van halen tour 1978

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How Van Halen Conquered the World in Just 10 Shows

Van Halen 's meteoric rise to fame during their first world tour in 1978 included 10 particularly important performances that helped transform the band from hometown heroes to platinum-selling superstars in just under a year.

One month after the release of their now-landmark debut album , Van Halen hit the road as the opening act for the much-more established Journey . As the year wore on, they'd cross the globe and share the stage with legends such as AC/DC , Black Sabbath , the Rolling Stones and Ted Nugent .

In every case, Van Halen made powerful and lasting impressions on both their peers and the fans in attendance. In fact, their nightly performances were so impressive that Ozzy Osbourne was ready to hand over his group's headlining spot, Journey's crew allegedly messed with Van Halen's sound equipment, and Nugent vowed never to let the group open for him again. Oh, and they also met their future second frontman, got screwed over a bit by Mick Jagger and pulled off an absolutely audacious stunt involving parachutes.

Read on to find out more on these fascinating Van Halen 1978 tour stories.

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March 3, 1978: Van Halen Begins First Tour

At the start of it they were a new and still largely unknown band whose self-titled debut album had been released about three weeks earlier. It was initially supposed to be a few weeks on the road, and eventually lasted eight months with more than 170 shows. By the tour’s end, Van Halen were well on their way to being rock stars.

From March through April the foursome of David Lee Roth (vocals), Eddie Van Halen (guitar), Alex Van Halen (drums) and Michael Anthony (bass) opened for Journey and Montrose.

The first night at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago on March 3, 1978, was shaky. There was little room left onstage after the other acts set up for Van Halen and their gear. They were all wobbly from wearing three-inch platform shoes (soon abandoned for Capezio dance shoes for Roth and sneakers for the rest of the guys). The lighting director’s headset didn’t work. And to add final insult to injury, they’d left on the headlights of their equipment truck, and its battery was dead when the band packed up to leave after the show.

Their 12-song setlist included “Runnin’ With the Devil” and “Feel Your Love Tonight” and ended with their Kinks cover, “You Really Got Me.” That first concert’s setlist is available here .

Watch the band perform a Kinks favorite later that year, recorded for their debut album

Related: How Eddie Van Halen changed rock guitar

The foursome soon found their sea legs and began delivering strong sets that captured the attention of audiences. In May they played Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and France before hooking up mid-month with Black Sabbath in the U.K. to open 19 shows in England and Scotland. Then it was off to Japan for six shows in June.

Back in the States, on July 1, Van Halen were the first act of the day at the debut Texxas Jam at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, sharing the stage with such top acts as Aerosmith, Heart and Ted Nugent. They played other festival dates and a variety of gigs before joining up with Black Sabbath again to open shows in the U.S., Canada, Germany and France. Another round of U.S. arenas and coliseums with Sabbath rounded out the year.

Related: Our Album Rewind of Van Halen’s self-titled debut

By the time the tour was over, Van Halen had earned a platinum album for selling a million copies of their debut disc (it went on to sell 10 million). The classic rock band never again opened a show for another act.

Related: Upon his death, fellow legends paid tribute to EVH

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I remember getting tickets to see my beloved Black Sabbath in Allentown, PA. A band called Van Halen opened up for them and I never heard of them. I figured I would tolerate their 40 minute or whatever set and watch Sabbath take over the night. While Sabbath did not disappoint, Van Halen BLEW them away! I was shocked and the next day went out and bought their album. This article brings back some great ( albeit hazy if you know what I mean) memories!

I had the same experience…but with Aerosmith. I first saw them at Madison Square Garden, but opening for Black Sabbath in 1975. 4 years later I was working closely with Aerosmith, and Steven Tyler passed out during the 2nd show of the “Night in the Ruts” tour.

Saw them March 22 1978 in Albany NY. They were who everyone was talking about after the show.

I saw VH in Nashville, opening for Black Sabbath. Great show, if a bit short.

Sabbath never made it. No one could find Ozzy. BS had played Birmingham, AL the night before.

Rumors were all over the place. He overdosed. He had been kidnapped by Christian fundamentalists. In the end it turned out he fell asleep in the wrong hotel room for a 20 hour nap.

The rest of the story: The promoter gave refunds to everyone who had a ticket. Since most people threw theirs away once the show started, you could pick up a few tix and send them in. So, not only did we get to see the hot new band, we got paid to do so!

Van Halen Setlist at Pogos, Wichita, KS, USA

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Tour: 1978 World Tour Tour statistics Add setlist

On Fire Play Video
I'm the One Play Video
Bass Solo Play Video
Runnin' With the Devil Play Video
Atomic Punk Play Video
Drum Solo Play Video
Little Dreamer Play Video
Ain't Talkin' 'bout Love Play Video
Ice Cream Man ( John Brim cover) Play Video
Eruption Play Video
You Really Got Me ( The Kinks cover) Play Video
Summertime Blues ( Eddie Cochran cover) ( followed by a closing jam ) Play Video

Edits and Comments

5 activities (last edit by ga5150 , 12 Sep 2021, 02:15 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

Ain't Talkin' 'bout Love
Atomic Punk
I'm the One
Little Dreamer
Runnin' With the Devil
Ice Cream Man by John Brim
Summertime Blues by Eddie Cochran
You Really Got Me by The Kinks

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Van halen gig timeline.

