The Politics of Van Halen (Part Four)
Eddie Van Halen, January 26, 1955 - October 6, 2020.
Editor’s Note: This segment is presented as it was written in real time, on October 6th, 2020.
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
…
…
Eddie Van Halen is dead.
Taking every ounce of being I have just to push pen to paper.
This fucking year.
I was at max density.
I’ve mentioned Van Halen more than once already, have I not?
They are…I guess I am now forced to say they were…the quintessential Southern Californian rock band.
People can argue for the Doors, or the Beach Boys, or Eagles, or Guns n’ Roses, and those would all be fair choices, but for Southern Californian Gen Xers, Van Halen was a consummate element of our existence.
Given Ed’s somewhat unexpected demise, I’m scrambling to find resolve, digging into my reserves where I thought all had been exhausted.
I am running on fumes as it is.*
*Editor’s note: We’re at the height of the pandemic hereabouts.
I don’t have many heroes.
In fact, outside of my father and mother, I have none.
Except Eddie Van Halen.
Yes, I know, he preferred Ed or Edward, never Eddie. Doesn’t matter. To Generation X, he’ll always be Eddie Van Halen.
He’d been battling throat cancer for a number of years.
Apparently the last 72 hours went south fast for him, as cancers tend to do in the end. The Van Halen camp has always been one of secrecy, so it came straight out of the blue to the fan base, announced in a Twitter social media post by his heartbroken son.
When I heard this morning through a text from an old friend, it was like a punch to the gut. It is incomprehensible, the thought of more fuel splashing on this year’s smoldering trash fire.
You gotta understand what it means to be a Southern Californian who grew up in the 1980’s, how intertwined Van Halen is with dudes like me. That band is a touchstone, primarily because of the guitar player.
It's strange how distant icons can impact a life from afar.
Past all the much chronicled band horseshit and lead singer drama, there was Edward, arguably the most famous guitarist in history in terms of public appeal and industry reverence, a man who could be magnanimous, arrogant, naive, shy, cocky, utterly flawed and magnificent concurrently, prone to addictions and difficulties in trusting others. It was his imperfections that made him so relatable. He seemed like a dude you'd hang out with outside the local liquor store, or in the back forty tippin' cows and smokin' American Spirits.
I’ve been around the block when it comes to live hard rock performances. I’ve attended many hundreds of gigs in virtually every venue in both southern and northern California. I have yet to see anyone match the stagecraft of Edward.
What it was like to witness the king of six strings in concert is hard to explain to non-Van Halen fans.
For guys like me, Van Halen show attendance was an honorarium, a trek to a middle class mecca only properly taken by pilgrims who knew Edward Van Halen’s music through and through, who knew the title of every Van Halen song, every album, who’d read all the unauthorized biographies, who knew the timeline and history of Van Halen, who’d tracked down the club demos, collected the bootlegs, which songs in their discography had been played live and which ones hadn't. Every time I walked into an arena to see Van Halen, it was like I was visiting a relative, one that I saw every few years. I was as comfortable in a concert venue at a Van Halen gig as I was at family gatherings. Van Halen concerts were indeed a familial congress of sorts for me, though they trended twenty thousand strong, lorded over by a quartet of SoCal dudes at the head of the table, the sheepish, cock-walking guitarist always carving the turkey.
Sadly, I never met Eddie in person.
Yet I've had brief, mutual acknowledgments with Eddie. At times I wanted to believe it was because he recognized my face over the years. Obviously, that's more a wish and likely not reality. It was luck, random happenstance, and the fact that after ten years of nosebleed seating in my adolescence, I started sitting closer to the stage as I grew up, and was able to afford better seats.
I remember the first time Eddie and I recognized each other existed. It was in 1991, on the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge tour at the Pacific Amphitheater in Costa Mesa. I was sitting seventh row center. I caught his eye during the encore. I pointed at him, he pointed back at me, winking, in that goofy, charming, Eddie fashion. My friends saw the exchange, lost their shit, and so too did I, of course.
I am so sad to lose him.
Five years ago, I saw what would become The Last Rush Show at the Forum on August 1, 2015.
Five years later, Neil Peart died of cancer in January of this very years, not long before the pandemic broke upon us.
Five years ago, I saw what would become The Last Van Halen Show at the Hollywood Bowl on October 4, 2015.
Five years later, Eddie Van Halen has died of cancer in October of 2020.
It feels like synchronous jimmy jam, but I’m going to ignore my monkey brain dictates and resist my brain’s compulsion to anthropomorphize those dates and numbers and craft illusory pattern connections between two of my favorite musicians’ subsequent ends.
It’s crazy, watching our Gen X era gradually come to an end, piece by piece, person by person, isn’t it?
With news coverage and 24 hour access to all corners of the world, we now know when any aspects of our generation and culture reach a final conclusion, and so our lives connect to those vicarious events far more immediately and thus, perhaps, more personally than in bygone eras.
Eddie is gone.
In enduring this loss, I am lesser for it, and the world is a poorer place, and the world isn't doing so good anyway.
To steal author Christopher Moore’s infamous term, this year is heinous fuckery of the highest order.
Eddie Van Halen was an essential part of Southern California. His death may seem like a global micro-loss, but it’s a macro thing to us SoCal dudes.
I sit here tonight, in the witching hours, decompressing after my pilgrimage.
After weeping for a while this morning, I bounced down to Los Angeles, to the nearest memorial spots where most fans would leave tidings and well wishes. In SoCal, that’s the Sunset Strip, in one of two places. The first is Guitar Center, where Eddie’s hand prints are immortalized, along with hundreds of other famous axe men, sort of the music world’s version of the famous Hollywood Walk of Stars. The second is the Whisky-a-Go-Go, famed nightclub where Van Halen used to play before they hit the big time, also where a commemorative brass plaque marking the legacy of Van Halen lies outside the club’s front door.
