Luis Dias
If I had to compile a list of ‘desert island’ discs, the American rock band Van Halen would probably not be among my top choices. I am familiar with their music, though I don’t own any of their albums.
But it took the recent death of its acclaimed lead guitarist, songwriter, producer, and inventor Eddie Van Halen (January 26, 1955 – October 6, 2020) for me to realise that his full name was in fact Edward Lodewijk Van Halen.
Lodewijk is the Dutch variant of the German name Ludwig. His father Jan Van Halen, Dutch jazz pianist, clarinetist and saxophonist, added it to the name as a tribute to the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven when the boy was born in the Netherlands.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, music was a formative element in the life of Eddie and little brother Alex. Their mother, Eugenia née van Beers, whom their father met on a music trip to Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies), found life made difficult for her in 1950s Holland where she was treated as a second- class citizen on account of her mixed-race background. “Life became a little rough”, admitted the rock legend laconically in 2015 to a standing-room-only audience at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
The family immigrated to the US in 1962, with “approximately fifty dollars and a piano” as famously put it in that interview. The piano obviously meant a lot to the Van Halens.
Eddie and his brother were signed up for piano lessons when he was six, barely a year after moving to America. They commuted from Pasadena to San Pedro to study with an elderly Lithuanian piano teacher, Stasys Kalvaitis. Eddie however claimed never to have learned how to read music, getting by instead by mimicking his teacher’s hand movements and learning his pieces by ear.
Reading this reminded me of the scene in ‘Rocketman’, the 2019 biographical musical film based on the life of British musician Elton John, (born Reginald Dwight). When young Reginald turns up to audition for piano lessons at London’s Royal Academy of Music, he mimics perfectly the beginning segment of the Mozart piano sonata that the professor was playing at the piano up to the point that he stopped. The similarity between the childhood stories of the two popular music icons is striking.
Eddie Van Halen got to be so proficient at the piano that from 1964 through 1967, he won first place in the annual piano competition held at Long Beach City College, earning praise from the judges even when he improvised upon the music of the master composers Bach, Mozart, Debussy and Beethoven. Although the Van Halen parents wanted the boys to become classical pianists, the call of rock was just too strong. But the love and interest in classical music persisted throughout Eddie’s life, and influenced his creative output. This is similar to the childhood story of Billy Joel; but the latter’s father’s abandonment of the family freed Joel to make this choice.
The influence of an early introduction to classical music seems to be a unifying theme in the lives of so many popular music icons, a fact that is not so obvious until one delves deeper into their life
stories.
When his brother Alex took up guitar, Eddie bought himself a drum kit. At some point, they switched instruments; apparently after Eddie heard Alex play the drum solo in the Surfaris hit ‘Wipe Out’, he gave his brother the drum kit and took up electric guitar. The rest would become rock music history.
That classical music remained on his mind comes through in tell-tale ways in his life. On the band’s 1986 concert tour, he paid tribute to his ‘namesake’, the other Ludwig, with a rock version of the piano bagatelle (No 25 in A minor WoO 59), known popularly to us as ‘Für Elise’, complete with his trademark improvisation and flourishes.
And continuing a family tradition started by his father, when a son was born to him and his then-wife Valerie Bertinelli in 1991, he was given the first name of another towering classical music composer, Wolfgang for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Wolfgang would join the Van Halen band as bassist in 2006, at just fifteen. He is still the youngest member of the band. In an interview, the son confessed that when a child he was unaware of his father’s fame until he began picking up CDs and saw his father’s picture on their cover.
As another example of how Eddie Van Halen’s classical music discipline in his childhood spilled over into his rock music in later life, his virtuoso nylon-string guitar instrumental solo ‘Spanish Fly’ on his band’s second studio album, Van Halen II is often cited.
Rolling Stone magazine gushed: An inspired piece of music, ‘Spanish Fly’ was also a warning shot fired to remind the legions of hard-rock guitarists who were beginning to imitate his playing style that he could transcend the genre at will. Future Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde, for one, got the message. “The first time I heard ‘Spanish Fly,’ I remember thinking, ‘How can anybody get that good?’” he says in Abel Sanchez’ Van Halen 101. “It was beyond insane.”
How can anybody get that good? Put it down to the innumerable hours Eddie Van Halen put in in his formative years: “walking around at home with his guitar strapped on or sitting in his room for hours with the door locked.”
And although I can’t prove it, I’d bet that dedication and discipline began with his childhood lessons at the piano, which he merely transferred to the guitar later in his life.
