Eddie Van Halen

Eddie Van Halen

Edward Lodewijk van Halen was a Dutch-American musician and songwriter. He was the main songwriter and guitarist of the American rock band Van Halen, which he co-founded in 1972. He popularized the tapping guitar solo technique, allowing rapid arpeggios to be played with two hands on the fretboard. In 2007, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame of Individually, as well as as the band’s collective ranks. He died in a car crash in Los Angeles, California, on September 25, 2013.

About Eddie Van Halen in brief

Summary Eddie Van HalenEdward Lodewijk van Halen was a Dutch-American musician and songwriter. He was the main songwriter and guitarist of the American rock band Van Halen, which he co-founded in 1972. He is regarded as one of the all-time greatest guitar players in rock history. He popularized the tapping guitar solo technique, allowing rapid arpeggios to be played with two hands on the fretboard. In 2007, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame of Individually, as well as as the band’s collective ranks. In 2019, the band Unal Knowledge won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance with Vocals for the album For Lawful Carnal Knowledge. The band’s lead single, “Jump,” became their first and only number-one pop hit and garnered them a Grammy Award nomination in 1992. The family moved from the Netherlands to the United States in 1962, settling in Pasadena, California. Eddie and his older brother, Alex, became naturalized U.S. citizens. The brothers learned to play the piano as children starting at the age of six. They commuted from Pasadena to San Pedro to study with an elderly piano teacher, Stasys Kalvaitis. Eddie was never taught to read music; instead, he would watch recitals of Bach or Mozart and improvise. He would often practice while walking around at home with his guitar strapped on or sitting in his room for hours with the door locked.

He once claimed that he had learned almost all of Eric Clapton’s solos in the band Cream \”note for note… I’ve always said Ericclapton was my main influence,\” he said, \”but Jimmy Page was actually more the way I am, in a reckless-abandon kind of way.\” He would later cite this performance as key to his desire to become a professional musician. In the early 1980s, VanHalen was one of. the most successful rock acts of the time. The album 1984 went five-times Platinum a year after its release. The band ranked 20th on the RIAA list of best-selling artists with 56 million album sales worldwide and more than 80 million sales in the United S.C. Additionally, Van Halen charted 13-one hits in the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart; meanwhile, VH1 ranked a seventh on the top 100 hard rock artists of all time, and in 2007, in the list of top 100 artists of the year, it was No. 1 on the Billboard Top 100 Hard Rock chart. In 2012, he announced that he would be retiring from the music industry. He died in a car crash in Los Angeles, California, on September 25, 2013. He leaves behind a wife and two children. He also has a son, Alex Van Halens, a brother, Mark Stone, and a step-son, David Lee Roth, who all played in his band.