Eddie Van Halen: $50, a piano and a new way to play guitar | Ultimate Guitarist Reunion

Why fans still care

EDDIE VAN HALEN, in the Rock Hall’s words, “forever changed the vocabulary of the electric guitar”. Two Van Halen albums, the 1978 debut and 1984, have each been certified Diamond in the US. That’s 10 million copies apiece.

Ask a rock guitarist how they started and Eruption comes up again and again. The music writer Katherine Turman told NPR that most guitarists she asks name it. In 2008 Rolling Stone put it at number 6 in its 100 greatest guitar songs, with Panama at 47 and his solo on Michael Jackson’s Beat It at 81.

Early life

Edward Lodewijk Van Halen was born in Amsterdam on 26 January 1955. His father Jan played jazz saxophone and clarinet in the Dutch Air Force band, and his mother Eugenia was an amateur pianist. The family moved to Nijmegen, where Eddie and his older brother Alex shared a bedroom, and his mother bought a piano she could barely afford. Eddie had classical lessons and did well at them, though he never learned to read music.

In 1962 the family crossed to America by boat, nine days at sea, and settled near Pasadena. They arrived, he said, “with approximately $50 and a piano”. He didn’t speak English and was bullied at school. “My first friends in America were Black,” he said later.

He took up the guitar after listening closely to Eric Clapton, Who’s Who number 3. With Alex on drums, the brothers’ first trio played Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Cream songs note for note.

Career chapters

1. 1962Family moves from the Netherlands to California
2. 1971Sees Led Zeppelin at the Forum, the show he later said gave him the idea for tapping
3. 1974David Lee Roth joins; the band becomes the house band at Gazzarri’s
4. 1977Warner Bros signs Van Halen after a Starwood show
5. 1978Van Halen, with Eruption, and a tour opening for Black Sabbath
6. 1982Guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s Beat It
7. 1983Kramer endorsement and the 5150 guitar
8. 1984Jump, the band’s only US number 1 single
9. 1985Sammy Hagar joins
10. 19865150, the band’s first number 1 album
11. 1992Grammy for For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge
12. 2007Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the first EVH guitar with Fender
13. 2012A Different Kind of Truth

Mammoth to Warner Bros 1972 to 1977

The brothers’ band was first called Genesis. When they found out an English band already had the name, they became Mammoth. In 1974 they took on David Lee Roth, a singer from a rival Pasadena band, and from April that year they were the house band at Gazzarri’s on the Sunset Strip.

By then Eddie’s playing was the talk of the Los Angeles clubs. On 2 February 1977 the Warner Bros producer Ted Templeman watched them at the Starwood. He came back the next night with the company’s chairman, Mo Ostin, and Warner signed them.

Eruption and the debut 1978

The band recorded the debut at Sunset Sound in Hollywood with Templeman producing. Eruption wasn’t on their list of songs. The story comes from Templeman’s side of the glass: he says he heard Eddie running through a piece between takes and asked what it was. “It’s just something I warm up on,” Eddie told him, as Louder tells it. “We gotta record it,” Templeman replied, and the 102 seconds went on the record.

The album also carried Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love, which Eddie wrote as a send-up of punk rock, and a cover of the Kinks’ You Really Got Me. It came out in 1978 and the RIAA certified it Diamond in 1996.

The Black Sabbath tour 1978

Van Halen opened for Black Sabbath on the 1978 tour, starting at Sheffield City Hall on 16 May. Nobody in Sabbath knew the name, so Ozzy Osbourne, Who’s Who number 29 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon), Tony Iommi, Who’s Who number 23, Geezer Butler, Who’s Who number 26 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) and Bill Ward went side of stage to see the end of the opening set.

They walked in on Eruption. Ozzy Osbourne, Who’s Who number 29 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) recalled that when it finished, they “were just too stunned to speak”. Tony Iommi, Who’s Who number 23 put it more simply: “it was like, ’Bloody hell!’”

When the tour reached London, Tony Iommi, Who’s Who number 23 took his friend Brian May, Who’s Who number 20 to watch from the side of the stage at the Hammersmith Odeon. “There hadn’t been anything so shocking since Hendrix,” Brian May, Who’s Who number 20 said.

