Van Halen

At 11 years old, Eddie stood by the piano and was supposed to turn the page for his Russian born piano teacher Stanley Kalvaitis during a concert but he didn’t do it  at the right time because he couldn’t read the music. Annoyed, his teacher asked him what happened? At that point Eddie admitted  he couldn’t read sheet music even  though he had taken piano lessons for 5 years. For five years, Eddie  learned to play pieces by watching his teacher play songs... remembering his finger positions and notes. He claimed that to play piano, he needed to see where his fingers were on the keyboard... that looking at sheet music was too distracting. Despite his unorthodox method of learning piano, (a very Indonesian way of learning to play an instrument) Eddie was able to win several piano competitions in his youth!

When the Beatles and Dave Clark 5 came out, Eddie quit piano for drums. Alex quit piano too, but his mom forced him to learn flamenco guitar to continue his musical education. To earn money to pay off his drum kit debt, Eddie delivered newspapers. While Eddie was busy delivering paper on his newspaper route, Alex practiced on Eddie’s drums at home.... becoming so good at drums that Eddie decided to  give up drums and switch to guitar... Alex’s guitar.

In their first years in America, the whole Van Halen household slept in a single room in a house shared by 3 other families. They had moved from the Netherlands in search of the American dream. Instead, they found hardship. His father, a concert clarinetist who couldn’t find steady music work that he had hoped to find, had to walk back and forth 6 miles to a dishwashing job in Pasadena. His mother, an Indonesian native who married his father in Indonesia, worked as a maid. To make ends meet, the father and 2 sons would play any gigs they could find on the weekends... weddings, bar mitzvahs, parties. Music was their way of life.

These financial circumstances created challenges and opportunities for Eddie. Eddie liked the whammy bar of fenders but didn’t like the thin sound of its pickups. He liked the large humbucking pickups of Les Paul guitars but they didn’t have whammy bars. He couldn’t afford the special effects pedals to create the sound he wanted... so he started tinkering. He bought a $50 knockoff fender body with a whammy bar, chiseled a hole in the guitar and screwed a  les Paul humbucking pickups to the wood and soldered an electric connection to the controls. The result was the sound and control he needed for his music. To create a higher fidelity sound, he poured paraffin wax around the pickup to stabilize it within the void he chiseled.

To dress up his new hybrid guitar, he painted the body black. It was rather dull, so then he took a strips of duct tape and used it as a mask when he painted red. He removed the tale and applied another pattern of tape stripes before spray painting his guitar white. The process of painting his guitar was like the Indonesian batik making process where masks of wax are applied before new color dyes are introduced. Pretty soon many guitars around the country started emulating Van Halen’s aesthetic of crisscrossed striping.

The other major innovation in guitar came from devising a new playing technique. Growing up, Alex and Eddie watched all the concerts at the LA forum. When he saw jimmy page play at a Led Zeppelin concert he realized Page didn’t need to pick the strings to play notes. That led Eddie  to experiment with various  finger tapping techniques using his strumming hand to register notes. This innovation in playing necessitated a new way of transcribing guitar music, tablature, so other guitarists could learn how to play his music like “eruption” with both hands on the fretboard. Eddie often jokes it is ironic he doesn’t know how to read sheet music nor the tablature notation system which he spawned. 

When asked how he learned guitar, Eddie responded “if I had taken formal lessons for guitar, I would not play 90% of what I do today because my technique and sound came from tinkering and exploration.” Now, when I hear eddie’s guitar playing, I hear an innate Indonesian musical prodigy, playing Russian trained classical music arpeggios fused with English Led zeppelin inspired finger tapping guitar playing techniques, rendered in high fidelity sounds created by Les Paul/Fender hybrid guitar.... it is the sound of an artist— the sounds of tinkering and innovation. His music doesn’t sound typical Californian... because it is a reflection of his unique background, circumstances, and history.