After a 10 year long battle with throat cancer, Eddie Van Halen has gone to be with the Lord, his cancer had spread to the brain. We will remember him for rocking the pants off a few generations of fans, he was 65 years old.
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I remember well when their first album came out in 1978. He had this tapping technique that nobody had done before, that let him play fast and furious, and he was just killin' it for all it was worth. The band was very good, they were prime for their time, it was a good time in America to be a kid growing up, countless legions of fans blasting VH out of cars, boom boxes, Marshall amps, they were more than a band, they were a permanent fixture on the cultural stage of the world.
As a band, they were the bomb but the music and the fans seemed to revolve around Eddie's searing guitar, many of the songs were riff oriented and written around the guitar hooks that made him unique and famous.
As a guitar player, Eddie was totally genius about how his guitars worked, what made them sound like he wanted them to sound, he would often go dumpster diving in the trash behind the music companies, one of his main guitars came from the dumpster behind Charvel, a manufacturer of bodies and necks, Seymour Duncan hand rewound the old 1950s Gibson "Patent Applied For" pickup that propelled them to stardom. Floyd Rose invented the tremolo unit that let him dive bomb the strings and come back perfectly in tune, this invention alone turned the guitar world upside down, and millions were made and used on nearly every brand of guitar made. Eddie painted all his guitars himself. Truly a one of a kind as was Jimi Hendrix and countless others before and after him, Eddie's with his heroes now.
These guys will never fade I bet. Now comes all the remasters and deluxe editions of their work.