Apr 01 1978 Kiel Opera House St. Louis, MO, USA Add time Add time
Apr 02 1978 Music Hall Omaha, NE, USA Add time Add time
Apr 03 1978 Pogos This Setlist Wichita, KS, USA Add time Add time
Apr 04 1978 Cain's Ballroom Tulsa, OK, USA Add time Add time
Apr 05 1978 Murat Theatre Indianapolis, IN, USA Add time Add time

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Album Reviews 1978 Albums , 2013 Reviews , Album Reviews by Ric Albano , American Artists , California Artists , Classic Rock Review Album of the Year , David Lee Roth , Van Halen 4

Buy Van Halen’s Debut Album

Van Halen was formed in Southern California in 1972 by the brothers that give the band its name – guitarist Eddie and drummer Alex Van Halen . Born in the Netherlands, the Van Halen brothers were the sons of jazz musician Jan Van Halen and were “forced” to study classical piano at very young ages. When the brothers began playing rock and roll, Alex was actually on guitar and Eddie was on drums. But once Alex heard his younger brother pick up the guitar and play more naturally, he forced him to switch instruments and took over as drummer. In 1974, the group rented a sound system from David Lee Roth and soon invited him to join as lead vocalist. Roth was the son of a renowned eye surgeon, who had considerable wealth and was the nephew of Manny Roth, who built and owned the New York establishment Cafe Wha? , which featured performers such like Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. Roth possessed an in-your-face charisma that demanded attention (like a true frontman should). While not considered a particularly accomplished crooner, his yelps and screams fit perfectly within the high-energy sound of the group.

Soon after Roth joined, the band decided to replace their current bass player with Michael Anthony , bassist and lead vocalist from a rival band called “Snake”, who impressed the Van Halen brothers during an all-night jam session. In subsequent years, the group played everything from backyard parties on a flatbed truck to some of the most famous night clubs on the Sunset Strip. They forged what Roth calls a “girl-friendliness” to heavy rock. In the summer of 1976, Gene Simmons of Kiss saw Van Halen perform and offered to produce a high end demo tape for the group. After a few recordings in Los Angeles and New York, Simmons opted out of the arrangement after the group declined his suggestion to change their name to “Daddy Longlegs” and Kiss management told Simmons that they had “no chance of making it”.

In mid-1977, Ted Templeman of Warner Bros. Records saw the group perform in Hollywood and was so impressed that he scored Van Halen a recording contract within a week (although the group now laments that this contract was not financially favorable to the members who ended up owing money by the end of 1978). Templeman produced the debut album at Sunset Sound Recorders over a three week period in the Fall of 1977. All of the tracks were recorded with minimal over-dubbing and a simple musical set-up was used to give the record a “live” feel. After the sessions, the group returned to playing small venues in Southern California until the album was released in early 1978.

The album is made of nine original compositions, credited to all four band members, along with two re-interpreted covers. Drummer Alex Van Halen and bassist Michael Anthony drive the opener “Runnin’ with the Devil”, which arrives like an alien visitor and then comes off heavier than it actually is in reality. It is down-and-dirty but short of hedonistic and got its lyrical inspiration from the Ohio Players song “Runnin’ from the Devil”. While released as a single, it failed to chart in 1978 but has become a classic rock radio staple and still a signature tune of Van Halen.

Although very repetitive, “Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love” is an extremely entertaining song which borders on being a Van Halen-flavored punk epic, especially with closing “Hey! Hey! Hey!” chant. Unlike the totally feel-good “You Really Got Me”, this has a much darker feel, especially with the deep bridge lyrics;

“I’ve been to the edge and there I stood and looked down, you know I’ve lost a lot of friends there baby, ain’t got time to mess around…”

“Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love” displays the effortless expression of the band, which replaces the pretension and self-consciousness of many of their late seventies peers. The hyper-blues shuffle of “I’m the One”, which highlights the entertaining showmanship of the band. With dynamics which range from the monstrous rhythmic surge to the later a cappella do-wop section, “I’m The One” is an underrated gem, which concludes the fantastic first side of the album.

Although not nearly as memorable, the second side of Van Halen does contain its share of high moments. “Jamie’s Cryin'” and “Feel Your Love Tonight” shows that the band definitely can play pop rock anthems. These two tracks share similar memorable riffs and catchy harmonized choruses and they both sound like they should have been bigger radio hits. Sandwiched between the two is “Atomic Punk”, an almost experimental song with intro guitar effects giving way to theatrical verses. However, this song’s title may be more provocative than the overall tune is actually substantive and the disorganized return after the guitar lead appears to be one of the few faux pas of the recording.

“Little Dreamer” is the finest tune on side two and may be the one true band effort on Van Halen . Eddie comes down to Earth with a standard riff and more subtle theatrics while the rest of the group steps forward as Michael Anthony’s bouncing bass contrasts yet compliments Alex Van Halen’s steady drum beat and Roth’s actual singing is at its finest on this record. “Little Dreamer” also offers a preview of some of the more substantive music featured on upcoming albums Van Halen II and Women and Children First . “Ice Cream Man” is cover from Chicago blues artist John Brim, which features David Lee Roth solo on acoustic guitar and vocals for a couple of turns before it finally breaks into a full-fledged rocker, ala Led Zeppelin. Unfortunately, the most forgettable song on the album is the finale “On Fire”, making for the only true weak spot on this incredible debut. While Eddie’s guitars are still impressive, the overall vibe makes really feels more like weak, hair-band material from a future Van Halen clone.

Van Halen initially peaked at #19 on the U.S. Albums chart and made a reappearance in 1984. By the end of the century, it was certified a Diamond album (over ten million copies sold or 20x platinum) and it made yet another appearance on the album charts in 2012 to coincide with Van Halen’s latest reunion. The band toured for nearly a year as the opening act for Black Sabbath before returning to the studio in late 1978 to record the follow-up Van Halen II , an album similar in style to their debut.

