
How Influential Was Eddie Van Halen?
The legacy of the guitarist, who died of cancer last week at 65.

I am a high school history teacher and sometimes I fill in as the guitar teacher. On my first day of guitar class six years ago, I gave the students a survey about their musical experience, interests, goals, etc. One of the questions was: āWho is your favorite guitar player?ā After I collected the surveys and began to review them, I was shocked and saddened to see that the most common answers for that question were āI donāt have oneā or just a question mark.
If my high school guitar teachers in the early ā90s had asked me who my favorite guitarist was, I would have replied, āI can only pick one?ā
If I had been asked that question in elementary school in the ā80s, though, I would have had an easy answer because I knew only one by name: Eddie Van Halen, who died last week at the age of 65.
With Eddie on guitar, along with his brother Alex on drums, David Lee Roth on vocals, and Michael Anthony on bass, Van Halen was the coolest band there was when I was a kid. As far as lead singer-guitarist pairs within rock bands, the ā60s gave us Mick and Keith, the ā70s gave us Plant and Page, and the first half of the ā80s gave us Diamond Dave and Eddie.
David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen were perfect for the glitz, glamour, and decadence of the ā80s hard rock scene. Roth was the over-the-top, super-charismatic, loquacious, high-kicking frontmanāand Eddie Van Halenās guitar playing was unlike anything anyone had heard before. As music critic J.D. Considine wrote, āUnlike virtually every rock guitarist before him, he didnāt simply build upon the electric-blues vocabulary of Clapton, Beck, Page and Hendrixāhe created a whole new language, one that replaced the bluesy string bends and stinging sustain of old with screeching tremolo dive-bombs and lightning-fast hammer-ons and pull-offs. As far as guitarists were concerned, it was as if the wheel had been reinvented.ā
My introduction to Van Halen came with their album 1984. Released during the heyday of MTV, the songs and the videos āJump,ā āPanama,ā and āHot For Teacherā were fun and bawdy, just like the band wanted them to be. (Disclaimer: Today, as an adult and parentāand, for that matter, as a teacherāI cannot always condone the lyrics and imagery of Van Halen songs and videos that I liked when I was between the ages of 10 and 17.) A downside to the raucous, provocative, humorous image of the band is that it may have made Eddie Van Halen seem like a mere party boy and unserious musician.
The latter couldnāt be further from the truth. On the bandās biggest pop hit, āJump,ā the most prominent instrument is surprisingly not Eddieās guitar: the songās iconic riff is played on a keyboard synthesizer by . . . Mr. Edward Van Halen.
āJumpā also features two different instrumental solos (unthinkable these days): a guitar solo by Eddie and a synth solo by Eddie. Even though he never learned to read music, he was clearly the brains behind the operation of one of the biggest bands of the decade.
After 1984, Roth left and was replaced by singer Sammy Hagar. Eddie Van Halen continued to grow as musician and songwriter, and on both of the next two albumsā5150 and OU812āplayed both guitar and keyboard parts, which alienated some of the hard rock purist fans. In āFinish What Ya Started,ā Eddie stripped away the distorted effects from his signature guitar sound. Hard rock purists complained that his playing sounded too much like country music. Although I, then a young teen, wasnāt a country fan, I remember thinking it was rad: āWhat canāt this guy do?ā
The bandās 1991 album, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, opened with Eddieās new trick: using a power drill to play the guitar on the single āPoundcake.ā The drill was largely a gimmick, yes, but a symbol of his Eddieās experimentation and technical creativity.
In the fall of ā91, I saw Van Halen in concert at the Capital Centre in Landover, Marylandāit was a blast. My favorite part was an extended version of Eddieās legendary unaccompanied guitar solo, called āEruption.ā I was a junior in high school and had been playing guitar for two and a half years. I started because I had discovered the Beatles, followed by the magical format of classic rock radio: the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream, the Allman Brothers Band, the Grateful Dead, and many others. While I quickly came to love the playing of Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, and Jerry Garcia, that night I was in the presence of my original guitar hero.
By this time, I had gone back and listened to the bandās older material. Like Prince, Van Halen exploded into superstardom with their sixth album, both released in 1984 (Princeās Purple Rain and Van Halenās 1984). And as with Prince, Van Halenās first album came out in 1978. Van Halenās self-titled album opened with āEruption,ā which segued into the bandās supercharged cover of The Kinksā seminal classic āYou Really Got Me.ā I can only imagine being a bit older and that being the first blast of Van Halen Iād ever heard. Iām envious of those who experienced it that way. Hereās a 4-minute version of āEruptionā and āYou Really Got Meā from a 2015 live performance, long after Eddie reunited with David Lee Roth and they started performing with Eddieās son Wolfgang Van Halen on bass (I picked this because in the old days, live versions of āEruptionā alone could be 10 minutes long):
As Considine noted, a generation of guitarists were influenced by the likes of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Jimi Hendrixājust as those greats had in turn all been influenced by the blues guitarists who came before them, such as Robert Johnson, Albert King, Hubert Sumlin, B.B. King, and Buddy Guy. Eddie Van Halen wasnāt unfamiliar with this musical legacyāI read an interview years ago where he discussed how he loved Clapton and learned all of his solosāyet his style sounds nothing like Claptonās, nor like anybody elseās. Eddie didnāt just synthesize what came before and add his own distinctive tweaks; he made something new.
And Eddie Van Halenās influence on others has been immense. Following the 1978 debut, a stream of technique-driven rock guitar virtuosos followedāincluding Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, Eric Johnson, and many others. Their so-called āshredā guitar style continues to have an audience today.
For pop-oriented rock/hair metal bands of the 1980s (Poison, Mƶtley Crüe, Whitesnake, etc.) it was all but required to have a technically proficient lead guitarist who could take a solo in every song. Why? Because Eddie raised the bar in rock guitar playing. If you wanted to compete in that scene, your lead guitarist needed chops. That changed in the 1990s: With the rise of Kurt Cobain and grunge, flashy guitar solos came to be seen as āmasturbatory,ā āself-indulgent,ā and a symbol of the old, no longer cool era.
Thereās a longstanding debate among Van Halen fans: Which is betterāthe David Lee Roth era (pre-1985) or the Sammy Hagar era (1985-1996, dubbed āVan Hagarā)?
To me, the debate always seemed largely unnecessary. Both frontmen had their strengths and weaknesses. And both eras had Eddie Van Halen. So is it really that important?
Looking back at the videos, and reading some of the reassessments of the band from over the last decade, it might be tempting to dismiss Eddie Van Halen as ājust a guitar player in a hair metal bandā or āa relic of the outdated, misogynistic sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll ethos of the 1980sā or āa guy who likes immature album titles.ā But if you do, you dismiss an excellent musician and one of the greatest rock-and-roll guitarists who ever lived.