RIP Eddie Van Halen (1955 - 2020)

So Much Larger Than Life

I've been trying to write something about Eddie for some days as you know. 

I wish it were as simple assuming up career highlights and noting his impact on the playing of rock guitar and then emote some grief. It would be like that if his life and times and career were like any other musician, but that's not quite true. And even with the dimension fo grief, I find it hard to express what exactly that we can articulate about a man who was fighting a losing battle against throat cancer while continuing to smoke. It's hard. 

Yet I'd like to start there. When famous people die and their careers are done, you can look upon their works and measure up their careers. With Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison, you know they were mid-flight when the folly of overdosing removed them service, so to speak. You can't quite say the same thing about Eddie Van Halen. It's been apparent since the double live album of 2015 that there might not be any more new albums coming from the band. 2012's 'A Different Kind of Truth' was in effect the final statement from a career that spanned 12 studio albums and 2 double live discs. His entire oeuvre was in the rear mirror as he lay dying. And even though 65 is much too young, it is hard to imagine there was going to be anything he would do to revolutionise guitar playing once more. 

Perhaps the coming years we will get releases from the vault of materials he was recording in disown private comforts at his own studio. For now, we are left with the 12 studio albums and 2 live albums. There is an almost symmetry in that the 12 albums can be split into 6 with David Lee Roth and 5 with Sammy Hagar, with the lone album with Gary Cherone. There is a live album each with Hagar and Roth respectively, and if their Sydney concert was anything to go by, there would be in the vaults somewhere a concert video with Cherone.

The point is, he wasn't exactly felled, mid-career like the 27 club - and we are much better off for it. It was a full and vibrant career made up mostly of high points and a few dud songs. If you were a kid in the 'burbs wishing upon a career as a rock star, you couldn't draw it up much better. If you add in his impact on the playing style, which is still reverberating through the guitar playing community, and his place in the history of rock guitar, it was a splendid career. And we are grateful he came along. 

So Vale, to the King of Rock Guitar.

That Moment We First Heard Eruption

Being in Australia, my first encounter was rather late. Back in early 1982, for us, Heavy Metal was still a peculiar sub-sub-genre of Hard Rock which was a sub-genre of Rock which had finally broken through to the mainstream with the advent FM Radio in Australia. The guy who introduced me to Van Halen was this guy who would later be known as 'Sandy' Vahadani in this band. At the time I was getting a lot of input in the schoolyard from various friends wanting me to listen to this that and the other thing - of course that's kind of how I got into most of the bands I still love and cherish. 

Sandy was always armed with Heavy Metal magazines of artists giving interviews in their spandex pants, posing and preening like wankers-from-outer-space. Sandy wanted to be one but he didn't exactly look the part. He flung me a cassette of Van Halen 1. He prodded the cover notes written in his loopy-jagged cursive with his hairy muscular index finger and said "make sure you listen to this, man". Dutifully, I took the thing home and listened that evening and it promptly blew my mind. 

I had had experiences with records blowing my mind, but nothing sounded quite like Van Halen. You could hear the boundaries of rock guitar being redefined. If the goal posts were moving by feet with every great rock album, the goal posts had suddenly moved to the horizon with the advent of Van Halen. 

This was, to borrow a phrase from Ted Templeman who produced their early albums, a generational talent.     To this day I can say with 100% confidence nothing has shattered and re-defined the boundaries of music quite like 'Van Halen I' with 'Eruption' as its piece de resistance. I've heard impressive, amazing, jaw-dropping players since but none of them have mapped an entire continent of playing like Eddie Van Halen did. 

Tapping As A Way of Life

There are many great guitar players - but there really is only one player who defined the guitar sound for a generation. The cultural power of Eddie transcended rock. It permeated the whole attitude of what it meant to be a guitar player. His playing demonstrated that everything matters. Technique matters; Intent matters; feel for the material matters; your understanding of the music you are playing matters; your equipment matters; the very coils of wire in your pickups around what kind of magnets matters; the voltage going into your tube amplifier matters. And when you summed up the total of all the things that mattered, guitar playing mattered, like never before.

When I was working my summer job at Dickson's Music in Chatswood around 1984-1985, every kid coming in to check out guitars was attempting to emulate Van Halen's two-handed tapping technique. There has been much spilled ink about the origins of the technique and whether Eddie Van Halen really did 'invent' it, but needless to say he was the man who made it part of the vernacular of guitar playing in the 1980s onwards, and it cannot be understated. 