Part of Classic Rock Review’s celebration of 1978 albums.

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"Ice Cream Man" by Van Halen | River of Rock June 13, 2016 @ 10:10 am

[…] The number six song on our Top 9 Summertime countdown extends across the spectrum from the innocent to the seedy. “Ice Cream” man was written and released in the early 1950s by Chicago bluesman John Brim but made most famous a quarter century later when Van Halen included it on their phenomenal debut album. […]

Post 1 – ASEM – Site Title July 26, 2017 @ 1:51 am

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Discussion Post #1 – Vellichor 94 August 2, 2017 @ 9:03 pm

RIP Eddie Van Halen, my favorite guitarist.

Eddie Van Halen: The Joy and Pain of Rock’s Last Guitar Superhero

By Brian Hiatt

Brian Hiatt

I n 1983, when Eddie Van Halen first built his beloved 5150 home studio in the hills near Hollywood, he decorated its kitchen with a photograph of a squat old apartment building in a city more than 5,000 miles away. Every time he’d head to the fridge for a beer during his all-night recording sessions, which was often, he’d see the home where he spent most of his first seven years, at 59 Rozemarijnstraat in the city of Nijmegen, in the Gelderland province of the Netherlands, near the German border.

Eddie, the grinning, all-American guitar genius and musical mastermind for the most distinctly Southern Californian band since the Beach Boys, was a biracial immigrant who barely spoke a word of English until he was seven years old. His father was Dutch, and his mother was born in Indonesia, with Indonesian and Dutch ancestry. In the band’s early days, when Eddie and his older brother, Alex, Van Halen ’s drummer, got into occasional screaming arguments, they would lapse into Dutch.

“It was one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen,” their onetime manager Noel Monk wrote. “These two ordinarily placid rockers, who usually spoke in a sort of pothead-surf patois, suddenly nose to nose, spitting and snarling and growling at each other in a foreign language, as if they had become possessed.”

Visit Our Special Tribute Package for More on Eddie Van Halen’s Music and Influence

Eddie, who died of cancer on October 6th, 2020, was, at his core, an eternally boyish, sweet-natured prodigy. The joy he conveyed onstage with guitar in hand was genuine and profound. But there were also darker currents in his emotional life he couldn’t express in words, even to those closest to him. He avoided the ups and downs of high school social life, and sometimes school itself, by holing up in his bedroom with his guitar and a six-pack. He went on to spend a good portion of his life in that realm of pure music, retreating into endless, meditative, alcohol-fueled jams in hotel rooms or in his studio. “It’s the universal vibration,” he told me in 2007. “It heals.”

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“When he played,” his ex-wife Valerie Bertinelli wrote, “he disappeared into a world that was his. There he was most comfortable, and whatever he shared was of his own choosing. This interior world would confound, anger, and frustrate me to no end later on, but early on it was seductive.”

He tended to avoid confrontation, and let his frustrations build. He didn’t protest when frontman David Lee Roth and producer Ted Templeman used a funky synth riff Eddie had intended for an original song to anchor the band’s 1982 cover of “Dancing in the Street,” but then complained bitterly about the seemingly minor slight for decades.

You can, at times, hear anger and pain in his playing, alongside the ever-present mischief and unearthly virtuosity. It’s perhaps most evident on Van Halen’s heaviest album, 1981’s Fair Warning , but from early on, his own mother heard all of his bent high notes as “crying.”

There was a fair amount of self-loathing in his makeup. His mom pushed classical piano studies so hard that Eddie took to casually comparing his upbringing to the movie Shine , in which parental pressure drives a musical prodigy into a mental breakdown. “The whole time I was growing up, my mom used to call me a ‘nothing nut — just like your father,’” he told Guitar World . “When you grow up that way, it’s not conducive to self-esteem.”

At the same time, as chronicled in Greg Renoff’s indispensable early-years bio Van Halen Rising , the Van Halen parents were supportive enough to stretch their finances to buy Alex a drum kit and Eddie a Gibson Les Paul in 1969. Eddie was still living with his mom and dad at the age of 25, when he had already made multiple platinum albums. At that point, his mom was still convinced it wouldn’t last, and that he’d have to go back to school.

At the height of his early success, with “Jump” all over MTV, he confessed to fearing he was “stupid,” and in another interview the same year, called himself “selfish” and a “sick fuck.” “Ed – you are a good man,” Bertinelli wrote in her memoir’s dedications. “Believe it. When you do, you’ll be free.” Even as he was widely acclaimed as the most exciting guitar player alive, even as Templeman was comparing him to Bach and Charlie Parker in the same sentence, Eddie was plagued by insecurity, requiring liberal doses of alcohol and sometimes cocaine to overcome his anxiety. “Every time I walk into the studio it seems like the first time,” he said in 1996. “It’s like I’ve never written a song before. I am just as scared.”

Like his father and brother, he was an alcoholic. In the entire first decade of the band’s success, he didn’t have a single sober day. “I’m actually a shy, nervous person,” he said in 1998. “I used to be easily intimidated. That’s why I used to drink.” Despite years of struggle, he didn’t achieve lasting sobriety until 2008.

Van Halen changed the way electric guitarists played, the sounds they strove for, even the physical construction of the instruments they used, with multiple patents to his name (and other technical breakthroughs, he credibly maintained, that were ripped off and capitalized upon before he learned how to use the patent office). He single-handedly gave the electric guitar an extra decade or more of cultural prominence, even as he’d try to duck blame for a generation of teased-hair shredders who “played like typewriters.”

