The King is Ed

Eddie Van Halen died today.

65.

Cancer.

Ed had already had it once, and it came back for him.

Becoming a rock star is sold as a pathway to immortality.

Eddie lived all of the rock star cliches - heavy smoker; heavy drinker; heavy drug user. He abused his body for decades because, hey, you're a rockstar, live the life. There is no tomorrow, just another stage and another chance to light it all up again.

And Ed did.

He also did so because ...

Because his Dad was a musician.

And so so was Ed.

Because his Dad was also an alcoholic.

And so so was Ed.

It isn't that you can't fight a genetic predisposition and learned behaviours.

You can.

But you have to be able to recognise them, you have to acknowledge them and you have to want to fight them.

Back then, the mythos was that this is what musicians did, so do it.

Funny.

Money, fame and success can't buy you more time if your time is up. It can buy you houses, cars, clothes and members of the opposite sex, but it can't buy you your way out of a terminal illness; or give you one more day if there are no more days left.

Ed had the power, the money, the fame and the status.

But Ed had no more days left.

Ed had the power, the money, the fame and the status because he was the last guitar hero at the last point where the guitar was still a culturally meaningful touchstone.

Ed was the last man to completely redefine electric rock guitar in the same way Hendrix had.

In the same way that Hendrix did, he started a revolution that created a million imitators.

The original, though, is always the one.

The imitators are copies, echoes of the big bang. It's the big bang that creates the universe.

Van Halen were always more than the sum of their parts. They were the best, most flexible and nimble American band of their generation. Fronted by a showman toastmaster in David Lee Roth and underpinned by Michael Anthony's deceptively simple bass and soaring backing vocals, the engine room was the symbiotic relationship between two brothers: Alex Van Halen and Eddie Van Halen.

Don't believe the self-mythologising rubbish that you'll now read about Ed being unable to read music or the idea that his ability was somehow innate and God-given - even though it was a line that Eddie himself often spun.

The Van Halen brothers were brought up musicians. Both put years of work into developing their musical abilities. Their father was a jazz clarinetist. They received piano lessons at an early age. They played piano on the boat coming over to America. Once they were there, they developed into classically-trained concert-winning pianists. Ed won the Open Category for California several times. Winning a major classical competition at any age in the UK is significant. Fiercely competitve, you're up against the best of the best the conservatoire system has to offer. They're launchpads for recording contracts and careers. And that's just in the UK. Eddie won the Open Category for the whole of California - which is twice the size of the UK - and then won it again. You don't do that by busking. You don’t do it if you aren’t a highly-trained schooled musician. At High School, Alex was so musically gifted he'd take his teachers and classmates through orchestral scores, teaching them how to get to the first coda.

Eddie was the last real giant of the guitar who existed in mainstream culture. U2 and Coldplay are now the paths to radio play and stadium success on the guitar. That's where where the electric guitar exists in music and culture now: parts-driven; ambient, textural, hooky. That's why you can hear The Edge's style in every studio session from Nashville to Mumbai. It's what sells, and it's played by faceless aces.

Eddie, though, was visible.

Extremely visible.

First off, there was his look: the mop of hair, the kooky grin, and the striped guitar he'd slapped together out of rejected parts and sprayed up himself.

Then there was the fact that he played in the band that defined what rock music would be in the eighties.

And then there was the thing that came before all of that, ran through it, and still remains:

The sound he made.

The sound he made was the roar of a fully-developed musical personality suddenly finding it was in the right band at the right time in the right place to express itself.

And boy, oh boy did it ever …

Eddie Van Halen. The mixed-race Dutch immigrant to LA who became the last guitar player to inspire a generation to pick up a guitar and rip.

As so many of us don't, Eddie found his passion in life and found himself in pursuing it. The guitar meant so much to him that Ed internalised it. It became an extension of him. He used to tell people he never practised, and then in the same breath say that he played for eight and ten hours at a stretch without moving.

Think about that.

Think about the fact that even once he'd hit big (and Van Halen were BIG long before Jump ever landed and they crossed over to the mainstream), Eddie would play so much he'd forget to eat, lost in a world where the possibilities offered by six strings were infinite.

What's salutary about Eddie Van Halen's story is this:

It wasn't that Eddie was a virtuoso.

He was - but there are thousands of virtuoso guitar players about and no-one other than other virtuosos and trainspotters listen to them.

It wasn't that Eddie could play things other people couldn't.

See above.

You can have all of that and if you have nothing to say, you still have nothing to say.

For all the six-string brilliance, Eddie had the impact he had because he was the right guy with the right sound in the right band with the right songs and the right image at the right time.

Most of us will never be the right person at the right point in history - even in our own personal stories. Too often as human beings we're raking over the past and planning for the future while missing the now.

Eddie was his moment.

That has nothing to do with talent.

The world is full of talented people you've never heard of.