In 1985, the fictional Marty McFly was tapping on his electric guitar in 'Back to the Future' and even tortures his father with a cassette recording labelled 'Edward Van Halen'. The sequels of overtones and howls of feedback melding into a cacophony of true 1980s Guitar-isme. And at that point the whole Van Halen thing was coopted into a schtick. It marks a denouement in the moment of all rock music where Hollywood abducted the power and turned it into a culture nicknack. All the same, in one of the best movies of all time, there is a deeply embedded imprint of Eddie Van Halen - the moment we can understand the cultural significance of that playing style. 

RIP Eddie Van Halen - you will always be an inspiration to every kid who picks up an electric guitar. 

A Different Kind Of Truth

The Old Is Not The New, It's Just Good

Van Halen came out with a new album about three weeks ago. I rushed out and got it at Utopia records in town. May as well do these things the old way. I know people are downloading these things but being a fetishist (as Rob Gordon would have it) I need to own plastic. I don't know, if I ever wanted Lady Gaga, I might download that, but a new Van Halen album deserves my full purchasing commitment. The point is to not give into the ravages of time; not surrender to the seduction of the new. If you truly love rock music, there's no way you're not going to fork out the money for the CD. Mine even came with a free poster, so suck on that iTunes!

What's Good About it

The word out there is that these aren't even new-new songs but re-arranged and re-written old songs, some of which were on that legendary demo tape to Warner Brothers. From the first note to the last, the Van Halen you hear sounds as bristling and energetic as any and all of the early Van Halen records that featured David Lee Roth. And really, that's what we expect, and that's what they deliver.

The playing is superb, the engineering is great, the mix is lively, and it just plain rocks. At the heart of it is Eddie Van Halen, still doing his remarkable guitar playing that changed the landscape for guitarists for a generation. The whole package might not sound fresh to music critics, but it sounds real, and lived in. You know, being 'good' is fresh enough for me.

What's Bad About It

Are you kidding me? Uh... It's not a double album?.

What's Interesting About It

Well, that's an interesting title for a start, that poses some epistemological questions. I don't know how philosophical a bent David Lee Roth has developed - judging from his solo works, maybe not much - but the line evokes two discussions about knowledge. One is whether we can ascertain truth and one is whether truth is multiple and that there can be conflicting, contradictory but simultaneous truth. The song 'Bullethead' suggests that reality might be a bit more vague than any definition we give it.

I'm sure the guys in the band aren't thinking about this sort of thing to much, and yet you get the feeling from the record that fame and success actually wore on them a lot more than they admitted. truth, as they found out was a socially determined construct, so they want to throw it back on us saying absolutes are questionable.

The long absence between '1984' and this album for David Lee Roth is the stuff of rock legends so I won't go into it here, but it has to be said, he's slipped right back into the soundscape like he had never left. It makes you think, if it's so damn easy, what took you guys so long to get back? The answer to that might be the GFC wherein a lot of bands have hit the road again in order to scare up some cash after investments were burnt in the GFC.

At least this is the silver lining on that very black cloud - and it shines too.

Going Black And White

I've noticed over the years that when bands want to hit the reset button, they come out with black and white video clips. 'Tattoo' and the other bits of video that's been released are all in black and white. Unfortunately it reminds me of the time The Who took on Kenny Jones to replace the deceased Keith Moon and came out with 'You Better You Bet'; The time the Police came out with 'Every Breath You Take'; and the time U2 went all bluesy and did 'Rattle ad Hum', half in black and white. I don't know if it really means anything but the black and white thing always seems like a statement, but ends up being something else.

The band is resetting in the sense that they haven't had an album out since 1998, and they're doing this one with David Lee Roth so it stands to reason. The problem is that the Who only really had one more album in them and then stopped putting out material for along time, and the Police really only had the 1986 remix of 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' left in them. It's really not a good sign. Speaking for myself, I haven't done anything since I worked in black and white, so... I'm just saying.

"Can He Still Do The Splits?"

I've had a few people ask this question of David Lee Roth. Because the question never crossed my mind, it kind of took me by surprise that quite a number of people are asking this question. I don't understand how this comes to the forefront of people's minds when it comes to David Lee Roth rejoining the band, seeing that my own consciousness of the band totally revolves around Eddie' guitar playing. I mean, it's like asking if Dennis Rodman still has weird hair when the subject of the Michael Jordan era Chicago Bulls comes up. I mean, yeah, no, maybe, but were you watching what that team did at all? David Lee Roth's splits? Come on, this is Eddie's band. :)