EDDIE VAN HALEN January 26, 1955 - October 6, 2020
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On October 6, the world grew shockingly quieter when guitar revolutionary and visionary Edward Lodewijk Van Halen finally surrendered to a devastating decades-long battle with throat cancer at the far too young age of 65. He was surrounded by his wife Janie, son Wolfgang, brother Alex and ex-wife Valerie Bertinelli upon his passing at St. Johns Hospital in Santa Monica, California.
Over the course of an extraordinary career that spanned 42 years and a dozen albums, the Dutch-born guitarist created an entirely new lexicon for the electric guitar player, a crazy ABC of never-heardbefore techniques, tones and harmonic templates. On February 10, 1978, when the first album bearing his name was released, all these elements were unleashed in a pulverising sonic blitz in which he rewrote the language of the guitar. Guitarists around the world realised they’d just heard the death knell for everything they ever knew. From that day forward, guitar playing – and rock’n’roll itself – would never be the same.
‘Over the course of an extraordinary career, Edward Van Halen rewrote the language of guitar playing.’
But that seminal day might have never happened, because the boy who would become King Edward and reinvent the guitar for the next generation began his musical upbringing not as a guitar player but as a reluctant classical pianist.
Shortly after his birth on January 26, 1955 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the Van Halen family moved 55 miles away to Nijmegen, where Eddie and older brother Alex shared a bedroom in a small house. At the insistence of his mother Eugenia Van Beers, who was an amateur piano player, Eddie was made to endure classical piano training. Alex had already been doing battle with the ivories, and to support the budding musical careers of her two sons Eugenia scraped together a few guilders and bought them a Rippen upright piano.
“She could barely afford it,” Alex said, years later. Money was tight, even though Jan Van Halen, the family patriarch, was a first-chair jazz saxophone and clarinet player in the Dutch Air Force, making records and playing at some of the most prestigious