But he wasn’t just a guitar player. Eddie was an award-winning piano prodigy before he hit puberty, and there were periods when he abandoned guitar altogether for as long as a year, writing exclusively on piano and synthesizers. He took up the cello seriously in midlife, playing along to Yo Yo Ma recordings for hours late at night. Friends told tales of him picking up unexpected instruments — a saxophone, a harmonica — and playing them at a seemingly professional level.

His most unbreakable bonds were familial. He and Alex played together from their preteen years all the way up to the end of Eddie’s career; in their first band, the Broken Combs, Eddie was on piano and Alex played saxophone. They had an uncanny musical bond, following each other’s rhythmic twists as if they shared a single musical intelligence. “We were probably the only rhythm section in rock & roll that was guitar and drums, not bass and drums,” Eddie told me.

Early in their marriage, he told Bertinelli he’d like to have enough kids to form an entire band. When Bertinelli became pregnant with their only child, Wolfgang, Eddie played guitar for him in utero. His son turned out to be a gifted multi-instrumentalist from an early age. At 15, Wolfgang joined Van Halen on bass, and Eddie was overjoyed (displaced bassist Michael Anthony less so). “I pick him up from school every day,” Eddie told me, with obvious pride, “and we make music. The kid kicks ass.”

Lead singers would come and go and come back, but Van Halen wasn’t the kind of group Eddie or Alex could or would leave (despite the occasional threat by Eddie during the original Roth years). It was their name, their band. Eddie’s tenure in Van Halen was temporary, he once joked: It would last “only as long as I live.”

Eddie and Alex’s father, Jan, was a hard-drinking, classically trained saxophonist and clarinetist who blew blazing solos in big bands. After fighting in the Dutch resistance in World War II, Jan traveled to Indonesia, in its last days as a Dutch colony, and married a woman he met there, Eugenia van Beers. When she and her husband returned to the Netherlands and started a family, they faced overt racism, even as Jan’s musical career was picking up. “My mom became a second-class citizen,” Eddie recalled, “because she was Indonesian.” With 75 guilders and a piano to their name, his parents, already in their forties, took Eddie and Alex on a nine-day boat journey to America.

Jan paid his way by playing in the boat’s band, and Eddie and Alex performed as well. Eddie never forgot that their performance earned them a place at the captain’s table for dinner. The boat landed in New York, and after a cross-country train trip, the family settled in Pasadena, California. Their new life in a new country was, at least at first, a complete disappointment. Eugenia cleaned houses, and Jan walked six miles each way to wash dishes at a hospital. Big bands were dead, but Jan rebuilt a semblance of a music career, playing in a polka band that would occasionally have Alex subbing on drums.

Eddie, meanwhile, was bullied in school, at least by the white kids. “I wasn’t able to speak English and used to get my ass kicked because I was a minority,” he said in 1998. “All my friends were black, and they stuck up for me.”

Even as Eddie and Alex endured piano lessons from an elderly Russian musician who slapped errant hands with a ruler, life in America finally started to show promise when they heard rock & roll. When Eddie encountered the snare-heavy beat of the Dave Clark Five’s fantastically noisy “Glad All Over,” he was convinced he had found his musical destiny: He’d become a rock & roll drummer like Clark.

“My brother and I used to build model cars,” Eddie told me, “and after we blew up the model cars with cherry bombs and lighter fluid, we’d stick all the plastic parts back in the box and pound on the box, trying to make it sound like their records.” He got a paper route to pay for a drum kit, even as Alex started taking flamenco guitar lessons. “And while I was out throwing papers, my brother started playing my drums; he got better than me, so I said, ‘OK, fuck you, I’ll play your guitar.’”

Eddie and Alex played together endlessly as kids, while other musicians came and went. Their first gigging band was the Trojan Rubber Company, and around 1971 they’d formed a power trio named Genesis, eventually adding a kid named Mark Stone on bass. Eddie served double duty as frontman. While he could pull it off — his harmonies with Michael Anthony would become a backbone of Van Halen’s sound — the vocals were mostly an afterthought.

In practically every interview he’d give later on, Eddie would tout Eric Clapton’s Cream-era playing as his sole influence. Entranced by what he heard as a saxophone-like tone and approach in Clapton’s playing at that time, he learned his solos note by note. On the wall of the bedroom Alex and Eddie shared were posters of Clapton and Ginger Baker. Cream, Eddie once told Guitar World , “made music exciting in a way I don’t think people really understood. It was almost as if the lyric and actual song structure were secondary. ‘Let’s get this shit over with so we can make music and see where we land tonight.’”

As he spent most of the Seventies playing with his brother in what became perhaps the greatest cover band in the state of California, Eddie also absorbed the style of just about every great hard-rock and metal guitar player, covering the Who’s Pete Townshend, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons (whose part on “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” is notably proto-Van Halen-esque, from its chugging riff to a quick two-hands-on-the-fretboard moment in the solo), and countless others. (Later, he’d get into fusion-era Jeff Beck, and take particular inspiration from the fluid, harmonically adventurous playing of Allan Holdsworth.)

Early on, the sheer speed of the playing on two songs caught Eddie’s ear and transformed his sense of his instrument’s possibilities: Alvin Lee on Ten Years After’s “I’m Going Home” and the underrated Jim McCarty on Cactus’ frantic version of “Parchman Farm.” As his own hands picked up velocity, Eddie became a local legend by the age of 15, an unknown kid already outplaying any rock guitarist his audiences had ever heard, backed by a drummer who could follow him anywhere.

By 1972, Genesis became Mammoth, after realizing their old name was taken by a certain British prog act. Mammoth were the rowdiest and most talented band in Pasadena’s thriving, police-hounded backyard party scene, where hundreds of sunburnt kids would gather near the pool of any house that vacationing parents were foolish enough to leave in the custody of teenagers.

