Eddie Van Halen R.I.P.

[Jakeboy]

His passing has affected me harder than I thought. When I play, I am usually very animated and smiling..,cause it is so much damn fun. I always saw this in EVH...whereas Page & Perry were too cool to smile much, they gave me a lot of stage presence which I somehow picked up. But EVH played with apparent Energy and joy....that influenced me more.

I recorded a tapping EVH style intro as a tribute yesterday. It will be the intro to a song on one of AC Rev’s 2021 albums.

[devrock]

I think another reason this is hitting people so hard is that it’s the first of many to come in the next few years. The generation of musicians who CREATED the genres of hard rock and metal are all now entering their latter years. We already lost Ronnie and Lemmy, but neither had the impact of an EVH. Although I’d absolutely put Neal Peart on that same level. But, in my case anyway, I’m dreading losing my idols like Rob Halford and Glenn Tipton. So many of our memories go back, however far, to seeing these guys in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s FULL of life, bringing millions of people to their feet. And now...they’re old. I was fortunate to see Eddie play 3 or 4 times. I wasn’t the biggest VH fan, but still loved them. Was lucky to see him one last time at MSG in 2015. Hard to imagine him going from that on stage to being gone in 5 years. Awful. This year has sucked for so many reasons - and we still have 2+ months to go...

[Steve Haynie]

Glenn Tipton's health is known, so his death will not be as hard to take.  The loss of his creative input with Judas Priest will end an era. 

Angus Young has said that Malcolm is not playing (old recorded tracks) on the new AC/DC album, but he had input on the writing of the songs.  If another album comes after more years go by it will be a new AC/DC.  Brian Johnson is 73 now.  He might want to wind it down in the next five to ten years.  We'll see. 

[LucSulla]

Some of you will find this entertaining.  Others, pretentious.  I find Chuck Klosterman to be both at times, but in this case, I found myself laughing pretty hard at some of his song reviews here. 

https://www.vulture.com/article/best-van-halen-songs-chuck-klosterman.html

Quote

97. “Black and Blue,” OU812 (1988)
In 1990, New Hampshire high school employee Pamela Smart used this plodding OU812 track to sexually seduce a 15-year-old male student, later convincing the teen to murder her husband. That sentence is not a music review, but it tells you almost everything you need to know.

Either way, he somehow nailed the expected ending with what I thought was a really unexpectedly profound explanation. 

Quote

1. “Eruption,” Van Halen (1978)
There are those who don’t even consider this a song. It wasn’t intended for the album, Eddie still insists it includes a mistake, and there are now eighth-graders on YouTube who can replicate every note. But “Eruption” is the distilled essence of Van Halen, the vortex of their ethos, and the sonic justification for jettisoning every lead singer who starts to seem halfway annoying. The first 45 seconds are impressive, but not transcendent (there are, in fact, certain similarities to the opening of the 1970 Cactus song “Let Me Swim”). The music fades out, and any cogent first-time listener would find themselves thinking, “Well, I guess that was it. I guess that was okay.” But suddenly he’s back, and now he’s attacking the instrument the way piranhas skeletonize a water buffalo, and then he does that thing that he always does and your living room speakers transmogrify into the P-Funk Mothership and ascend through the roof and into the troposphere. It ends with the Doppler effect, except you haven’t moved and neither has he. This is, by the widest possible margin, the most important freestanding guitar solo of all time. And I realize that if you hate Van Halen, this is precisely what you hate. You hate the sensation of having your brain trapped in a beehive, you hate the distance between the proficiency of the artist and the potentiality of his audience, and you hate that this guy just invented the 1980s. But if you love Van Halen, this is what you love, and you can listen to it a thousand times without diminishing returns. The experience does not evolve. You will always be inside that guitar.

 

[RobB]

1 hour ago, LucSulla said:

1. “Eruption,” Van Halen (1978)
There are those who don’t even consider this a song. It wasn’t intended for the album, Eddie still insists it includes a mistake, and there are now eighth-graders on YouTube who can replicate every note. But “Eruption” is the distilled essence of Van Halen, the vortex of their ethos, and the sonic justification for jettisoning every lead singer who starts to seem halfway annoying. The first 45 seconds are impressive, but not transcendent (there are, in fact, certain similarities to the opening of the 1970 Cactus song “Let Me Swim”). The music fades out, and any cogent first-time listener would find themselves thinking, “Well, I guess that was it. I guess that was okay.” But suddenly he’s back, and now he’s attacking the instrument the way piranhas skeletonize a water buffalo, and then he does that thing that he always does and your living room speakers transmogrify into the P-Funk Mothership and ascend through the roof and into the troposphere. It ends with the Doppler effect, except you haven’t moved and neither has he. This is, by the widest possible margin, the most important freestanding guitar solo of all time. And I realize that if you hate Van Halen, this is precisely what you hate. You hate the sensation of having your brain trapped in a beehive, you hate the distance between the proficiency of the artist and the potentiality of his audience, and you hate that this guy just invented the 1980s. But if you love Van Halen, this is what you love, and you can listen to it a thousand times without diminishing returns. The experience does not evolve. You will always be inside that guitar.

A little verbose, but, yeah. I curtainly cant rite that gud.

[devrock]

On 10/27/2020 at 8:46 AM, Steve Haynie said:

Glenn Tipton's health is known, so his death will not be as hard to take.  The loss of his creative input with Judas Priest will end an era. 

Angus Young has said that Malcolm is not playing (old recorded tracks) on the new AC/DC album, but he had input on the writing of the songs.  If another album comes after more years go by it will be a new AC/DC.  Brian Johnson is 73 now.  He might want to wind it down in the next five to ten years.  We'll see. 

Known or not, I’m going to be crushed when his time comes. To me, he’s THE guitar god. I started playing at 10 because of him.