Edward Van Halen: A Definitive Biography (3 page)

CHAPTER 2 

Life in America

Eventually, they settled into a two-bedroom bungalow in Pasadena at 1881 Las Lunas Street where they would stay for two decades. One of the first orders of business upon arrival was to find a replacement piano tutor for the boys. One cannot be sure where the pressing need to become fluent in English laid on the priority scale, but it would soon become a major issue.

1818 Las Lunas Street as of 2011. The 900 square-foot home was built in 1922, giving the lush vegetation plenty of time to grow hearty and healthy over ninety years. Edward lived in the home from age of seven until approximately the age of twenty-five. The home was burglarized while Van Halen performed their first headlining show at The Forum in 1979. Photograph © John Adams

Edward and Alex were freshly transplanted Dutch boys in the heart of California in the early 1960s, and not just Dutch boys, but race-mixed kids as well, with Alex bearing more distinguishable Eurasian features than his little brother. At first, of course, they spoke absolutely no English except “yes,” and had a habit of smiling and saying “yes” to anything said to them.

Alex said that their mother gave them a book to help them learn English and the very first word in the book, alphabetically, was “accident,” which was unfortunately appropriate. The brothers were bearing abuse reserved for weird outsiders. Alex recalled: “One day I was walking in a park and went past a kid carrying a baseball bat. I said, ‘baseball,’ because it was one of the few English words I knew. He said something to me and I nodded affirmatively, and it turned out he’d asked, ‘Do you want me to hit you in the face with this?’” Alex ended up with a broken nose. Welcome to America.

Edward would further add: “I wasn’t able to speak English, and used to get my ass kicked because I was a minority [Author’s note: part-Indonesian, part-Dutch, 100 percent immigrant]. All my friends were black, and they stuck up for me… because I was in the same cage as them, literally. In elementary school, there was a special place for us on the playground. And God, those days… Steven and Russell were my first two friends. Sometimes, I think of going back to that school (and) checking the records to find them. They were wonderful human beings… Such a trip.”

Because of the barrage of abuse, Edward held back, too shy and too scared to make a move on his own. The older and bigger Alex took the admirable route some big brothers take which is to protect their little brother. Rather than be in constant battle like many brothers so close in age tend to be, considering the totality of their circumstances, Edward and Alex formed a tight bond that would prove to be unbreakable throughout their lives. Although, possibly in return for protection, Alex was known to engage in hardcore wrestling with Edward, routinely beating his ass with Ed getting in his own licks as best he could. “We were two outcasts that didn’t speak the language and didn’t know what was going on,” said Eddie. “So we became best friends and learned to stick together.”

The brothers continued on, learning more and more the rules of the playground and enjoying the freedom offered to them by their bicycles. In their small backyard, they had their own tree house—a private sanctuary for the two of them to not only commiserate, but also to plot and scheme.

A piano tutor was found that took on the boys with authority. “When we got to the States, my mom and dad did their best to find a really happening concert pianist teacher,” Edward later told
Keyboard
World
magazine. “They found a Russian teacher named Stass Kalvitis.” A well-regarded, however nasty teacher, the septuagenarian instructor was known to have a ruler at the ready to mete out physical discipline upon a young Edward’s hand or face were he to commit the sin of hitting a wrong note, or even being late on the right one. Yet operating under the hopes that the boys could possibly become respectable classical pianists some day, the lessons continued.

Hard Work

To support the struggling family, Jan took many different jobs to make ends meet. He went to work as a janitor for the Masonic Temple. He also worked at the Arcadia Methodist Hospital washing dishes (without steady transportation, Jan often walked the ten-mile round trip). He even occasionally took a job answering telephones during a graveyard shift. Eddie recalled learning how to use “one of those big floor waxers” working with Jan on his janitorial shift. Ed said his dad “worked his ass off” and added that “it shows you that you can make something out of nothing if you put your mind to it.” Eugenia worked as a maid, though she spoke practically no English at the time.

And of course, Jan picked up gigs, primarily getting his start in the area with wedding and oompah bands. Again, Jan was a great player. Eddie remembered: “I knew what music was really about ever since my earliest memory of hearing my dad downstairs in his music room, holding just one note on his clarinet for as long as he could. I’m serious. He wouldn’t just sit there pissing up a rope.”