Beat It 1982

In 1982 Quincy Jones rang and asked him to play on Michael Jackson’s Beat It. Eddie brushed off the first call, and the band had a rule against sessions, but he said yes. When he got there he asked, “Can I change some parts?” He reworked the section and improvised two solos.

Jump and 1984 1983 to 1985

In 1983 Van Halen headlined the heavy metal day of the US Festival for $1.5 million. Louder reports that the fee went into the Guinness Book of Records as the highest ever paid for a single show. Jump went to number 1 in the US on 25 February 1984 and stayed there five weeks. It reached number 7 in the UK.

The album 1984 spent five weeks at number 2 in the US and became the band’s second Diamond album. David Lee Roth left the band on 1 April 1985.

The Hagar years 1985 to 1996

Sammy Hagar came in on vocals in 1985, and 5150 (1986) was the band’s first number 1 album. Why Can’t This Be Love from it reached number 3 in the US. For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance With Vocal in 1992. Gary Cherone sang on Van Halen III later in the decade.

Illness and the last record 2000 to 2020

He was treated for tongue cancer from 2000, losing about a third of his tongue, and was declared cancer-free in 2002. He wondered whether the metal picks he held in his mouth were to blame, but called it “just my own theory”.

Roth came back in 2007, the year Van Halen went into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and A Different Kind of Truth followed in 2012. Eddie Van Halen died on 6 October 2020, aged 65. His son Wolfgang shared the news.

Tapping: where it came from and what it did

The idea

Eddie always said the spark came from Jimmy Page, Who’s Who number 32. In his telling, he and Alex went to every show they could at the Forum in Inglewood, and in 1971 he watched Jimmy Page, Who’s Who number 32 play the Heartbreaker solo with one hand raised in the air.

His thought was to use a finger of his picking hand as a moving nut. At a 2015 Smithsonian talk he put it simply: “I just moved the nut.” He told Guitar World’s Steven Rosen it was “like having a sixth finger on your left hand.”

Not the first, and he said so

He never claimed to have invented tapping. “I never claimed that I did,” he said at the Smithsonian. What he did claim was that he hadn’t heard anyone build whole pieces of music out of it.

Brian May, Who’s Who number 20 had tapped a passage on Queen’s It’s Late in 1977. He has said Eddie told him “Yeah, I copped that.” Brian May, Who’s Who number 20 learned the trick from a guitarist in Texas, who said he’d picked it up from Billy Gibbons, Who’s Who number 5.

Joe Satriani, Who’s Who number 29 was already tapping too, after seeing Wishbone Ash on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert on television. Then he heard Eruption on the radio. “Oh my god. I’m in the presence of greatness,” he remembered thinking.

How it sounded to other players

Kirk Hammett, Who’s Who number 10 bought the first album with his friend John Marshall, and the two of them couldn’t work out what they were hearing. He learned chord and string muting from Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love, and later saw the band at Day on the Green in Oakland.

Slash, Who’s Who number 43 was 13 and hadn’t picked up a guitar yet when his friend Steven Adler played him Eruption into You Really Got Me on a little Panasonic cassette player. Slash, Who’s Who number 43 said later that the record “signalled the end of rock as we knew it.”

Zakk Wylde, Who’s Who number 27 ranks him straight after Jimi Hendrix, Who’s Who number 6. In his words, “Eddie was Jesus Christ, the Second Coming.”

Steve Vai, Who’s Who number 30 met him at an Allan Holdsworth gig and took him to Frank Zappa’s house. His verdict on trying to match him: “Only an idiot competes with Eddie Van Halen.”

Craft, sound and style

The Frankenstein

“I hate store-bought, off-the-rack guitars,” he told Guitar Player in 1978. So he built his own.

The body and neck were Strat-style parts, most likely Charvel, from Boogie Bodies. He bought the body for $50 and the neck for $80, by his 1978 account. At the bridge he fitted a PAF humbucker taken out of his Gibson ES-335, mounted on a slant, in an enlarged cavity. There were no pickups towards the neck, just a Strat vibrato, jumbo Gibson frets and a single volume knob. “There is only one volume knob,” he told Guitar Player.

That one guitar put a Gibson-style humbucker on a Fender-style body and vibrato. Guitar.com credits his search for a better guitar with changing the guitar industry.