An ambitious, cocky, charismatic, off-puttingly motormouthed local kid named David Roth soon set his sights on the band, offering himself up as a new frontman. They considered it, until they determined that he could not, in fact, sing. Undeterred, Roth went off and started his own competing party band, working hard on his vocals. Eventually he made it into Mammoth, in part because the band was already renting the PA system purchased for him by his dad, a highly successful eye surgeon. The band began practicing in Roth’s spacious basement.

Roth had his sights on the Hollywood clubs and well beyond. He pushed the band into more concise, poppier, danceable territory, even getting them to cover K.C. and the Sunshine Band, James Brown, and the Isley Brothers (though their version of the Isleys’ “It’s Your Thing” somehow sounded like Black Sabbath). The Van Halen brothers were musical purists, stepping onstage in street clothes, aiming to impress with note-perfect covers of album sides. For Eddie, any frontman would always just be a “throat,” almost a necessary evil, and Roth, as Eddie once put it, was “no opera singer.” But it was his showmanship and sex appeal, along with his love of pop and R&B, that pushed the band out of backyards. It was Roth’s idea, in the end, to name the band Van Halen.

In 1974, the band recruited a new bassist, Michael Anthony, a good-humored guy whose sturdy physique reflected his playing style. He had been the lead singer in another popular party band, and his powerhouse background vocals, in harmony with Eddie’s, helped create a new signature sound for Van Halen, bringing in a hint of sunshiny pop that few other hard-rock or metal acts of the era would even attempt.

When Eddie was 12, his dad gave him his first drink and cigarette, in a misguided effort to calm his nerves (young Eddie was either upset after an attack by a German shepherd or nervous before a musical performance, depending on the account). By the mid-Seventies, Eddie’s drinking was starting to ramp up, and he was already using cocaine. By 1977, the drug was enough of a staple of the band’s daily lives that they had a pet name for it, “Krell.” There were some early warning signs of trouble: One day in 1972, Eddie snorted PCP he thought was coke and suffered a near-fatal overdose, ending up in the hospital.

As the band began working original songs into their set, moving up in the club world from the sleazy, unhip Gazzarri’s to the more desirable Starwood, the prospect of a record deal loomed. After a false start with Gene Simmons of Kiss that ran afoul of that band’s internal politics, they signed with Warner Bros. in February 1977. Templeman, a Warner exec, became their producer, and his commercial instincts and deep regard for Eddie’s musicianship served them well.

In an evolutionary leap that required true genius, Eddie’s already spectacular playing suddenly transformed in 1977. It started late the previous year, when he assembled a Stratocaster copy, gutted it, and stuck in a humbucking pickup, the kind usually reserved for Gibson guitars. He’d eventually douse the thing in spray paint — black paint on a white body at first, later to become red.

“I said, ‘Eh, I’m gonna put some masking tape on it, paint it black, take it off, and see what it looks like,’” he told me. “Went to the bicycle store, bought some spray-paint cans, went to my backyard, just hung it up with a coat hanger, and painted it.” The Frankenstrat would become one of the most famous instruments in rock history, ending up on display in the Museum of Modern Art. It looked like Van Halen sounded: “barely controlled chaos,” as Eddie put it to me.

Armed with the Frankenstrat, Eddie began making extensive and inventive use of the note-warping whammy bar, teasing out elephant roars, horse whinnies, rocket-engine bursts of noise, and disorienting octave jumps. He could make it sound like his guitar was laughing in disbelief at his own virtuosity. Many post-Hendrix guitarists had avoided the whammy bar, because it knocked guitars out of tune. Eddie, never a Hendrix devotee, had long admired Ritchie Blackmore’s use of it on 1970’s Deep Purple in Rock, apparently filing the technique away for seven years.

Eddie’s other 1977 transformation was a true paradigm shift: He started two-hand tapping. Eddie was far from the first player to use his right hand along with his left to fret and pull off notes (Steve Hackett of Genesis was one of many predecessors), but no one else had employed the technique anywhere near as extensively or effectively. Now, his solos were spiked with hornlike note flurries and liquid neoclassical arpeggios.

It didn’t hurt that he already had one of the best guitar tones in rock, thanks in part to the brilliant innovation of using a Variac voltage limiter to allow himself to crank his amp to creamy — or Cream-y — levels of tube-melting distortion without excessive volume. Star Wars hit theaters that same summer, and the bursts of impossible speed that the two-hand technique brought to his playing were the sonic equivalent of the Millennium Falcon blazing through hyperspace.

Van Halen seems to have gotten immediate inspiration for the move from guitarists Harvey Mandel and Rick Derringer, according to Renoff. But Eddie told me, in an anecdote he often repeated, that he’d started pondering the possibilities of two hands on the fretboard in the early Seventies, after watching Jimmy Page do one-handed pull-offs on Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker.” (Eddie maintained that he’d been actually using the trick since 1972, but no one seems to have witnessed that, and there’s no evidence of it on bootlegs and demos. Even geniuses can be unreliable narrators.)

“Basically all it is, is, you get an extra finger on this hand,” Eddie told me, indicating his left. “And you can put it anywhere you want and you can add other fingers. Yeah, I was watching Jimmy Page go” — he sang a hammer-on riff — “and I was going, ‘Oh, OK. I can play like that.’ You wouldn’t know if I was using this finger or this one. But you just kind of move it around, and it’s like you got one big hand there, buddy. That’s a hell of a spread!”