Through every last little bit of hard work through ungodly hours, Jan did everything he could to make their new life in this strange new land as perfect as it could be. But as a respite from the hours and brutal pace, Jan’s penchant for alcohol consumption was an out-in-the-open situation. It was no family secret. Ed said, “He was a happy guy. He wasn’t an angry drunk.” Edward also later revealed the dual nature of his father that he struggled to come to terms with, yet unfortunately would inevitably emulate: “I think my desire to do my own thing came from my dad. He was a real soulful guy. He played sax and clarinet like a motherfucker. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic.”

Eugenia often oversaw and came down on Jan’s activities and behavior just as if he was one of the boys himself. Edward said, “The whole time I was growing up, my mom used to call me a ‘nothing nut—just like your father.’ When you grow up that way, it’s not conducive to self-esteem.” How sad for a little boy with such unimaginable potential.

Ironically, it turns out the one that really pushed the boys musically, at least in adhering to the strict, paid-for expectations of their tutors, was Eugenia. According to Edward, “My mom was the one pushing us. You know the father in the movie
Shine
. That’s what my mom was like. And my dad, who was a musician, didn’t push us at all.” It was Eugenia who commanded their electric organ for holiday family jam sessions.

Under the vigilance of his mother, Edward entered and won several talent competitions. He later admitted that he actually was not ever able to read sheet music on sight. All of those years of piano lessons under such strict circumstances, Edward Van Halen, the young child, relied solely upon his ability to memorize passages and rehearse them on the Rippen. “I never learned how to read,” he said. “I always fooled the teacher. He’d play the song for me first and I’d watch his fingers and learn the song by ear.”

With Mr. Kalvitis as his instructor, Edward said, “He would have us practice all year for this contest they had at Long Beach City College… . I actually won first place two years in a row. But I
hated
it.” He said, “You sit there and practice one tune for the whole year, and they put you in a category and judge you… . [I won] second place the last time, which kind of showed I was losing interest.”

Discovering Rock Music and Vices

Ed himself admitted his reason to slipping to second place in the piano recital was his waning interest, mainly as it did not function to advance his burgeoning interest in this rock and roll business. As Ed said, “I wasn’t into rock in Holland at all because there really wasn’t much of a scene going on there. When we came to the U.S., I heard Jimi Hendrix and Cream, and I said, ‘Forget the piano, I don’t want to sit down. I want to stand up and be crazy.’” Ed added, more specifically, “We moved to America, and we saw
A
Hard
Day’s
Night
the movie—and I stopped playing piano.” Ed did in fact cease taking formal piano lessons at age twelve. In 2009, upon further reflection, Edward said, “I stopped playing piano for one reason: I was forced to do it and I wasn’t allowed to play what I wanted, so it wasn’t fun. So I rebelled and bought myself a drum kit.”

Twelve would also bring another change, a seemingly random event that truly changed his life forever. Out with his father, Edward was, incredibly, attacked and bitten by a German shepherd. “Alex, my dad, and I were out in Covina, and a German shepherd jumped through the screen door and bit me. It hurt like a motherfucker.” It being 1967, Jan retrieved a flask from his person and dispensed a shot of vodka to his son and followed it up with a Pall Mall cigarette. “Have a shot of vodka, Ed. This will make you feel better,” said his father. Jan is absolved from the judgment of twenty-first century child-raising norms, and Jan most definitely lacked any medical understanding of the incredibly complex genetic nightmare that is alcoholism. Nevertheless, this is the fateful moment that Edward begins what will be a long-term problem for him, and ultimately his family, his band, his image, and his fans. It’s not often that one can pinpoint the exact moment when
that
ball got started rolling, but this was it.

Almost thirty years after the fact, Edward’s recollection was a little different, but no less profound. “I remember when my dad got me into drinking and smoking when I was 12. I was nervous, so he said to me, ‘Here. Have a shot of vodka.’ Boom—I wasn’t nervous anymore. My mom used to buy me cigarettes and it just stuck, it was habit. I don’t drink for the taste of it, I drink to get a fucking buzz. I like to get drunk. I really do.”

A few years earlier, at the house, like seventy million other television viewers, Edward and Alex watched The Beatles perform on
The
Ed
Sullivan
Show
and were blown away. At the time, Edward was actually more impressed with the Dave Clark Five, the first British band after The Beatles to score a U.S. hit with “Glad All Over”—a song he would come to credit repeatedly over the years for his fairly major shift in musical direction that would follow further exposure to other groundbreaking material and artists.

