I was working on Tuesday afternoon when the news broke out of California that Eddie Van Halen had lost his protracted, valiant battle against cancer. He was just sixty-five.
Forty-plus years ago, his eponymously-named rock and roll band, in which he played lead guitar and which featured his brother Alex on the drums, Michael Anthony on the bass guitar, and a shy, retiring fellow named David Lee Roth as its lead singer, burst onto the music scene with a debut album that, to date, has sold more than ten million copies in the United States alone.
While my musical taste has always runs towards Springsteen or Petty or similar artists, and away from "hard rock" bands - including the endless parade of hair-band posers MTV foisted upon us in the 1980's - Van Halen is a band whose music I have always liked. I do not pretend to possess either a broad or particularly deep knowledge of their catalog but the songs of theirs that I know are ones that I enjoy quite a lot.
Eddie Van Halen's guitar work was - and is - the principal reason I listen to the band's music. Irrespective of whomever was fronting the group, which had a revolving door of lead singers in the three-plus decades since Diamond Dave's first exit in the latter half of the 1980's, he played his guitar with exuberance. Often times, when watching a true guitar virtuoso ply his or her craft, I am drawn to the very, very serious look on the guitarist's face. Not so with Eddie Van Halen. He bounced around on stage, smiling, laughing, and mugging for the crowd as if to say he was having as much damn fun doing what he was doing as they were having watching him do it.
Although I never met him, he broke my heart when I was still a kid when he swept Valerie Bertinelli off her feet and then, shortly thereafter, married her. Until I saw pictures in the newspaper of their wedding, fourteen-year-old me really thought I still had a shot with television's Barbara Cooper. Who knew that her taste ran to good-looking, rich, talented, guitar gods and not goofy-looking, phenobarbital-dependent epileptic eighth graders?
They separated about twenty years after they married and divorced in 2007. Their bond remained unbroken though, both in terms of together raising their one child, Wolfgang Van Halen (who played bass in Van Halen with his dad and Uncle Alex since 2006), and in terms of supporting one another. He got married again in 2009 and she, Valerie, attended. When she married for a second time in 2011, he attended her wedding. According to the reports I have read, when he died on Tuesday he was surrounded by those he loved and those who loved him most of all, whose number included Valerie Bertinelli.
Since I began running in earnest (a/k/a "slowly but on a regular basis, often times while crying") more than a decade ago, I have had several Van Halen songs loaded into my iPod. My all-time favorite Van Halen song is "Little Guitars". I smiled Wednesday morning when I stumbled across this video on You Tube of the band playing it at a show in Brazil at the end of its tour in support of the Diver Down album:
The chorus includes the lyric, "Catch as catch, catch as catch", which to someone unfamiliar with the song's words could readily be mistaken for "Etch-a-Sketch! Etch-a-Sketch!" Admittedly, I had never given thought to that possible faux pas until someone pointed out to me the other evening.
So, if you are in the State of Concrete Gardens at some point over the next few weeks and you see a gray-bearded, middle-aged fella running earnestly (referring you back to the paragraph above and the definition of "earnestly"), shouting the words "Etch-a-Sketch! Etch-a-Sketch!", and grinning madly, then feel free to laugh at me or, if you prefer, simply shake your head.
You'll not hurt my feelings.
Promise.
-AK
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