Why? Because you don't get to choose to be the zeitgeist. If we could, we'd all be rich, successful and famous.

The zeitgeist chooses you.

And it chose Van Halen and Ed.

Van Halen were the right people in the right place at the right time with the right look and the right sound and the right songs - just like The Beatles and The Stones. Just like Monet and Manet. Just like Dickens or Shakespeare or insert name here.

Their story wasn't particularly complex, even if the competing life trajectories of its principal characters and the band's internal politics were. The friction between two immigrants whose father was so poor he had to wash dishes to keep his family afloat and the son of a successful surgeon who was the singer created their sound and their identity even as it ripped them apart.

The story Van Halen told was deceptively simple.

It's Saturday night, you're all invited to the party.

It’s deceptively simple.

So simple it appealed to America from sea to shining sea - and if you appeal to America, which is a big place, you’ll never want for money again.

It’s Saturday night, you’re all invited to the party sounds like meathead, knuckle-dragging stuff until you realise this:

Parties are all human life, sped up and condensed. They're about who's in and who's out. They're simultaneously classy and sophisticated and down and dirty. They're about heat, buzz, colour, power, money, fun, laughter, showing off and letting go, being seen and being heard, dancing on the tables and crying in the kitchen, sex, drugs, rock n' roll ... even when it's a garden party at Buck Palace ... and for all the glitz and glamour, sometime after midnight someone's going to throw a punch and it's going to get nasty.

The whizz-bang-flash-crash would have meant nothing without the songs, the vibe, the attitude, the humour and the fact that in their first incarnation Van Halen portrayed life in a band as being immense fun - and hey, you're all invited.

I'm not supposed to say any of this.

Eddie Van Halen is supposed to have had no impact on me.

Why would he?

I’m a Folkie.

I play acoustic guitar.

In a variety of odd tunings.

There's no apparent whizz-bang-flash-crash in my playing.

I don't write paeans to eternal Saturday nights, beautiful girls or cruising with the top down.

All of this is true.

Still ...

Go and put Dance the Night Away on.

If you don't swing your hips and dance around the room to that, singing the hook you should call the police and the coroner because you're dead - you just haven't realised it yet.

You might want to sniff dismissively. Ed and Van Halen aren't proper music. They're too American. They're too brash. It's just sturm and drang; there's no nuance, no subtlety, just party hearty day-glo technicolour bombast.

Yeah?

Bull.

If Bernstein had written I'm the One for West Side Story or Sinatra had sung it with a big band we'd still be talking about it today as a landmark in hard bop and Rat Pack glamour.

If Paco de Lucia rather than a LA punk kid had recorded Spanish Fly or Little Guitars they'd be part of the classical repertoire.

Go and listen to Jump - probably Van Halen's best-known song among people who don't know the first thing about the band.

Don't marvel at how in two seperate solo sections Ed proves himself to be the master of not one but two instruments - although he does - or that they’re both not just flurries of notes but thrillingly, thrillingly exciting, leading you on to the next bar and the next phrase and the next bit with glorious giddy energy - although they do.

Don't admire the way each section leads perfectly into the other in a study in applied voice-leading and modulation - although they do.

Don’t groove to the eighth-note pulse - long before The Police, U2, Snow Patrol and Coldplay realised it was the key to the stadium millions - and realise it was made by musicians playing together in a room, rather than a snap-to-grid function computer.

Don’t marvel at the fact that by the time you’ve listened to it, you always feel better.

Just put it on, turn off your brain and let it go straight through to your emotions.

Might as well ... Jump?

JUMP!

You will.

It’s pure joy in sound.

Some think music has to be serious and po-faced for it to be 'proper' music. It has to have a message. It has to sing pain, not shout joy.

The human urge to get down and boogie is just as valid as the urge to sing the blues, though.

The reality is that music is there for all of the human emotions to be fully and clearly represented - even day-glo technicolour ones.

Jump is just as valid to some and their life experience as She Loves You or Vossi Bop is to others.

I can remember when I first heard Van Halen.

I was sixteen.

I didn't get them at all.

At the time, my elder sister was expressing her identity as a teenager in the way that all teenagers should: getting the best and most obnoxious music possible and playing it so loud that it shook the house. I was still learning my first three chords on my EKO Ranger guitar, but I knew enough to know that Eddie was considered the best rock n' roll guitarist on the planet.

So, one night when she was out, I slipped into her room, slid her vinyl import copy of Van Halen II onto the turntable, dropped the needle and listened as You're No Good rumbled out of the speakers ...

Nothing.

No reaction.

Not only did I not get it, I just didn't hear what all the fuss was about.

I didn't realise that by that time everything Ed and Van Halen had brought to the table had been copied ad infinitum by the bands following in their wake.

I'd grown up with the echoes, rather than the big bang itself.