Before heading full-long into the rock world, they started their first “band,” The Broken Combs. They even worked up two original songs while still enrolled in Hamilton Elementary School. The unorthodox lineup featured Edward on piano, Alex on saxophone, with the band rounded out by a drummer, a guitar, and, well, yet another saxophone. While these gigs that took place in the school cafeteria were certainly innocent fun, they had a profound effect on both Alex and Edward in finally reaching the point where they not only belonged, but stood out as unique individuals, extremely talented young men. Edward summarized, “Music was my way of getting around my shyness.”

CHAPTER 3 

The Stringed Instrument

In what would on the surface appear to be simply yet another attempt by their parents to continue training their children in classical music, the boys were made to learn violin when Edward was near the end of elementary school. However, this move marked the moment that stringed instruments were brought into the house; up to that point, they had been confined to keyboard and wind instruments. By the time the boys were in John Marshall Middle School, they were fully entrenched in violin lessons learning traditional classical music pieces, including Kreutzer’s instantly recognizable
Etude
No.
2
.

John Marshall Middle School in Pasadena, California. Photograph © Kevin Dodds

Alex progressed impressively and made All City Orchestra, but according to Edward, “I never did. I didn’t like the songs they made me play so I just started messing around with it and lost interest.” He was easily distracted by the TV, and found himself more focused on plucking out the theme to
Peter
Gunn
on his violin rather than study Paganini’s caprices. This is the first known instance of Edward’s guitarish abilities, revealed when in a form of rebellion against the violin itself; he used it to play along to the theme song to a television show. It’s funny how he used the violin in a tongue-in-cheek manner to amuse himself. He would later revisit his violin years while composing what would ultimately become his most important piece of work.

The violin period lasted about three full years before its interest finally bowed. Hoping to capitalize on Alex’s talent on a stringed instrument, the parent’s next hope was flamenco guitar. Alex was given a nylon-string and an appointment with a flamenco instructor.

Enter the Guitar

Edward’s fascination with the Dave Clark Five got a hold of him and he maintained his resolve to buy a set of drums to study their songs “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces.” Ed admitted, “I never grew up wanting to play guitar.” Although the family was in Eddie’s words “very poor,” they provided Alex with a flamenco guitar, and Edward was provided with a $125 St. George drum kit for which he had to take a paper route to pay back. Ed cracked, “It was the only honest job I ever had was a paper route.”

What follows is the kind of momentous lore that changed the direction of not just the one or two peoples’ lives forever, but would also end up affecting millions upon millions of people around the world. Alex and Ed exchanged instruments. One can imagine how protective Eddie was of his new investment, and $125 was not chump change in 1966. Eleven-year old Edward was getting up at the crack of dawn, 5:00am, retrieving his lot of papers, pedaling his bicycle “with a flat tire” for hours to deliver them all, only to return home day after day to find Alex couldn’t resist the lure of the St. George. Of course, one can’t be sure if it was Alex’s mastery of “Wipeout” that really made Ed throw in the towel on the drums.

Having played nothing but piano and violin up to that point, the drums didn’t make actual music. He heard melodies and other note structures and combinations in his head, not pitter patter. Alex, on the other hand, must have found the drums a stress-relieving break from the piano, the saxophone, and the violin, and thus took to them with enthusiasm.

Once the flamenco guitar was in his hands, Edward quickly learned The Arrows tune “Blues Theme” but decided that this default acoustic was not at all the type of guitar he needed if he was going to undertake this challenge his way. A trip to Sears brought the first electric guitar ever to grace the Van Halen household or the hands of Edward Van Halen: a $100 Teisco Del Ray. A family photo shows a beaming twelve-year-old Edward strapped with the guitar nearly his own size with his grinning mother leaning down over him.

Surf music being the rage of the day (as illustrated by Alex and “Wipeout”), after Edward mastered the bar chord, he focused on “Walk Don’t Run”—the surf masterpiece by The Ventures. In Ed’s words: “The very first thing I learned was a bar chord, E, and then I went [demonstrates going up and down the neck holding a bar chord]—hey, anywhere! But this very first thing I learned—I played it for hours—and I didn’t have an amp—so I would put my guitar on the table—so it would be louder. So it would resonate on the table. So the first thing I learned was… [Ed demonstrated the descending bar-chord sequence, E-D-C-B, for “Walk Don’t Run”] I would just play those four chords for hours. I never learned [demonstrated the very distinctive single-note riff part of the song]. I never learned that! Just—[plays E-D-C-B repeatedly again and laughs].”