The debut wasn’t all Frankenstein, though. Guitar.com says about half of it, You Really Got Me included, was played on a 1970s Ibanez Destroyer.

The stripes

He sprayed the Frankenstein in acrylic bicycle paint over masking tape, black and white first, and the stripes became the way people pictured him. From 1983 he played Kramer, and the Kramer 5150 carried red, white and black stripes on a Pacer Special body. Guitar.com credits his deal with helping make Kramer the best-selling electric guitar brand in the US in the mid-1980s, and Kramer’s own history says it outsold Fender and Gibson in 1985 and 1986.

By 2006 the original had been retired after more than 30 years. Fender’s Chip Ellis copied every detail for Frank 2, which Eddie played on most of the 2007 to 2008 tour with Roth. Frank 2 went to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2011. The first guitar under the EVH name with Fender, in 2007, was a Frankenstein remake.

Later guitars

The Music Man EVH of 1991, designed with Dudley Gimpel from his sketches, had custom DiMarzio pickups and was his first twin-pickup guitar. The Peavey Wolfgang followed in 1996, with a D-Tuner for dropping the low E. He left Peavey in 2004 and launched EVH with Fender in 2007.

He’d been changing guitars long before the endorsements. When Jas Obrecht interviewed him in January 1980, he already had a newer guitar with an extra-thick Boogie Bodies body and a Floyd Rose vibrato. In the mid-1980s he endorsed Ernie Ball strings, Guitar.com says.

The brown sound

Fans call his tone the brown sound. Marshall describes it as smooth distortion, most of it from the amp. On the first six records that amp was a 1967 or 1968 Marshall Super Lead, close to stock. Guitar.com names it as a JTM100 Plexi head, and a 1978 interview has him with three 100-watt heads: a Music Man and a Laney as well as the Marshall. Guitar.com adds an MXR Phase 90, an MXR flanger, an MXR six-band EQ and an Echoplex, with a Univox echo in the mix.

The Variac is where his own stories differ. In 1978 he told Guitar Player he turned the voltage up, to 130 or 140 volts. Later, speaking to the Smithsonian, he said he turned it down, to about 60 volts in small bars and around 89 for recording. Guitar.com reads the 1978 version as deliberate misdirection. It also reports that his tech, Jose Arredondo, modified the amps.

He always said the sound was in his hands. “The way I play is in my fingers,” he told Jas Obrecht in 1980. “I can play through any amp and it still sounds like me.” Early on he couldn’t afford a wah or a fuzz pedal, so he found sounds with his fingers instead, he said at his 2015 Smithsonian talk, which NPR later replayed.

Steve Vai, Who’s Who number 30 saw it first hand when Eddie picked up his rig. “It had that ’brown sound’,” Steve Vai, Who’s Who number 30 said.

His signature amps followed: the Peavey 5150 in 1992 and the EVH 5150 III with Fender in 2007.

Practice and patents

“I never really sit down and really practice,” he said in 1978. He was handy away from the fretboard too. In 1987 he was granted US patent 4,656,917 for a musical instrument support, filed under the name Edward L. Van Halen.

Stories people still tell

1. Back to the crowd.

   For about three years in the Hollywood clubs he often played his solo piece with his back to the audience, so nobody could see what his hands were doing.

2. The American dream.

   Arriving with $50 and a piano and ending up in the Rock Hall: “if that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is,” he said.

Legacy

When he died in October 2020 the tributes came from across rock. Angus Young, Who’s Who number 35 called his playing “pure wizardry”. Tom Morello, Who’s Who number 22 called him “truly visionary”. Nikki Sixx, Who’s Who number 19 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) wrote, “You were the Mozart of rock guitar.” Geezer Butler, Who’s Who number 26 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) called him “a true gent and true genius.”

The Rock Hall calls Les Paul, Who’s Who number 38 his hero, and Eddie called him “a pioneer, an innovator and a dear friend”. In 2025 Joe Satriani, Who’s Who number 29 released Encore, Thank You, Goodnight as a tribute to him, with Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony. And in February 2026 Alex Van Halen said he and Steve Lukather were finishing songs meant for the next Van Halen album, with Eddie’s guitar and Wolfgang’s bass already recorded.