Last fall I was blogging about the death of one of the musical icons of my youth, Ric Ocasek of the Cars, and now I must blog about the death of another, Eddie Van Halen, who died in October.
Eddie Van Halen was the main creative force in the band Van Halen. He is best known for his guitar playing, and in particular for bringing the technique of two-handed tapping to prominence within rock music.
It wasn’t Eddie’s guitar, though, that made me a fan of Van Halen. For on thing, I found his tone, on a purely sonic level, somewhat harsh and grating. (As I’ve gotten older I’ve found it less so, perhaps due to my ears losing sensitivity.) And, maybe more importantly, in my own attempts at playing the guitar, I lack anywhere near the level of skill to pull off the sort of trickery that he could do easily.
What really appealed to me about Eddie Van Halen’s music was his absolutely huge synthesizer sound, perhaps the “biggest” synth sound that anyone has ever produced. It was only employed on a handful of songs on a handful of albums in the Eighties. They’re not the Van Halen songs that it’s cool to like, but they’re the ones that influenced me.
Here is Van Halen’s biggest hit, and the first and perhaps best example of Eddie’s enormous synthesizer sound, just in case, for some bizarre reason, you’re not familiar with it.
