A FAST RIFF ON
EDDIE VAN HALEN

Van Halen was an unusual beast: disciplined and arena-ready even when they were Pasadena club rats, harbingers of “hair metal” with their crowd-pleasing, sexed-up amalgam of hard rock and pop hooks, musically adventurous and versed in everything from blues and country to psychedelia and girl-group sha-la-las. They could be winking and playful—and hardly averse to borscht-belt schtick—but when the groove was cranked up, they were ferocious.

At the center of it all was Eddie, whose flash and panache and reduce-it-all-to-ash riffage left jaws on the floor worldwide. He was the virtuoso’s virtuoso (and the brightness of his light was the only reason the brilliance of VH’s rhythm section never quite got its due). It was as though the great lead players who preceded him had been playing in slow motion, and here came this hummingbird whose blistering sorties across the frets were garnished with baroque filigrees and surf-rock salutes, taps and snarls and screams.

But to see EVH as a technician is to overlook his magic. The fact is that every lead guitarist in the throng of frankly anonymous hair bands that followed in Van Halen’s path was chasing him, slavishly copping his hammer-ons and harmonic squawks and whammy-bar half-bends. And yes, with enough woodshedding it was possible to approximate the execution.

But what they missed was the joy.

If you were looking at the blur of Eddie’s fingers you were neglecting a key feature of his art: that smile. His playing, his performance, was infused with transcendent happiness that was in no way “metal,” but was essentially rock & roll: the aspect of a soul revealing itself and sharing its abundant, dazzling inner landscapes. Even on his final tour he leapt into the air, just as he had as a badass prodigy decades before, all sneakers and boyish grin, those hummingbird riffs sparking in his wake.

40-plus years on, his greatest recordings have not lost their capacity to delight and astonish. They never will.