You know "Jump," you know "Panama" — but did you know Eddie Van Halen could rock as hard with a power drill as he could a guitar? Here's everything you didn't know about Van Halen's iconic guitarist.
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00:00You know Jump, you know Panama, but did you know Eddie Van Halen could rock as hard with
00:04a power drill as he could a guitar?
00:06Here's everything you didn't know about Van Halen's iconic guitarist.
00:10When Eddie Van Halen emigrated to the U.S. from the Netherlands in 1962, English was
00:15not his first language.
00:16He and his brother Alex endured all kinds of bullying at the hands of school kids who
00:20saw them as different due to their background.
00:22During a 2015 audience Q&A at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington,
00:28Eddie described his first day of school in America as absolutely frightening.
00:32They would tear up my homework papers, make me playground sand.
00:36Unfortunately, the Van Halen brothers had also experienced something similar in their
00:40homeland.
00:41They'd suffered racist abuse in Europe as the children of Dutch and Indonesian immigrants.
00:44Across the pond in sunny California, the language barrier only gave more fodder to their bullies.
00:49The school, Eddie said, was still segregated at the time, and because he and his brother
00:53couldn't speak English, they were considered a minority.
00:57Eddie Van Halen is known as one of the great guitar heroes of the 70s and 80s, but he actually
01:02began his musical journey on the piano.
01:04Both Eddie and Alex were instructed in classical piano from a young age, and Eddie won several
01:08consecutive piano competitions after the Van Halens arrived in Southern California.
01:12In a 2009 interview with Forbes, he said,
01:15"...I took piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland.
01:18When we moved to America, it was just the typical thing except I was really good at
01:21it.
01:22So was my brother.
01:23I actually won three years in a row at Long Beach City College."
01:26In the end, Van Halen turned to the drums, and then the guitar, after hearing the Dave
01:30Clark Five.
01:31"...Immediately we said, okay, enough piano."
01:33His piano skills came in handy in the long run, however.
01:36He contributed keyboards to several of his band's hits, such as Jump and Right Now.
01:41Eddie Van Halen was always open about the fact that he never learned to read sheet music.
01:45This might seem strange for a professional musician, but it's also been true for a number
01:49of other legends over the years, including Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and all four Beatles.
01:54Van Halen had a finely trained ear that helped him mimic the sounds he heard and translate
01:58them to guitar.
01:59He had learned to do this when he took piano lessons as a young boy, playing by ear and
02:03watching his instructor's finger movements to map out his performances.
02:06According to Van Halen, he did this so effectively that he was able to pull the wool over everyone's
02:11eyes.
02:12Speaking to Forbes, he said,
02:13"...Nobody ever knew that I couldn't read music.
02:15I fooled everyone cause they always tripped.
02:17They're going, how come you're not looking at the sheet music?
02:20I was just blessed with good ears."
02:22Following Van Halen's rise to stardom in the late 1970s, Eddie Van Halen had a unique nickname
02:27among his bandmates, Vard.
02:29According to David Lee Roth, the backstory behind the name was one of family ties, coined
02:33in honor of Van Halen's mother, Eugenia.
02:35However, Van Halen's special nickname served a different purpose when the Rock outfit was
02:39out on the road together.
02:41In conversation, it helped Roth and the rest of the band differentiate the guitarist from
02:45Roth's security guard at the time, who was also named Ed.
02:48"...His mother used the Dutch expression, or Dutch, uh, the way she said it was Dutch.
02:54Ed vaak, Ed vaak."
02:57Eddie Van Halen found a whole new audience for his music when he contributed the guitar
03:01solo to Michael Jackson's iconic 1982 Thriller track, Beat It.
03:05But this almost didn't happen at all, according to Toto keyboardist David Paich, who contributed
03:09synthesizers and arrangements on Thriller.
03:11That's because the members of Van Halen had a rule stipulating that nobody would play
03:15on session material outside of their own band.
03:17For this reason, Van Halen was initially reluctant to play on Beat It, and he almost
03:21missed his chance entirely when the song's producer, Quincy Jones, called him on the
03:25phone.
03:26Paich later told the Broken Record podcast,
03:28"...So when Quincy called Van Halen and said, this is Quincy Jones, he goes, yeah, sure,
03:33and hung up on him."
03:34Luckily, Van Halen quickly realized his mistake and sent a tape in.
03:37Jackson and Jones liked it, dropped it into their song, and the rest is history.
03:42While unknown to Van Halen fans upon its release, it later emerged that Eddie Van Halen had
03:47played drums on 1998's Van Halen III, the band's only album with Gary Cherone as lead
03:52singer.
03:53Alex Van Halen, the band's mainstay drummer, didn't contribute to the album, as he was
03:57going through his second divorce at the time.
03:59In a respectful nod from Eddie, however, Alex is still listed as the drummer in the album
04:03credits.
04:04But the album's producer, Mike Post, made no bones about Alex's absence when asked about
04:08it in 2024.
04:09Speaking on an episode of The Hustle podcast, Post explained that Alex was drinking to excess
04:14divorce, the impact of which came to a head during a recording session at Eddie's recording
04:18studio.
04:19Post recalled Eddie saying,
04:20"...I want him to think about himself and his family and to get straight and to figure things
04:25out and get his divorce finished."