In May 1978, Eddie Van Halen sat in a Parisian hotel room, weeping. His band had a hit debut album, had just played their first European headlining dates, and would soon embark on a tour opening for Black Sabbath, where they would routinely blow the older band off the stage. But Eddie was done. “I want to go back to L.A.,” he told his then-tour manager, Noel Monk, according to Monk’s memoir, Running With the Devil. “I don’t want to do this anymore.… Fucking David — that asshole — he wants to be a big rock star.… I don’t want to be a rock star. I hate this bullshit!” Monk reminded Eddie how many people were counting on him, and that if the success continued, he’d be able to buy his parents a house. The crisis was averted.

Once Van Halen finally managed to get signed, there had only been a few other speed bumps. Templeman, unimpressed with David Lee Roth’s vocal skills, briefly considered having the band bring in sturdy former Montrose frontman Sammy Hagar. But Roth kept working on his singing, even taking vocal lessons, and Templeman came to appreciate Roth’s gift as a stylist and lyricist. With Eddie on guitar, there was already so much music in Van Halen that Roth’s frequent jive-y detours into talk-singing and just plain talking were as clever as they were necessary, making room for the band’s other assets.

The band began recording their still-astonishing self-titled debut album in late August 1977. Proving the value of a prolonged party-band apprenticeship, they knocked the whole thing out in two weeks, capturing near-perfect live takes in the studio. (Roth and Templeman quietly worked together for hours afterward to capture acceptable lead vocals.) They spent only $54,000 in the process, according to Renoff, a pittance even for the time. Along the way, engineer Donn Landee was savvy enough to hit “record” while Eddie was running through his stage guitar solo, which became the epochal instrumental “Eruption.” Even as generations of guitarists risked tendinitis trying to master the piece, Eddie always maintained that he could’ve played it better.

In the wildly productive years between 1976 and ’78, Van Halen had amassed so much material that they were able to draw on the stockpile during the entire Roth era. Which is fortunate, because they released an album a year five years in a row under increasing commercial pressure from Warner Bros., while maintaining a brutal touring schedule. A lot of their evolution had already happened: Even some songs that seemed like giant leaps ahead, such as 1980’s impressive, Who-like multipart suite “In a Simple Rhyme,” actually predated their record deal.

The band rarely had enough time in the studio, and on 1981’s Fair Warning, Eddie began staying up all night with engineer Landee, lacing the songs with overdubs and some of the most unhinged solos he’d ever play. It was also, in his mind, a way of pulling the album away from Roth and Templeman without face-to-face conflict. As Eddie saw it, Templeman and Roth started to fear he was “out of control.”

“He sat there with his engineer and tinkered with ideas until he either got them the way he wanted,” Bertinelli wrote, “or ran out of booze, coke, energy, or inspiration, or all of the above.” Eddie felt endless pressure, she continued, to come up with “something better, something catchier, something Dave approved of, something the record company liked.” Around that time, Eddie revealed later, he was so frustrated with Roth that he actually contemplated quitting the band. As a rule, Eddie wrote riffs and instrumental tracks, not finished songs. He needed his singer to write vocal melodies and lyrics, which only added to his continual frustration.

On April 11th, 1981, 18 days before the release of Fair Warning, Eddie married Bertinelli, then a 20-year-old TV actress. He had met her only eight months earlier. No one in the band was particularly happy about it, least of all Roth, who already resented the level of attention Eddie was getting. (Rather churlishly, Roth wrote in his memoir that he had “no interest” in Bertinelli when she’d first come backstage to meet the band the year before.) Bertinelli wrote in her memoir that Eddie claimed to have overheard Roth saying, “That fucking little prick, not only is he winning all the guitar awards, he’s also the first to marry a movie star.”

Van Halen and Bertinelli fell in love on the road, while the band supported 1980’s Women and Children First. A Van Halen tour was, to say the least, a strange place to start a monogamous relationship. It was Roth and Alex who took close interpersonal contact with fans to new levels, with the singer inventing a system of rewards for roadies who wrangled attractive young women backstage. But the only member who avoided road hookups altogether was long-married Michael Anthony.

“We were punch-drunk in love,” Bertinelli wrote. “And just plain punch-drunk. We drank Southern Comfort and vodka tonics. He also drank his Schlitz malt liquor.… He was almost nocturnal, and if I hadn’t stayed up drinking and doing coke with him, we would have been on completely different schedules.” After the tour, they moved in together and started planning a wedding, filling out forms for the priest while each held their own vial of cocaine. The wedding day was a near-disaster, with Eddie getting so wasted that he threw up before the ceremony even started.

Fair Warning became a favorite of serious Van Halen fans, and the VH album of choice for Nineties alt-rock stars including Billy Corgan and Dave Navarro. It was also the slowest-selling LP of the Roth era. Band members decided they needed to stop rushing through their albums, so they came up with a plan that would entirely backfire. They recorded a cover of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” as a standalone single, figuring it would be their only release of 1982. Instead, it became a pop hit so big that Warner Bros. demanded an accompanying album, immediately. They had to bang out an LP in 12 days, and Eddie was particularly unhappy about it.

Diver Down included no fewer than five cover songs, plus two guitar instrumentals, including the remarkable “Cathedral,” on which Eddie uses his volume knob to create organ-like swells, turning it so fast and hard that he ruined the mechanism. There was a lot of that kind of destructive friction in Van Halen at the time: Eddie hated cover songs; Roth despised Roth-free guitar instrumentals. (“Fuck the guitar-hero shit,” Roth would say, according to Eddie. “We’re a band!”) Roth was a gifted narcissist who grated on almost everyone but his fans; Eddie was a quiet-to-a-fault virtuoso who was drinking too much and doing too much coke. Alex was taking in so much alcohol that, within a couple of years, he’d complain of hallucinations.

