The injury that turned Eddie Van Halen into a guitar legend: “Fuck this”
There’s one thing that every guitarist needs to become great. Well, actually, there are several. Understanding parents, unyielding self-belief and, y’know, a guitar to name but a few.
However, most of all, they just need time. Excellent guitar skills don’t just appear overnight no matter how talented or smart someone is. No matter if they’re Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, or anyone else, it may not seem like each of them spent their 10,000 hours indoors trying to get their scales right…but they almost certainly have.
It sort of goes against every stereotype there is about the guitarist, doesn’t it? Discipline and hard work are anathema to rock stars of every level, but it’s true. To get their level of skill, you do need to shut yourself indoors for a long time, playing along to your favourite record until you basically can’t play it incorrectly anymore. The trouble is that there aren’t a lot of folks with that kind of temperament when they’re young. Especially those taken in by the glamour and counterculture mystique of rock ‘n’ roll.
So, quite often, something has to give. In a quite surprising number of cases, it’s their own bodies. There are numerous cases of rock stars turning to their weapon of choice due to the boredom of being bedridden with a serious injury. Kate Nash didn’t start writing songs until she was bedridden for several months with a broken foot. Julio Iglesias was a goalkeeper for Real Madrid’s youth team (of all things) before a horrific car accident left him within an inch of death. After being taught guitar as part of his rehabilitation process, he discovered his musical talent.
Obviously, the overlord of all this is Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath. It’s a technicality, as when his fingers were badly injured after a terrible accident at the sheet metal factory he worked at, he was already a professional guitarist. However, the adjustments he made to his playing style to accommodate his disability created heavy metal guitar playing as we knew it. The next step in heavy metal guitar playing wouldn’t come along until a different young man injured his hands, but in a much, much less impressive way.
How did an injury turn Eddie Van Halen towards music?
There’s no shortage of famous people who could have become professional athletes were it not for career-ending injuries. Matt Smith, Gordon Ramsey and Olly Murs were all highly rated footballers before their bodies (more specifically, their knees) gave out on them. The story of Eddie Van Halen isn’t that tragic. With each of those people I’ve previously mentioned, their athletic dreams were the whole focus of their lives cruelly taken away from them by the hands of fate.
With Eddie Van, it sounds a touch more… petulant. Start as you mean to go on, I guess.
In an interview conducted in 1989 and unearthed by The Tapes Archive, Eddie is asked what he would have done if he had never picked up a guitar, to which he responds, “Well, I was too small to play football!”
He goes on to say, “I used to love playing football. In junior high, I was on the football team and I sprained my thumb after a scrimmage game and I said, ‘Fuck this’. And I started playing.” It’s not exactly an ACL tear but still, pretty metal that the first thing Eddie Van Halen did after spraining his thumb was take up the guitar.
A reminder, if one was ever needed, that no matter what life throws at you, we can never be certain what it has in store for us. However low we’re feeling, however stuck we may feel, we can always change our lives for the better.
