Eddie Van Halen - by Moses (a.k.a Stacey Marc Goldman)

Eddie Van Halen  

Born - January 6, 1955 in Amsterdam, Netherlands      

Died - October 6 2020 in Santa Monica, California, U.S.A

       It is a sad day losing Eddie Van Halen from this World.  Eddie Van was the greatest guitar player of all-time.  Better than Steve Vai, and better than Jimi Hendrix.  Eddie could play 4 String Bass, 5 String Bass,  6 String, Mandolin, 12-String, 18 String (all using finger tapping techniques that he created), Piano, (and probably a bit of drums).  

  The band Van Halen was perhaps the greatest Rock and Roll band of all-time.  Alongside his brother Alex, David Lee Roth, his son Wolfgang, Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony, and Gary Cherone they created studio masterpieces.  For over 40 years they played, toured around the Globe, and recorded in studios (creating album after album).  They produced the albums 'Van Halen 1', 'Van Halen 2', 'Woman and Children First', 'Fair Warning', 'Diver Down', '1984' (all with their first Front-man David Lee Roth), then alongside Sammy Hagar they produced '5150', 'OU812', 'For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge', and 'Balance', and finally with Gary Cherone as their third Front-man they released 'Van Halen 3'.  All along the way they played tour after tour, with perhaps the strongest band fan-base Worldwide.

  Eddie Van Halen was the greatest when it came to finger tapping on the guitar.  An exercise that he was one of the first to create (alongside Steve Vai).  Eddie Van and Steve Vai were considered the two greatest guitar-men of all-time (alongside Jimi Hendrix).  During one of their first tours (their David Lee Roth days) they had a stringent rule on the tour.  They demanded (in their contract) that at each concert the promoter had to produce 1000 M and M's for the band.  If there were any brown M and M's they wouldn't play the show.  They literally walked away from one show because of it.  Van Halen set standards throughout their history as a band, raising the bar in the music world with their musical virtuoso.  

  In fact Eddie Van Halen will be remembered among the likes of Ludwig Van Beetoven, Schubert, Strauss, Mozart, Wagner, Haydn, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Johann Sebastian Bach for the compositions he wrote and recorded.

  Eddie Van Halen and Alex Van Halen came to music at a very young age.  Their Dad (a Dutchman before moving his family to America) was a virtuoso musician in his own right and he started his son Eddie on Drums, and his son Alex on Guitar.  Then Alex and Eddie flip-flopped bringing Eddie onto the guitar.  The sounds that Eddie Van created are endless.  Early on he used his finger tapping techniques and mean intonations on guitar that really couldn't have surfaced from anyone else in the Planet aside from Steve Vai.  'Eruption', 'Little Guitars' 'Unchained', 'Intruder', and 'Mean Streets' are just a few of his masterpieces.  In fact when Eddie Van befriended Michael Jackson during the studio recording of the album 'Thriller', Eddie was asked by Jackson to look at the song 'Beat It' to get a feel.  In 10 minutes Eddie re-orchestrated the composition to what we see today in the track 'Beat It'.  He didn't take a dime.  Although Eddie wasn't with her at the end of his life, Valeri Bertonelli (his ex-wife) was someone Eddie wouldn't bad mouth to another soul.  His greatest joy was when he played on stage with his son Wolfgang.   

  Eddie Van Halen was one of the classiest men in the Rock and Roll World.  R.I.P Eddie Van Halen.