When Roth finally returned to the fold in 2007 (with Eddie’s son Wolfgang taking over on bass for the exiled Michael Anthony), the band made no attempt to court a younger generation of rock fans who may have only known Eddie’s name from mentions in blog posts about Marnie Stern. Eddie’s public image eventually morphed from the above-it-all mastermind grinning from the side of the stage to a hard-to-please patriarch with a long memory for grudges. Van Halen never went away for too long as a commercial concern-disastrously with Extreme’s Gary Cherone in the late ’90s, then anticlimactically and acrimoniously reunited with Hagar a few years later-so they never had the chance to have their absence turn into fond nostalgia. Roth’s schtick, tongue-in-cheek though he may have thought it had been, probably wasn’t too compelling to scrappier indie bands who thought themselves above that kind of cartoonish excess, and Eddie’s unimpeachable musicianship felt like an admirable skill no one quite coveted, or at least talked about coveting. As hard rock settled into its grunge phase and arch indie kids were elevated to glossy-magazine status, Van Hagar were right there with goatees and gas-station shirts, but they were the exact kinds of relics these newer bands were designed to make feel irrelevant. Even if you didn’t care for that development, you still understood that he was Jordan.Īs a result, for all Van Halen’s success and broad appeal, their subsequent cultural footprint has been weirdly invisible. What he did transcended genre, and even music itself, turning guitar playing into sport. Even as his band was redefining what excess looked like at their early-’80s peak, he seemed like the grounded one (even if the coke dealers of the greater Los Angeles area might beg to differ). He did physically impossible things with a musical instrument in mid-air during loud and dumb rock songs and somehow came off as understated, managing to carve out a lane between artful DIY punk-he built and painted that guitar himself-and total bombast. Hearing his name, you’re as likely to picture his face as his guitar’s trademark criss-cross design, red with white and black stripes, a distinct color scheme that certainly no other guitar-wielding artists have used to create an identity since. Between the formidable spectacle of his own lead singer and the how-did-he- do-that gawping at his skill, it was easy to overlook Eddie’s pure style.

Best of van halen playlist