In the summer of 1982, Eddie received a phone call from Quincy Jones, who was working on Michael Jackson’s Thriller. They had a hot R&B-rock song called “Beat It,” with a riff and rhythm guitar from Eddie’s friend Steve Lukather, and they needed a guitar solo to match. Eddie shrugged and said sure. He came into Westlake Studio, suggested a few changes in the song’s arrangement, and then laid down a 30-second solo that would become the most-heard bit of music he’d ever make, a growling, dive-bombing, squalling mini-masterpiece that concluded with a blast of finger-tapping, a speed-picked trill, and one last show-off-y tug on his whammy bar. The fresh context was a reminder of how exciting Eddie’s playing could be, as dazzling as the moonwalk Jackson would soon debut.

Eddie didn’t tell his bandmates about his work that day. And for reasons he had trouble articulating, he didn’t accept any payment or royalties for his work on “Beat It.” Instead, if you believe Roth’s account, Eddie would end up paying a heavy price. Roth learned of the collaboration the following year, when he heard “Beat It” blasting out of a car parked outside an L.A. convenience store. By that time, Eddie had also recorded a couple of instrumentals for one of Bertinelli’s TV movies, and was contributing solo tracks for the soundtrack of the Cameron Crowe-penned film The Wild Life.

In his memoir, Roth described that moment as a turning point in his thinking: “It was at that time, I said to myself, ‘How many solo projects will he do while I stand guard at the gate of dreams worth dying for here?’ Saying, ‘No, no, I’m not going to act, I’m not going to write, I’m not going to be on television.…’ It was at that point I said maybe I’ll do something on the side as well.” Within two years after the release of “Beat It,” that decision would lead to the end of the original band.

During the Diver Down sessions, Eddie tried to interest his collaborators in a synthesizer piece he was particularly excited about, built around a catchy sequence of ascending chords. It was quickly tossed aside. Eddie played that initial version of what became “Jump” over the phone for journalist Jas Obrecht in 1982, and judging from the leaked audio of that conversation, it was still undeveloped, with the main chord progression almost buried amid frantic, trippy keyboard noodling.

Ever brand-conscious, Roth was wary of synths, fearing sounds associated with New Wave would offend Van Halen fans’ tribal loyalties. “We had intentionally stayed away from keyboards,” he said in 2004, “because up till then, what instruments you used indicated which neighborhood you were part of.” Templeman, meanwhile, felt that if Van Halen had to use keyboards, they should be as ferocious as Eddie’s guitars, as in Women and Children First ’s “And the Cradle Will Rock,” built around a heavily distorted Wurlitzer part.

So when sessions began in 1983 for what would become 1984 , and Eddie again presented a version of the “Jump” track to the band, there was again a distinct lack of excitement. But by that point, Eddie had a secret weapon. On his property off Coldwater Canyon, he had recently broken ground on what, as far as the city zoning commission was concerned, was supposed to be a racquetball court. It was, instead, the first incarnation of his 5150 Studios, a clubhouse where he could record all night — or for days on end — while maintaining complete control.

In an overnight session at 5150 early on, Eddie and Alex laid down a basic track for “Jump” that suddenly made the song undeniable. As Templeman recalls in his recent memoir, Ted Templeman: A Platinum Producer’s Life in Music , he disliked the clean, bright sound Eddie settled upon for the main chordal riff, comparing it to an organ in a baseball stadium. But in the track Alex and Eddie created, “Jump” drew its hard-rock power almost entirely from a fierce drum performance (on an electronic Simmons kit) that offset any synth cheesiness. Roth took a cassette into his 1951 Mercury convertible and blasted the recording over and over for an hour while he wrote lyrics and came up with a melody. It took about an hour, and when Roth was done, Van Halen had officially written their biggest-ever song.

The rest of the album did not go as smoothly. Eddie and engineer Donn Landee were in a deep mind-meld, avoiding Roth and Templeman. The pair would record for days straight and then crash. (Eddie once called Landee, with deep admiration, “a man-child genius on the edge of insanity,” though it was unclear which of the two men he was really describing.) In the end, the situation deteriorated to the point where Roth and Templeman were mixing one version of the album, while Landee and Eddie finished another entirely separate mix, using master tapes they were literally hiding from their producer.

In the end, the album was, for the most part, brilliant, with an effervescent air and youthful energy that betrayed zero signs of its ugly birth. “Panama,” based around a sparkling monster of a riff, was a perfect Van Halen song, with one of Roth’s greatest vocal performances. The shuffle “Hot for Teacher” featured a startling drum performance by Alex, pummeling his digital kit with the same disconcerting speed his brother mustered on his fretboard.

The tour featured a band that was hitting its peak, and about to fall off a cliff. Eddie and Roth, never exactly pals, had begun avoiding each other as much as possible offstage. “By mid-1984, Van Halen was a glossy but depressed replica of its former self,” wrote Monk, who was in his final days as the band’s manager by that point. Eddie, for one, had a personal cocaine dealer following him around the world, kept lines of coke on one of his onstage amps, and took to chugging vodka straight from the bottle, according to Monk.

Roth was increasingly imperious, and always in character, even in private rehearsals. He banned band wives from a Life Magazine shoot, hired two little people as his backstage bodyguards for what he intended as comic effect, and held court after shows, chiding the crew and his bandmates for mistakes, as if possessed by the Van Halens’ old piano teacher. “I was domineering,” Roth acknowledged in 2004. “I was demanding. I was exacting.”

Midway through, Roth and the Van Halens found something to agree upon, according to Monk: Unhappy with Anthony’s lack of songwriting input, they asked him to sign a document retroactively revoking his writing and publishing royalties from 1984. In the end, he signed it, to Monk’s horror.