At Guitar Center, I was one of the first few folks to show up outside today. An elaborate flower bouquet array had been set out by the establishment. Several news teams had arrived already. I stumbled out of my truck and shakily approached Ed’s marker, all the while masked up with my N95, trying madly to stay distant from the smattering of assembled folks there. I kept my presence of mind we were still in the throes of a pandemic. I laid down a guitar pick on the fingerprints he had set into cement years ago, and I whispered the words I needed to say.
After I was done, a couple of reporters asked if they could interview me. I declined. I was too out of sorts to speak on camera (also still perfectly cognizant of potential viral loads floating around the Hollywood air).
Then I drove up to the Whisky and found the Van Halen plaque on the sidewalk outside. It was evening then. I lit a small candle I’d brought and set it among the assembly of tokens already there…bouquets, guitar picks, empty mini-bottles of Jack Daniels. People were pouring one out for Ed.
Yes, I broke quarantine today. I’ve only done that a few times, mostly for what I deemed to be essential activity, like our dog’s surgery back in April, or my attendance of a local Black Lives Matter march after the murder of George Floyd, or my trip to the high desert to memorialize the passing of my dogs, and now, this sojourn to Los Angeles today, upon hearing of the death of Eddie Van Halen and my pressing need to pay respects. I’m pointing this out because I’m not breaking social distancing recommendations for just anything. I realize qualifiers in terms of what’s apropos to break quarantine and what ain’t, tend to run subjective among the masses, myself included. I’ve missed birthdays, weddings, funerals, holidays, graduations, all while trying to flatten the curve.
But I had to do it.
I stayed distanced and masked the entire time.
There’s only one person on earth, outside of my immediate family, I’d have risked a fringe honorarium for, in this year of all years.
Eddie fucking Van Halen.
Of course it's Eddie that went first of all the band’s members, given his history of party hearty ways, of course it is, how could it be otherwise?
Without Eddie, there is no more Van Halen. Ever.
That era of my life is done, for me, for Southern California, for the world, and there’s so much to lament in California this year, with 16,500 Californian deaths from Covid to date and over four million acres of Californian wilderness burned from megafires.
California didn’t need any more hits.
I didn’t need any more hits. Not after losing two of my dogs this last summer.
I didn’t think I could take anymore this year.
I’m writing. I’m breathing. I haven’t keeled over. I’m barely sleeping and I’ve gained too much weight from quarantine. Somehow, I haven’t caught the bug yet. But I’m still pressing on. Is there another choice, short of waving the white flag to the abyss?
Tonight, in my grief, sitting here at my laptop drinking hot black tea with lemon and honey, I’m thinking of all the horseshit this year about race and class systems, prompted by the public losses of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and how, incredibly, Edward Van Halen fits into all of that.
Ed’s father Jan was Dutch. His mother Eugenia was Eurasian/Indonesian. As such, he and his brother Alex had mixed race identities. Before they came to the States, Eddie’s family resided in the Netherlands. Because of their mixed heritage, they soon found out on Pasadena grade school playgrounds that being something other than Caucasian was less than acceptable. They were frequently termed ‘half-breeds’ and ‘second-class citizens.’ Eddie said on more than one occasion the primary reason his father moved the family from Holland to America was because of the European racism exhibited toward his wife and children’s Indonesian heritage. Eddie didn’t speak English as a first language when he arrived in the early sixties. Naturally, the racism here was little different than in Holland. Some of his first friends were Black kids, since he too was considered a minority.
In a 2017 interview, on being an immigrant in the United States, Eddie said: “It was actually the white people that were the bullies…they would tear up my homework and papers, make me eat playground sand, and the Black kids stuck up for me.”
The thought of the iconic gunslinger being marginalized by SoCal whiteboy kids because of his skin color infuriates me, I admit. Though any person, famous or not, having to endure such indignities as a child, boils my blood no less. What must it be like, to grow up and realize you’re the kid who forced Eddie Van Halen to eat dirt because your parents taught you how to be racist?
By the by, I’m aware of Eddie’s own proclivities in perpetuating class warfare, in his occasional, impulsive condemnations of other races. It’s a common phenomenology, when peoples of color embrace their oppressors’ successful stratagems in the same system which initially marginalized them.
My heroes are flawed.
All heroes are flawed.
None of us are gods.
None of us are devils.
His flaws made him all the more mythic.
He was a SoCal dude, same as me and my Californian brethren.
He was a hero because he was an antihero.
He was one of us.
You crafted the soundtrack to my life, Eddie.
Thanks, man.
I guess that's it.
Editor’s Note: A few days later, I returned to the greater Los Angeles basin, one of my remaining doggies in tow. I wanted to leave flowers at a pop-up makeshift memorial in Pasadena that had sprouted close to the Van Halen boys’ childhood home, on a street corner outside a liquor store where Ed and Alex used to loiter in the early 70s. They’d carved their last name into the concrete curb. Note the Van Halen inspired striped mask. :)
That same evening, I fulfilled a vow I’d made at the tender age of seventeen, thirty-four years prior, wherein I promised, should my hero pass before me, I’d light a candle for him and leave it at the steps of the Fabulous Forum, the first place I ever saw Eddie Van Halen play live. I had to sneak past several security guards to do it, but it was a dark night for the venue and was otherwise deserted. I lit a mason jar candle, placed it upon a concrete ramp wall, and slipped away into the streets of Inglewood before getting arrested.
It seems like a lot, doesn’t it?
All that pomp and circumstance for a dude I didn’t know personally.
Or did I?
Ed always said if anyone wanted to know him, it was in the music.
I’m pretty sure he was right.
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Not a big deal just to SoCal guys, also girls.