A FAREWELL TO THE KING
NEWS OF VAN Halen’s death shocked the guitar community, which is still mourning the loss of a man that many of us considered the most influential guitarist of our lifetime. It is certainly understandable to mourn Ed’s death, particularly since he passed earlier than most of us imagined he would, and his imagination and individual musical voice have now been silenced.
But while some are grieving his passing as the end of an era, the encouraging truth is that Ed’s numerous contributions to the guitar will live on for many more decades, and perhaps even centuries, well into the future. His life will endure as guitarists celebrate the many gifts Ed shared with the world that made our favored instrument better, more popular and enduringly cool.
The majority of Guitar World readers today are probably too young to remember what things were like before Edward Van Halen came along, but for many older guitarists — myself included — the release of Van Halen’s debut album on February 8, 1978, was as historic to my generation as the Beatles’ performance on The Ed Sullivan Show almost exactly 14 years earlier on February 9, 1964, was to the previous generation. I consider myself very fortunate that I got to witness Van Halen’s rise to fame as the band first gained exposure beyond the Los Angeles club scene, having heard “You Really Got Me” on Los Angeles radio station KMET when Warner Bros. rush-released the single about a month before the debut album hit record store shelves. The song’s unique sound — the brash, powerful guitar, massive drums, distinctive vocal harmonies and David Lee Roth’s wild screams — simply blew me away, but even that didn’t prepare me for what came soon after.
At 8 p.m. the day of the album’s release, San Diego radio station KGB (I lived in northern San Diego county so my radio picked up signals from both cities) played Van Halen in its entirety. I was mesmerized from the very first seconds of “Runnin’ with the Devil” as the cacophony of blasting car horns descended in pitch like a landing alien spacecraft, followed by a bass line that stomped like Godzilla crushing Tokyo, a dissonant metallic swipe of the strings between the guitar’s stop tailpiece and bridge (a sound I already recognized from my own wanderings beyond the fretboard) and the biggest rush of power chord fury I had ever heard.
Then came 102 seconds that changed my life forever — “Eruption.” I considered myself a connoisseur of the
