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Limp Bizkit jam story my favorite...this, this is perfect. And while I never graced his rock presence, I was friends with Grohl, grew up with him...he was not legendary back then lol
Virtuoso. Visionary. Revolutionary. Tinkerer. Inventor. Sonic assassin. Showman. Hit maker. Off-the-boat-Immigrant, the American Dream made flesh. It's impossible to sum up this man's contributions to music in a stupid post like this but I'm gonna try.
First, and this can't be stated enough - there was simply nobody like Edward Van Halen before he arrived. Easy to forget when you think of the droves of followers who made cliches out of his inventions. But make no mistake, Ed was numero uno.
His band were wildly popular and they made loud party music, so the critics were never going to get behind them. But Van Halen's work deserves to be studied and analysed, poked, prodded and puzzled over for another century at least. And Eddie was the engine of it all.
He made it look easy - the ever-present grin, the casual onstage acrobatics. Behind all that was an all-consuming devotion and discipline. Countless hours not just practicing his instrument, but trying to reimagine the instrument itself: tinkering with gear, mad-scientist-style, tearing things apart, blowing shit up, forcing conventional equipment to submit to his will. He needed the perfect tonal delivery system for his entirely new six-string language and he attained it. Boy, did he ever.
Even guitarists occasionally forget the primacy of EVH. The decades after his official bomb-dropping arrival in 1978 have been strewn with fretboard wizards who, standing in his impossibly long shadow, absorbed his tricks, his tone, his innovations. Some played them faster, added new techniques, broke the land speed record. Some of them were innovative in their own right. But without Edward's blueprint, they just wouldn't have existed. In electric guitar history, there is pre-Eddie and post-Eddie.
And those packed arenas? They were packed because the man could write SONGS. Songs that appealed to people who aren't guitarists. Van Halen music is irrepressible, reckless, dazzling, drunken, daredevil shit with melodies you hum all the way home. There is a white-knuckle vitality to the music that grabs you by the lapels and forces you to deal. Ed's virtuosity was just a way to throw some extra adrenaline into the party - a party to which EVERYONE was invited.
EVH's influence on me goes without saying. If you play electric guitar, it's inevitable. But he's so much more than a guitar god - the albums, the songs, the crackling incandescent energy of the music are the likes of which you only get to witness once per lifetime. I'm grateful to have had Van Halen in my formative years. Thank you, Ed.
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