![]() ![]() Other tracks on the debut now read like a Van Halen greatest-hits package: “Runnin’ With the Devil,” “Eruption,” “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” “Jamie’s Cryin.’” The guitarist latched onto the original riff and sent his fingers dancing over the fretboard. The band’s first single was “You Really Got Me,” a snarling cover of the Kinks’ early proto-metal hit. The guitarist was 22 when his band recorded its debut album, “Van Halen,” released Feb. Templeman told Rolling Stone years later: “There were like 11 people in the audience, and they were playing like they were at the Forum.” Records after label President Mo Ostin and producer Ted Templeman watched a performance at the Starwood on a rainy Monday night. Kiss management didn’t get behind Simmons’ discovery, so the bassist let them out of their contract. Simmons signed them to a contract and produced a 15-song demo recording at Electric Lady Studios in New York. They simply didn’t sound like anybody else. “Even though the band was a three-piece, there was a big sound coming out of them, and Eddie was tapping the neck - which I’d never seen done on guitar before - with speed and accuracy in the melody. “This band comes on, and all of a sudden, I forget about everybody around me. One night in 1976 at the Starwood nightclub in West Hollywood, Kiss singer-bassist Gene Simmons happened to catch the unknown band, with its grinning guitar phenom at stage left. Even more exciting were the band’s original tunes, which were explosive but melodic. Sammy Hagar, Gene Simmons, Lenny Kravitz and Kenny Chesney are among the musicians paying tribute to Eddie Van Halen, who died Tuesday at age 65.Ī typical 1975 live set in Pasadena might have included covers of songs by the Rolling Stones, Robin Trower, Bad Company and David Bowie, each stretched out in strange new ways on Van Halen’s hot-rod guitar. Music Eddie Van Halen remembered as ‘the Mozart of rock guitar’ “I realize I don’t sound like him,” Van Halen told Guitar Player magazine in 1978, “but I know every solo he’s ever played, note for note.” guitar hero Eric Clapton, in particular his years in the super-heavy blues-rock trio Cream. In later years, he claimed to rarely listen to contemporary music other than his own but acknowledged the lasting influence of U.K. Eddie bought a drum kit with money from a newspaper route but soon switched to guitar, beginning with a low-budget beginners’ model: a Sears Teisco Del Rey six-string.Īn early rock inspiration was the Dave Clark Five, British Invasion hit makers from the mid-1960s, and Van Halen learned as a teen to play along to favorite records by slowing down the turntable. kept him on the road for weeks at a time.Īs elementary school kids with uncertain English, the Van Halen brothers performed during assemblies and lunch in a band they called the Broken Combs. Later, Jan’s rekindled music career in the U.S. Van Halen’s mother, Eugenia, initially worked as a maid, while his father washed dishes and worked as a janitor, playing live gigs on weekends. ![]() Settling in Pasadena, the foursome shared a single room in a house with two other families. Until Roth’s exit at the peak of the original band’s popularity in 1985, the duo epitomized the eternal struggle between guitar hero and lead singer, each fueled on hyperkinetic energy, if not always in sync. If older brother Alex was his closest musical partner throughout Eddie Van Halen’s life, in Roth he found a key collaborator and sometime nemesis, who brought a showbiz flourish to the guitarist’s virtuosic, mad-scientist metal. “While they’re going to 11,” Van Halen joked during a 2015 appearance at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., “I was already going to 15.”Īs a band, Van Halen made other contributions to the era’s resplendent rock-star lore: demanding that no brown M&M’s appear anywhere backstage drummer Alex Van Halen crescendoing at concerts with a flaming gong singer David Lee Roth high-kicking in leather chaps with a bare backside. ![]() The idea was to stretch out and get loud, he once said, as he referenced the fictional metal act Spinal Tap, whose members bragged on camera that their amplifiers went all the way to 11. ![]()
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