04:28It might sound crazy now, but Van Halen almost changed their name mid-career.
04:32The proposed name change was pushed by the group's record label, Warner Bros. Records,
04:36when Van Halen first swapped lead singers in 1985.
04:40Original lead singer David Lee Roth had left Van Halen to pursue a solo career, and Sammy
04:44Hagar became the outfit's new singer.
04:46Certainly, it would have been a risky move.
04:48Speaking about Eddie and Alex's reaction to the idea, Michael Anthony later recalled,
04:52"...we were at Warner Bros. and they were yelling, going, hey, hey, this is our last name, this
04:56is our careers, you know, and we're, this is it, Van Halen."
05:01Put on Van Halen's 1991 studio album for unlawful carnal knowledge, and you'll hear something
05:06strange.
05:07The song's main track, Pound Cake, begins with something that sounds like an overpowered
05:10dentist's drill subtly morphing into Eddie Van Halen's unmistakable shredding.
05:15That's because the sound, indeed, comes from a drill — a power drill, to be exact.
05:19While experimenting in the recording studio, Eddie and his audio engineer devised this
05:23aggressive, uncharted guitar sound by having Eddie play his guitar with a power drill — specifically
05:28by placing the tool close to his guitar's pickups.
05:30What came out of the speakers is now considered a canonized rock intro among the Van Halen
05:35Subsequently calling the experiment a goofball little thing, Eddie addressed his power drill
05:40playing in Kevin Dodd's book Edward Van Halen, a definitive biography.
05:44He explained,
05:45"...the motor of the drill got picked up by my guitar pickup, just like a microphone.
05:48I turned my volume on, and it sounded like kick-starting your engine."
05:51In 2015, Eddie revealed that the drill had been left sitting around by the studio maintenance
05:56technician, which led to Eddie picking it up and putting it to use.
05:59Eddie even used the same drill when Van Halen played the song in concert.
06:03One famous story about Eddie Van Halen demonstrates the respect he had for other pioneering rock
06:08and metal guitarists.
06:09He gave one of his Van Halen guitars to the late Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darryl Abbott
06:14so that Abbott could be buried alongside it.
06:16Abbott died in 2004 when he was murdered by an audience member during a performance with
06:20his post-Pantera band, Damageplan.
06:22"...it just went crazy and started shooting people."
06:25For guitar enthusiasts, Van Halen was renowned for his guitars striped in crisscrossing red,
06:30white, and black layers.
06:31But Abbott had always preferred Van Halen's black-and-yellow striped guitar, as pictured
06:35on the back cover sleeve of 1979's Van Halen II.
06:38Speaking to Billboard in 2014, Abbott's widow Rita Haney said,
06:42"...Eddie called to see if he could do anything for us and for Dime.
06:44So I asked him if he'd stripe up a guitar for Darryl.
06:47He said, one of the red, white, and black ones?
06:49And I said, no, Darryl always said that the yellow and black was your toughest guitar."
06:53And Van Halen gladly obliged with the ax, saying,
06:56"...an original should have an original."
06:59Eddie Van Halen never hid the fact that he had a history of tobacco, drug, and alcohol
07:04misuse.
07:05He entered a drug rehabilitation program in 2007 and remained sober for the rest of his
07:08life.
07:09But while some may speculate that Van Halen's later health problems may have resulted from
07:13his previous addictions, he has offered up his own theory as to why he was diagnosed
07:17with tongue cancer in 2000.
07:19And it all revolves around his guitar picks.
07:21Speaking to Billboard in 2015, he said,
07:23"...I used metal picks, they're brass and copper, which I always held in my mouth, in
07:28the exact place where I got the tongue cancer.
07:30But at the same time, my lungs are totally clear.
07:32This is just my own theory, but the doctors say it's possible."
07:35Van Halen underwent surgery for his tongue cancer in the early 2000s, which reportedly
07:40removed a third of his tongue.
07:41In 2002, he was declared free of the disease.
07:44Sadly, that wasn't to be the end of Van Halen's cancer journey.
07:47He would be diagnosed with both lung and throat cancer before his death in 2020.
07:52Eddie's son, Wolfgang Van Halen, is now the leader of his own rock band, Mammoth WVH.
07:57So named in honor of Wolfgang's father and Van Halen's music, when Van Halen was still
08:01a fledgling act in Southern California in the early 1970s, one version of the band went
08:06by the band name Mammoth.
08:07Wolfgang added his initials to the name for a slight twist to make it his own.
08:11In a 2021 interview with Billboard, he said,
08:13"...since I was a kid, my dad would tell me the story of the band, and that it was called
08:17Mammoth.
08:18It was a three-piece with dad singing, so that's another connection I have with it.
08:22Just growing up, I was like, that's the coolest name.
08:24When I grow up, I want to call my own band that."
08:28Aside from being close as family, Eddie and Wolfgang are also close musically.
08:32In 2007, when he was still only 16, Wolfgang replaced Michael Anthony as the bass player
08:37in Van Halen.
08:38The band essentially disbanded in 2020 following Eddie's death.
08:41Wolfgang premiered his new band later that same year with a debut single, Distance, which
08:45was dedicated to the memory of his dad.