YOUNG EDDIE VAN HALEN HOW TO

Without the jazzy propellant of his brother Alex’s drumming without the crackling hallucination of personality projected by his lead singer, David Lee Roth without the stolid Michael Anthony on bass, and his ability to hit a dead-on angel-of-hedonism Beach Boys harmony-without, that is, the stunning machine that was Van Halen (the band) in its prime-who knows where Eddie might have gone, or who he might have been? Idle musings. Of course, he was magically fortunate in his co-creators. That’s how it feels to listen to Eddie Van Halen. But his most idiosyncratic zoomings arose, blissfully, playfully, from the void. Not that he lacked a tradition-Clapton, Page, Beck, blues licks, funk scratchings, he loved them all, and was a monastically disciplined apprentice. His noises, his phrases, came rainbowing out of an electric abyss: something out of nothing, creativity at its origin. With Eddie, the emptiness that preceded his genius was part of the point. Empty virtuosity: That’s a bad thing, right? Not with Eddie Van Halen. But if a huge discharge of “frictionless whiffery,” as the critic Joe Carducci called it, is part of his legacy, the purer part is beyond emulation, beyond parody. In its more sensational aspects-the finger-tapping, the pick slides-it became the template for ’80s hard-rock lead guitar. Van Halen happened it was meant to happen and Eddie was meant to be at the heart of it, with his happy face and his sci-fi chops and his gift for a massive pop hook.

YOUNG EDDIE VAN HALEN HOW TO

How to salute him? As a musical seeker, a restless innovator perpetually at the boundaries of the possible? As a writer of gorgeous, gas-guzzling hits? As the grinning incarnation of American party time? His truest eulogy has already been written by the thousand YouTubers who lovingly deconstruct his solos, note by note and effect by effect, simply to understand how they work. We’d lost Eddie Van Halen, and suddenly his sound-phased and flanged and volleyed into the ether with oodles of whammy bar-was everywhere. It happens like this with the greats: The current of life fails, and the artistic essence is globally dispersed, as if by an explosion. On the day of his death, an irregular cortege rolled in pieces across America, a scattered celebratory motorcade: maybe a pickup truck at a traffic light in Louisville, Kentucky, with the puffy, moon-landing chords of “Jump” coming out of the window maybe an electrician’s van changing lanes in Long Beach, California, while quaking to the shocks of “Unchained” maybe a Lexus in Boston, spewing the preposterous fluency of “Eruption” in its wake.

Young eddie van halen