Later on, when I had more perspective, I heard Van Halen I in its entirety for the first time.

Then I got it.

Recorded live in the studio, no stoppee-no startee, it isn't just a debut for the ages, it's a before and after moment.

The level of musicianship is staggering; the dynamics something you can only get from really good musicians who play well together playing well together. The production is pristine - Ted Templeman and Don Landee take a bow - light and airy and packed full to the brim with the entire band's personality. The songs are bulletproof ... I'm The One, Jamie's Crying; Little Dreamer: Running With The Devil; Ice-Cream Man ... there's not a dud among them. The whole album moves and breathes and swings ...

Most people forget that the Van Halens came from a jazz background. In the lumpen world of hard rock and heavy metal, they were the only ones who genuinely knew how to swing. Go and listen to Hang ‘em High. Then realise that impossibly fast and impossibly complex guitar part is being swung - swung at that tempo in that pattern.

Boy, could they swing ...

And the guitar-playing ...

It isn't the pyrotechnics - although listen to the lead breaks on I'm the One or Ice Cream Man and imagine Maxim Vengerov playing them on a violin at Carnegie.

It isn't the sense of fun - although it's present throughout. Even the guitar playing sounds like someone having the most fun they could possibly have because they’re playing the guitar.

It's the song-sense.

On most records and in most songs you can always imagine the road not taken - how it could be done differently. You could have done this, you could have done that. You could have played this lick, you could have pulled this move, you could have gone with this sound here ...

With Eddie, you wouldn't change a note - which is how you know that what you're getting isn't a collection of hard-won licks and moves but a fully-formed musical personality expressing itself through an instrument.

And the sound of that guitar: bright and clear, but at the same time heavy and rich and complex, shot through with light and energy and sparkle and cheek and humour.

All of the human emotions are in Ed’s guitar sound.

Everything we aspire to do as musicians - express and connect with other human beings clearly and concisely; honestly and without filters - is there.

And then there's Eruption - the moment when someone barely out of their teens completely redefined what was possible on six strings in 103 seconds.

Think about that.

It took Jimi three albums of increasingly wild sonic experimentation to move the guitar forward.

It took Clapton ripping off Buddy Guy on the Beano album to make a genre that black Americans had known all about for years the guitar playbook of choice for white people for the next five decades.

It took Eddie Van Halen 103 seconds to change the landscape of the electric guitar - forever.

Go back and listen to Eruption with that in mind.

What you're hearing is someone changing everything in the time it took them to play the whole thing right through once.

What you're hearing is someone building a bridge to the future in real time before your eyes.

Everyone who came after walked across that bridge.

Ed built it.

Nowadays, you can find 12 year-olds on Youtube who can play it note-for-note.

Good.

Learn it.

But here’s the thing.

You can buy a stripy guitar.

You can dime your amp, buy an MXR Phase 90.

You can learn the licks.

And we do, because guitar culture is now not about finding your own voice, but replicating the past, instrument spec for instrument spec, sound for sound, note-for-note in the same way classical musicians do.

The reality is: Ed did it, he did it first; and no-one will ever do it better.

That's the key thing.

No-one will ever play Eddie Van Halen better than Eddie Van Halen.

I went on to learn some of Ed's licks and some moves.

I did the finger-tapping thing.

The more I learned, though, the more I learned that there was no point.

Ed had already done it.

Why repeat it?

Outwith of the songs and the stories, the most important thing Eddie Van Halen did was show us the importance of finding your own voice on the instrument.

And ninety percent of us never get that message.

It’s odd.

Most of us pick up a guitar because of the way it made us feel when we hear our heroes playing it.

Most of us don't learn the lesson inherent in that: our heroes become our heroes because they carve out their own path.

As guitar players, most of us don't.

We just follow their trail.

Rather than tell our own story, we copy their words, sentences and phrases and cut-and-paste them together and call it music.

Eddie Van Halen teaches us the value of sounding like ourselves.

Over the coming days and weeks and months and years, people will rehash his legacy.

The business will use this as a platform.

Songs lost in vaults might see the light of day.

Ex-singers might 'finish' unreleased material; go on tribute tours; write a book.

What should be remembered is the joy Eddie and his music gave and still gives to millions.

What should be remembered is how many people Eddie inspired to play.

What should be remembered are the family who he leaves behind and how much they will miss him.

The King is Ed ...

Long live the King.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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The Origin(al) Stories Journal was launched to track the writing and recording of the Northumbria album. You can read about the thought processes behind decision here. It has continued as a collection of posts drawn from my personal diaries, project journals, and process notes. Showing how I’ve found a path to doing something, often via experimentation, missteps, false trails and blind alleys, these posts do not offer definitive insights into any of the projects on The Landing Stage. They are just postcards from the ongoing journey.

Have a great day, be a positive force, and tell those you love that you love them.