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I think I heard "jump" and thought no not for me.
Couldn't tell you anything about him but he must have been doing something right.
Someone bought me a magazine (think it was a Guitar World special issue) which was all Van Halen stories, photos, album reviews and a few tabs. I gave up trying to play Eruption almost immediately but reread every article over and over so could probably recite the track listings for all the albums at that time without even hearing them.
When I finally got a job I went to Oxford Street and bought every single Van Halen album available on vinyl with my first weekly pay packet and it was a great weekend - my parents were away and I remember 'testing' my Dads new rack hifi by blaring out VH1 so loud that my neighbour (a very calm , rational senior copper) properly lost his sh1t and came round screaming and hammering on the front door.
I think one word to some up his music (certainly the DLR stuff) was 'joyous', Fair Warning was dark but as a guitar nut you stll break into a massive grin when those riffs kick in
Oddly enough although VH were never that heavy compared to modern metal I don't I've ever heard anyone else sound so aggressive in their playing, some of those harmonics and vibrato were just so wild and fat sounding.
Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
Tributes are times for memories - i don’t have any of rock, historical importance, just personal and and a bit of hearsay.
First got into Van Halen from a friend at high school - Women and Children first album era. The jade green and silver cover with the four of them in arch-bending rock poses...what an image, it just oozed rawwwk !
The John Menzies, next to the old bus station in town, upstairs, was selling the Women and Children album and they had the posed cover in a four-foot cardboard cut-out display.
After a few weeks of advertising the next big album was pushed forward and the cut-out was for the bin. Said friend snaffled it....jealous as fcuk !
I even bought a ‘frankenstein’ strat off of The Bay - it looked the spit of Eddie’s. The guitar was up for sale in Rhythm House (Hanley) for quite a while when i was selling my own guitars due to attendant illness at the time. It eventually sold via my mate, Pat. I would love it back but, whoever has it, no worries...just enjoy it !
I also remember hearing of the time Eddie was in Stoke and running around with a guitar shop owner trying to buy old MXR (?) pedals from folk that the owner knew had some.
So, anyway, back to that album - rocking (have you seen junior’s grades), sassy (no, no, a little more to the right), funny, eclectic mix of songs...Alex’s power drums, MA’s pinging bass, DLR’s showmanship and, of course, Eddie’s searing lead lines and rhythm power chords.
Could this be magic ?
It certainly was, Edward...it most certainly was !
Few years later Eddie meets Slash somewhere and mentions that they've both recorded with MJ. Eddie asks what Michael said to him:
' thank you Slash, I really like the high bits.'
The point, in some ways, about that solo is that black artists weren't getting played on MTV ( first rap artists on MTV? Blondie) and by creating a song with a rock solo MJ could get on there. But is a flown in solo that then becomes hard to imagine the song without.
I've been listening to a few Van Halen things this week ( I'm not at home and don't have internet access every day so it's a bit limited) and I think Eddie as a guitarist and the band as a whole were just much more experimental than people imagine. I think it's Dirty Movies which has this sort of Avant Garde noise guitar before the riff starts ( and has a spoken word part which seems like sexist nonsense but flips it around at the end, surprisingly smart). And the harmonics at the start of Top Jimmy are such a delicate sound. Just the tip of the iceberg of what he/ they did really.
Such a big loss to the guitar world, 65 is so young too.