As you know by now, this blog is one of the few places on the internet where we address everything from saints to rock stars! Today brings sad news about Eddie Van Halen. RIP to another guitar legend.😥🎸🔥 As a guitar hack for over forty years who even played a few gigs on rather small stages, I must pay appropriate tribute to this Master of the craft.
Now remember, it was “the 70s,” dear people. Eddie Van Halen was not what one would call an exemplar of moral virtue when I was a teenager. But the dude could PLAY!🎶💥
I can’t say that I consciously “imitated his playing style” because it was so far out of my league (or anybody’s league that I knew). This was from some other planet. (Actually he and his brother both had classical training on piano, which is one aspect for his inspiration for what’s going down on this video.)
Click THIS LINK to watch and listen to VIDEO
Let me tell you, for a kid in those pre-digital days, an electric guitar was a marvel in itself: part challenging musical instrument, part interactive multimedia device, part rowdy noisemaker. (I apologize to all the folks in the neighborhood we drove crazy in those days. It didn’t help that we weren’t any good!😝) But Eddie Van Halen was crazy good.🌟 You didn’t have to be a “Van Halen” (the band) fan to appreciate it. Anyone who “plugs in” a musical instrument today owes gratitude to this sonic pioneer. Eddie invented many of the “sounds for guitar” that are built into today’s gadgets.
Every electric guitarist who came after him stole something from him, or tried to! (which is how you show respect for someone in music😉🎵).
Sadly, Eddie has had cancer the past few years. It wasn’t widely known, so we all find ourselves surprised. He was 65, which is uncomfortably close to my current age (gosh, when you’re 17 you think these guys are so much older than you... but that gap closes so soon😳).
Life is more precious and more mysterious than we know.
God unfolds his plan for each of us in the time and patience that correspond to the particular mystery of each of us as a person, his gifts to us, and his amazing ways of engaging our freedom while respecting it completely and bringing his healing mercy to bear gently upon it.
May the merciful Lord grant that Eddie Van Halen might rest in his peace.