“Tear to my eyes”: Eddie Van Halen’s greatest on-stage moment
Van Halen were less a band and more the 1980s themselves personified. They were an exercise in taking the thunderous hard rock of the 1970s and making it bigger. Not better because all their idols made pretty undisputably better work. Not even louder, as Eddie Van Halen and his band were a commercial concern from day one. Just… bigger. The ‘70s had riffs? Make them bigger. Then ‘70s had big personalities? You know what they did. The ‘70s had solos? Sweet, merciful Christ did Van Halen make them bigger.
Even the most die-hard Van Halen obsessive will tell you that there’s something a little obnoxious about it all, that was basically the point. It wouldn’t be the 1980s made flesh if it wasn’t. Its saving grace was just how undeniable the whole thing was. The songs rocked hard. David Lee Roth was just that charismatic. Above all though, Eddie Van Halen was absolutely that good at guitar.
There’s an argument to be made that every virtuoso guitar player since Eddie has just been playing catch up to the impact ‘Eruption’ made when he first started playing it live. Decades later, they’re still acres behind. It’s fitting that he did it with his back to the audience too. How Eddie did what he did on guitar was as important to his act as a trick to a magician. If anyone else learned how to do it, they wouldn’t need to go to him.
All this led to the cult of personality that followed Eddie Van Halen his entire life. From the moment he arrived on the scene, he was being talked about as the second coming of Jimi Hendrix. If you’re wondering how any musician in the world would cope with being hyped up like that, you’ll have to just keep wondering, unfortunately. When Eddie was asked about this in an interview with Forbes in 2020, he expertly dodged the question and instead talked about the way he keeps a Stratocaster in tune while playing live.
Perhaps that says more about the man himself than he knows. After all, what better way of dealing with hype than by blocking every mention of it out and focusing on the minute details of your craft? You don’t play like that without being obsessive about it, after all. There is a moment when we see the man shine through but not the guitarist. It comes when the interviewer asks about a then-recent gig in Philadelphia, where the gig closed out with the audience chanting the virtuoso’s name.
Eddie said, “It brought tears to my eyes. It makes me feel kind of weird, but obviously, the man upstairs gave me something, and it touches people, and I’m just so blessed. And now I got my son in the band, and it makes it even more…Alex, Wolfie, and I, it’s a family thing. And by the end of the tour, Wolfie was just incredible. For a 16-year-old to get up there and play in front of these people, and he pulled it off very, very good.”
By this point, the band’s bassist was Eddie’s son Wolfgang, and there, the true nature of this band breaks through. Sure, the scale, excess, and wee-widdly-woo guitar solos are part of it. However, the reason the band is called Van Halen is not just for its guitarist. Eddie’s older brother Alex was the drummer the whole time. Eddie saw the group as a family affair, and more than any individual praise, that seemed to be the most important thing to him.
