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R.I.P.
Oct 6, 2020 19:46:29 GMT
Post by kds on Oct 6, 2020 19:46:29 GMT
Wow. I don't know what to say.
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R.I.P.
Oct 6, 2020 20:08:05 GMT
Post by Kapitan on Oct 6, 2020 20:08:05 GMT
Well there had been news that his health may be be failing in recent months (and years, even). I guess it was. Horrible news. One of the greatest, most influential guitarists in the history of popular music. In the rock vein, he's up there with Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix as true innovators who spawned entire genres.
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Post by Sheriff John Stone on Oct 6, 2020 22:33:45 GMT
I'm not the biggest Van Halen fan; there's a handful of their songs that I really like - "Runnin' With The Devil", "You Really Got Me", "Panama", "Dance The Night Away", and "Hot For Teacher". Would any VH fans like to share what Van Halen's music and Eddie's guitar playing meant to them?
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Post by Kapitan on Oct 6, 2020 23:32:25 GMT
I'm not the biggest Van Halen fan; there's a handful of their songs that I really like - "Runnin' With The Devil", "You Really Got Me", "Panama", "Dance The Night Away", and "Hot For Teacher". Would any VH fans like to share what Van Halen's music and Eddie's guitar playing meant to them? He was the first guitar hero for me, literally. The term itself, the idea, was him. My parents were a little too old for Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Jimmy Page, so I didn't have that music lying around. Their music was more late 50s to early 60s stuff, and what "new" music they enjoyed in their early married years (late 60s and into the 70s) was more easy listening, folk, and country oriented: Linda Ronstadt, John Denver, the Oak Ridge Boys, and so on.
Van Halen began before my time, obviously, with their debut coming out when I was two years old. But 1984 appeared around the first time we had MTV--I think as part of one of those 30- or 90-day free trials--and so I saw those hits. Or when we'd go to my grandma's (who had MTV ... funny for the grandma to have it, but us not), I'd see it there. I knew about guitars because my dad played, a few friends of his played. But what I saw Eddie Van Halen do had very little to do with what I understood about guitars. My dad had an old Martin dreadnought acoustic guitar; EVH had ... a spaceship?
By late elementary school, I started doing Top 10 lists. (Some things never change...) Granted, I had no particular knowledge or ability that qualified me for such lists, but that said, EVH topped every guitarist list I made. Even as I got into junior high, high school, it was just obvious. Of course Eddie was the best. It was like talking about shooting guards in the NBA. We can talk about Clyde Drexler, about Ray Allen, about Ricky Pierce, Alvin Robertson, Reggie Miller, Byron Scott or whoever was around at the time; Michael Jordan is a given, and there was no reason to even question that. That was Eddie Van Halen.
My first guitar was a "Hondo II" strat-style with a weird pickup configuration and a series of odd switches, but it was a black body with silver electrician's tape applied in an EVH style. I didn't do it--the previous owner of this $80 gem did--but I also didn't remove the tape for a while...
That would have been around 1988. I tried to learn Van Halen music, and that made me love Eddie even more. I worked my ass off to learn "Eruption," and I could more or less play it by high school. But I couldn't REALLY play it. It's one thing to work through it without screwing up; it's another to speak that music. Further, his sound. "The brown sound," they called it. I remember a Guitar For the Practicing Musician issue that explained how to get it. I forget the details, it was like turning up the mids, applying some light flanging or chorus, a saturated distortion sound. I fiddled. Man, did I fiddle! I had a half-dozen pedals, a couple of amps, I did what I could. But I didn't sound like Eddie. Nobody sounded like Eddie.
He's my favorite Dutchman! (No offense to Rik Smits; I don't know whether I'd call our very own jk a Dutchman since he's from the UK, if I'm not mistaken.)
His rhythm playing is a whole other universe of brilliance. He boogied. He rawk-riffed. He was such an interesting player in every aspect.
It's a shame how little we got from Eddie, in one sense. But in another, it's undeniable how much we got from him.
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R.I.P.
Oct 7, 2020 0:57:04 GMT
Post by Sheriff John Stone on Oct 7, 2020 0:57:04 GMT
Joe Satriani remembers Eddie Van Halen:
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R.I.P.
