Remembering Eddie Van Halen: The Guitarist Who Changed Everything
Eddie Van Halen was, by some distance, the greatest guitarist of his generation. People were saying this, with no hyperbole, from the first time the world clapped eyes and ears on him, aged 23, when Van Halen’s debut album exploded in 1978. In a time of guitar heroes – Jimmy Page, Tony Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore, Michael Schenker – it was like seeing colour television for the first time. He wasn’t just faster, slicker and more energetic than his forebears (although he was) – this skinny, bad-haired kid with the weird-looking, patterned guitar was literally doing things nobody had ever heard on the instrument before. When a fractured, burnt-out Black Sabbath took Van Halen out on the road in America that year, the feeling of a guard being changed could not have been more stark. Sabbs could on...
