Here’s a 4-minute version of “Eruption” and “You Really Got Me” from a 2015 live performance, long after Eddie reunited with David Lee Roth and they started performing with Eddie’s son Wolfgang Van Halen on bass (I picked this because in the old days, live versions of “Eruption” alone could be 10 minutes long):Īs Considine noted, a generation of guitarists were influenced by the likes of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Jimi Hendrix-just 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. I’m envious of those who experienced it that way. Van Halen’s self-titled album opened with “Eruption,” which segued into the band’s supercharged cover of The Kinks’ seminal classic “You Really Got Me.” I can only imagine being a bit older and that being the first blast of Van Halen I’d ever heard.

And as with Prince, Van Halen’s first album came out in 1978. Like Prince, Van Halen exploded into superstardom with their sixth album, both released in 1984 (Prince’s Purple Rain and Van Halen’s 1984). 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.īy this time, I had gone back and listened to the band’s older material. 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. My favorite part was an extended version of Eddie’s legendary unaccompanied guitar solo, called “Eruption.” I was a junior in high school and had been playing guitar for two and a half years. In the fall of ’91, I saw Van Halen in concert at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland-it was a blast. On the band’s biggest pop hit, “Jump,” the most prominent instrument is surprisingly not Eddie’s guitar: the song’s iconic riff is played on a keyboard synthesizer by. The latter couldn’t be further from the truth. (Disclaimer: Today, as an adult and parent-and, for that matter, as a teacher-I 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. Released during the heyday of MTV, the songs and the videos “ Jump,” “ Panama,” and “ Hot For Teacher” were fun and bawdy, just like the band wanted them to be. My introduction to Van Halen came with their album 1984. As far as guitarists were concerned, it was as if the wheel had been reinvented.” Considine wrote, “Unlike virtually every rock guitarist before him, he didn’t simply build upon the electric-blues vocabulary of Clapton, Beck, Page and Hendrix-he 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.

Roth was the over-the-top, super-charismatic, loquacious, high-kicking frontman-and Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing was unlike anything anyone had heard before. As far as lead singer-guitarist pairs within rock bands, the ’60s gave us Mick and Keith, the ’70s gave us Plant and Page, and the first half of the ’80s gave us Diamond Dave and Eddie.ĭavid Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen were perfect for the glitz, glamour, and decadence of the ’80s hard rock scene. 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. If I had been asked that question in elementary school in the ’80s, 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. If my high school guitar teachers in the early ’90s had asked me who my favorite guitarist was, I would have replied, “I can only pick one?” One of the questions was: “Who is your favorite guitar player?” 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 “I don’t have one” or just a question mark. On my first day of guitar class six years ago, I gave the students a survey about their musical experience, interests, goals, etc. I am a high school history teacher and sometimes I fill in as the guitar teacher.

Eddie van halen hair