Oct 7, 2020 12:06:35 GMT
Post by kds on Oct 7, 2020 12:06:35 GMT
I was driving on Saturday with my wife and son this past Saturday, and Runnin' With the Devil came on the radio. I commented that we hadn't really had any updates on Eddie in awhile, and that I hoped he'd beat cancer, and take the mighty Van Halen on the road again once concerts are a thing again.
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R.I.P.
Oct 7, 2020 12:09:23 GMT
Post by kds on Oct 7, 2020 12:09:23 GMT
I'm not the biggest Van Halen fan; there's a handful of their songs that I really like - "Runnin' With The Devil", "You Really Got Me", "Panama", "Dance The Night Away", and "Hot For Teacher". Would any VH fans like to share what Van Halen's music and Eddie's guitar playing meant to them? I think Van Halen are the best hard rock band ever to come out of the States, easily. I grew up on Van Halen, even though I was a little young to truly appreciate Eddie's talents. It wasn't until I was a sophomore in high school, soon after the release of Balance, that I really really got into them. Of course, that was poor timing for me as Balance marked the end of Van Halen as a prolific creative force, but those first ten VH albums meant the world to me, and they still do.
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R.I.P.
Oct 7, 2020 13:28:07 GMT
Post by jk on Oct 7, 2020 13:28:07 GMT
Sad news indeed. Rest in peace, Eddie.
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R.I.P.
Oct 8, 2020 16:33:50 GMT
Post by Sheriff John Stone on Oct 8, 2020 16:33:50 GMT
So, do you think a "new" Van Halen album will be cobbled together from unreleased material? A live album? Did Eddie ever record solo tracks?
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R.I.P.
Oct 8, 2020 16:36:24 GMT
Post by Kapitan on Oct 8, 2020 16:36:24 GMT
I think there will be something. Van Halen fans have been feeling mistreated and ignored as every other legacy band has put out deluxe reissues, unreleased material, big boxes, etc., and Van Halen's reissues, as far as I know, were always simply remastered versions of the original albums. Nothing extra, nothing new.
The combination of the dearth of such releases in the past and the typical practice of putting out such materials after a death makes me assume that within the next couple of years we'll see some big ones.
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R.I.P.
Oct 8, 2020 16:42:10 GMT
Post by kds on Oct 8, 2020 16:42:10 GMT
So, do you think a "new" Van Halen album will be cobbled together from unreleased material? A live album? Did Eddie ever record solo tracks? Other than their 1977 demo, I don't think there's that much in the vault in regards to studio outtakes. Eddie never really did any solo stuff that I'm aware of. There's some random stuff here and there, like instrumental bits used in Back to the Future and Twister, but probably not enough to cobble together an album. For a band that has a reputation of being a great live band, they have surprisingly few official live releases. Two concert films from the Hagar era (Live Without a Net from 1986 and Live Right Here Right Now from 1991) and two live albums (Live Right Here Right Now from 1991 and Live at the Tokyo Dome 2014). To date, there are no official live releases from the original band. If anything sees the light of day, I could see some archival live releases.
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R.I.P.
Oct 8, 2020 17:27:28 GMT
Post by Kapitan on Oct 8, 2020 17:27:28 GMT
Other than their 1977 demo, I don't think there's that much in the vault in regards to studio outtakes. Do we know that or is that just a suspicion? I know they mined the vault for the A Different Kind of Truth, so that would have depleted whatever there was.
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R.I.P.
Oct 8, 2020 17:47:35 GMT
Post by kds on Oct 8, 2020 17:47:35 GMT
Other than their 1977 demo, I don't think there's that much in the vault in regards to studio outtakes. Do we know that or is that just a suspicion? I know they mined the vault for the A Different Kind of Truth, so that would have depleted whatever there was. Hard to tell with Van Halen. I don't know how much of the material they mined for ADKOT was actually put to tape or completed. The only one I know for sure is She's the Woman, which appeared on their 1977 demo. But, considering they rushed many of their albums in the early days, and those albums were often quite short, I suspect that there aren't a ton of outtakes, or any outtakes that exist really aren't very good.
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R.I.P.
Oct 9, 2020 12:31:44 GMT
Post by kds on Oct 9, 2020 12:31:44 GMT
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R.I.P.
Oct 21, 2020 12:35:33 GMT
Post by Kapitan on Oct 21, 2020 12:35:33 GMT
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