorting to cliché and hyperbole. So, I’ll stick to what he meant to me.

Anyone who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s and listened to rock music would have heard Van Halen. Many who tried to learn to play the electric guitar in those years would have tried their hand at two-hand tapping and, having discovered that a crude facsimile of it is somewhat achievable, fancied themselves as the next Van Halen for the briefest of moments.

I did both these things. I listened to Van Halen’s music obsessively and, in the most incompetent way, I tried to learn to play the electric guitar like him. Suffice to say I had far more success with the former than the latter.

Eddie created musical soundscapes that were unlike anything that preceded him. Hard rock was a rather serious affair until he came along, from the angsty punk sounds of the Sex Pistols to the imperious riffing of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Van Halen were happy, dancey, upbeat and still somehow dripping with virtuoso skills — primarily that of lead guitarist Eddie Van Halen.

Eddie didn’t invent two hand-tapping but in ‘Eruption’, the 1:42 instrumental off their debut album ‘Van Halen’, he took it to a place where no else had gone before. With that brief, blistering display of solo guitar, he changed the way rock music was played. The legend goes that Alex Van Halen, his brother and drummer of the band, advised Eddie to face away from the crowds when he played the tapping solos on stage so that others wouldn’t copy him.

Many did end up copying him to various degrees, but very few rock guitarists are associated with a particular technique the way Eddie is with tapping. Which is not to say that tapping even begins to cover the sheer depth and breadth of his contributions to the guitar vocabulary.

Eddie was a self-taught guitarist, even though he was a trained pianist, and also taught himself to play the drums, the keyboard, and the bass guitar. Although he initially set out to be a drummer, when he discovered that Alex was better at it, he switched to playing the guitar — and he played it like few before him could.

His innovations were not merely restricted to guitar playing techniques; he also redefined the way guitars were constructed and sounded. He bolted the neck of one guitar onto another, he ripped out pickups from yet another guitar and installed them. He played around with the position of the pickup on the guitar’s body. He experimented with the paint and lacquer on the guitar, he shaved and shaped the guitar’s body to better fit the contours of his body. He made the guitar itself his own and, in doing so, deeply influenced how guitars would be constructed for rock music for decades to come. His iconic Frankenstein guitar has even been on display at the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Like many legendary rock acts, Van Halen the band went through many line-up changes: the first chunk of their catalogue fronted by David Lee Roth, another large portion by Sammy Hagar, and a solitary album featuring former Extreme frontman Gary Cherone. Purists and fans rate the Roth era as Van Halen’s apogee, but I personally love the pop-fuelled ballads of the Sammy Hagar era (described somewhat derisively by critics as Van Hagar), and one of my favourite Van Halen songs is ‘Josephina’ from ‘Van Halen III’, the only album they did with Cherone before they parted ways.

Every element of Van Halen’s skill, from delicately finger-picked clean sections, to heavy riffing, to dazzling solos are all showcased in this power ballad.

We used to have bands from all over India come to our college music festival in Bangalore, and they would cover all of Van Halen’s contemporaries, from Metallica to Iron Maiden and Guns’n’Roses. However, few, if any, would attempt to cover a Van Halen song. Van Halen’s combination of dazzling virtuosity and a singularly unique sound (as much to do with Alex’s drum sound as Eddie’s guitars) meant that it was well-nigh impossible to do justice to a Van Halen song. This was an omission borne out of reverence, and it is this reverence that will be Eddie Van Halen’s legacy for rock musicians anywhere around the world.

I was at a bar in Chennai a few years ago with some friends and the DJ was playing a Van Halen song. One of the people at the table was a radio jockey in his early twenties, and I jokingly remarked that he’s so young he probably hasn’t even heard of Van Halen. Sure enough, his response was “Van Halen? Who’s that?” and the whole table proceeded to pounce on him with expressions of exaggerated astonishment.

My young friend being unaware of Van Halen is probably a testament to the increasing obsolescence of rock music as an art form, but for those of us who still live for the riffs, there’s no one else like Eddie Van Halen.

Vinay Aravind, a former corporate lawyer, is a Chennai-based photographer, cinematographer and freelance writer. Twitter: @VinayAravind. Views are personal.