With their drumming and guitar chops improving at a rapid pace for the boys, it wasn’t long before they were sitting in with their father at gigs around the L.A. area. The opportunity first arose when Jan needed a last-minute replacement drummer for the wedding band and Alex kept up with their jazz and salsa repertoire. Eddie started out subbing on bass playing the rather strict up-and-down oompah bass lines. The brothers even performed as a duo during intermissions.

As per usual, Jan sent the boys out with a hat to gather tips in addition to the standard pay for the band. After the first gig as a collective family, upon counting out the money in the hat, the tips totaled $22. After distributing $5 each to the boys, the two were left puzzled. According to legend, Jan revealed an ugly truth to them when he said, “Welcome to the music business, boys.” Imagine the tree house conversation that night.

Every gig under the sun was now fair game for Jan and his wunderkinds: weddings, bar mitzvahs, polkas, and oompah music. Edward: “We would play at the La Mirada Country Club. My dad would play at the Continental Club every Sunday night, and we would sit in with him. He’d play at a place called the Alpine Haus off of San Fernando Road in the Valley, and we’d wear the lederhosen. Those polka songs are so weird. They’re all I-IV-V, but they’re like some odd country song.” At an age where most boys were playing baseball—not taking a bat to the face, that is—Edward and his brother were as groomed and as trained and as prepared for a career as musicians as any two young men could possibly have been.

Doing it Wrong

For Edward, his obsession with his Teisco revealed itself to be the ultimate target for punishment by Eugenia. Access to the guitar would be restricted by locking it in a closet for up to a week should Ed be deemed to deserve it after coming home late on a Friday night. Ironically, the worst offense would be forsaking piano lessons, which by that point, must have just been excruciating for him. In Ed’s words, his parents expected him to play “something respectful… not rock and roll.” Eugenia bought him the oft-debated go-to starting point for so many guitar hopefuls and hapless, the
Mel
Bay
Guitar
Book
for
Beginners
. However, Ed took a look and learned all the chords he felt would benefit him and abandoned it. Guitar would not be to him what piano had been: a chore, work, sitting down, being told “you’re doing it wrong,” even though that is still what happened.

The first page of the Mel Bay book shows you the “proper” way to hold a guitar pick, but Ed could not hold it as demonstrated—he held it between his middle finger and his thumb. “My mom goes, ‘You’re doing it wrong,’” he said. “I’m going, ‘ . . . wait a minute. It’s music
theory
not music
fact
 . . . so don’t tell me I’m doing it wrong.” Many years later, Edward said, “When I found the guitar, I refused to take lessons. This was my real emotional release, and I didn’t want to be taught how to approach the instrument.”

By 1968, at thirteen Ed was smack dead in the heart of the onslaught of the heavy rock guitar music of the day. If you indeed are requiring a point of reference for what music was changing the world at that time, a mini-snapshot would include:
Electric
Ladyland
by Jimi Hendrix;
The
Beatles
by The Beatles (aka the “White Album”
)
;
Beggar’s
Banquet
by The Rolling Stones;
Wheels
of
Fire
by Cream;
Vincebus
Eruptum
by Blue Cheer. The political upheaval at the time: MLK/RFK assassinations and the Chicago riots, to name a few. Something was in the air. The thirteen-year-old found himself at just the right place at just the right time to soak up the aggressive and inspired music flowing forth from, arguably, one of the most creative and dangerous eras in the history of rock music and the United States.

Unlike other thirteen-year-olds though, Ed was sitting down with these records and learning them note-for-note, songs like “Crossroads” by Cream. The percentage of human beings on planet earth at that time, not just thirteen-year-olds, that could listen to and play back “Crossroads” note-for-note, without the benefit of charted, technical notation or special equipment of any kind, could not have been—using technical terminology—statistically significant. Ed was also a student of The Yardbirds featuring Jimmy Page as well as The Jeff Beck Group. Alex said, “I could tell by how he was imitating and listening to different people and being able to play the same thing that this guy knew what the hell he was doing.”

Edward eventually began to experience a slow awakening; a self-realization that perhaps he had a potentially unique ability on the guitar that just might be he just might be able to do some serious damage with. He observed: “Some things were easy, some things were hard. I didn’t even think about whether it was easy or hard; it was something I wanted to do. To have fun and feel good about doing (it). Whether it took me a week to learn half a song or one day to learn five songs, I never thought of it that way.”