turns you from hunted into hunter...

I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about Eddie Van Halen. Like most guys of my generation, I worshipped his unmistakably ferocious style of guitar playing when I was a ‘tween. Fair Warning, which I think of as Van Halen at their creative apex, was a huge album for me when I was 13. There’s two things that occur to me with Eddie’s playing. On the one hand, it’s the sound of the adolescent male id, at once confused and excited by a world in which sex is suddenly the prism through which all of life is refracted. But then, on the other hand, his playing also conveys violent aggression and rage. Hearing him play makes you wanna break shit. It’s a cathartic sensation, a purging of destructive impulses that cleanses your soul of all the dark, repressed stuff you walk around with all day long. Eddie’s onstage persona was always happy-go-lucky, more or less, but my impression of him from the admittedly little I know is that he’s a troubled dude, not real well adjusted, maybe even a little trashy in a very particular Pasadena via Holland kind of way. I get the same vibe from his brother, Alex, but you see less of Alex because he’s hidden behind that gynormous drum kit he plays. …Whatever demons haunt Eddie, they definitely come through in his playing. It’s simultaneously beautiful, ugly, ecstatic, painful, pleasing, scary… I was reflecting on this today and decided that an EVH riff is like the ‘go get your fuckin’ shine box’ scene in Goodfellas, the one where Billy Batts gets beaten to a pulp to the music of Donovan and then stuffed into the trunk Henry Hill’s car. Like the scene, the riffs tend to be jaw droppingly dramatic and even operatic. The violence is sublime. You can’t avert your attention even though what you’re hearing is utterly terrifying. If somewhere in the universe there’s a fine line separating sensuality and smoldering anger, Eddie Van Halen straddles it. He almost always tunes his guitar down by a half tone, and often plays in drop D tuning, so the low E string is as low and weighted down as a 15-yr-old’s ballsack. It’s gives him that filthy, nasty, sexy, wet dream sound. For a long time, as my taste supposedly got more sophisticated and refined, I dismissed Eddie as a mere guitar tech, vulgar by comparison with my guitar heroes, guys like Roger McGuinn and Clarence White, Johnny Marr and Peter Buck, Mick Ronson and Bill Nelson. But I’ve reassessed Eddie’s body of work and come to realize that he is one of the most emotionally affecting guitarists I’ve ever heard. I’m not gonna reach for a Van Halen album every day, and I’m never gonna reach for anything after 1984, but when I’m feeling beaten down by life, pissed off, and undersexed, I know Eddie’s playing will lift me up and set me free…