In August 1984, as the band prepared for the final leg of the 1984 tour, Roth informed his bandmates that he had already recorded a solo cover of “California Girls,” and planned to release it as part of a solo EP that January. They were not thrilled. Things only got worse when Roth practically took over MTV early the next year with the garish hit videos for that song and his “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” medley. Roth became convinced he was destined for multimedia superstardom, and began writing a script for a movie he planned to star in, imagining that Van Halen could do the score. Eddie found the idea insulting.

In early 1985, the band attempted rehearsals for what was supposed to be Van Halen’s next album, without much progress. “There were constant delays and screaming,” Roth wrote. “The chemistry had turned rotten.” Eddie later said that Roth didn’t want to make the album (though the singer had told David Letterman he was looking forward to it that January); Roth, in turn, claimed the brothers didn’t want to tour anymore, though it seems more likely that they just didn’t like Roth’s idea of going back on tour before they had completed the new album.

Either way, Roth quit. The singer recalls warning Eddie about his brother’s drinking; Eddie remembers Roth suggesting he might come back after his movie, which was never actually made. As inevitable as the split may have seemed, Eddie was shell-shocked. “He really hurt me,” Eddie told journalist Steve Rosen in 1986. “At the height of our career, when you work at something that long, and someone just pulls the plug on you? That’s, y’know, kind of cruel.”

The second incarnation of Van Halen began , appropriately enough, at a repair shop for ultra-luxury sports cars. A former Ferrari test-driver named Claudio Zampolli in Van Nuys was the go-to mechanic and sales broker for temperamental Italian cars and the rich L.A. guys who owned them, and his clients included both Eddie Van Halen and the journeyman rock singer Sammy Hagar, of “I Can’t Drive 55” fame. The Van Halens had always admired Hagar’s work in his first band, Montrose, whose debut album had been co-produced by Templeman.

At Zampolli’s shop, Eddie admired a rare Ferrari that turned out to belong to Hagar. Zampolli, who knew of the Van Halens’ dilemma, handed over the singer’s number and urged him to call, which he did, right from the shop’s phone. Hagar showed up at 5150 in a pressed Armani jacket, only to encounter two drunk brothers in a filthy studio that “smelled like the worst bar on the planet,” as he wrote in his memoir. Beer cans, cigarette ashes, and old pizza boxes were everywhere.

Hagar, who was eight years older, didn’t know what to make of it all. But when he stepped to the microphone and started improvising over what would become the song “Summer Nights,” they all realized they had, at the very least, a viable product. Or as Warner Bros. exec Mo Ostin put it after he heard the conglomeration, which he thought they should rename Van Hagar: “I smell money.”

The band had considered other possibilities for a singer, including at least one woman, Scandal singer Patty Smyth (a friend Bertinelli feared Eddie was in love with, though Smyth always insisted their relationship was platonic). Eddie had talked to Pete Townshend about some kind of collaboration, before literally losing the Who maestro’s phone number. That discussion was apparently separate from another abandoned idea: an all-star Van Halen album where singers from Joe Cocker to Phil Collins would appear. Former Journey singer Steve Perry also recently told Rolling Stone that he got a call from Eddie during this period, but nothing came of that either.

Hagar was a hard-working, unpretentious dude, a naturally melodic songwriter with a likable manner and an undeniably powerful singing voice, a contained howl that always sounded thoroughly commercial, radio-ready. He was armed with some of the best business instincts in rock, but unlike Roth, he was no intellectual — his subtext-free lyrics were often as undercooked as they were crass. (“Wham, bam, oh, Amsterdam,” he would sing, in a dubious celebration of Eddie’s birthplace.)

The new lineup quickly recorded its first album together, 5150 , and it charted higher than any release of the Roth era, hitting Number One. The follow-up, 1988’s OU812, also topped the charts. The eccentricity and experimentation of the best of the Roth era was increasingly hard to find in Eddie’s songwriting, which was leaning toward sleek, concise constructions, with more and more keyboards.

The band still managed some pleasingly unhinged hard-rock songs. But on other tracks, Eddie’s newly streamlined tendencies — combined with Hagar’s polished voice — pushed Van Halen toward the gleaming corporate-rock of Journey, a band the wild, old Van Halen mocked. Even so, Van Halen had survived a lead-singer transplant, an all-but-impossible feat, and it was Eddie’s talent that made it possible.

With Hagar, Van Halen went from “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” to howling about the subject repeatedly. On 5150 alone there was “Why Can’t This Be Love,” with the fantastically insipid line “Only time will tell if we stand the test of time,” and “Love Walks In,” followed on later albums by “When It’s Love” and “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You.” (At least “Don’t Tell Me (What Love Can Do),” which attempted to address the death of Kurt Cobain, took a slightly different tack, at the Van Halen brothers’ insistence.)

In December 1986, with the new band fresh off the road from its first tour together, Jan Van Halen died, after suffering a heart attack earlier that year. Told by his doctors that alcoholism had weakened his health, Jan asked his sons to stop drinking in his last days. Alex, always an even heavier drinker than Eddie, managed to get sober by the following spring. Eddie just wasn’t ready. If anything, his alcohol and coke intake ramped up as he mourned.

In the fall of 1987, Bertinelli left him for the first time, and the couple was separated for three weeks. She returned and staged a tearful intervention for Eddie, who shipped off to Betty Ford for his first attempt at rehab. It didn’t take. “After I got out of Betty Ford,” Eddie told Rolling Stone’ s Steve Pond in 1998, “I immediately went on a drinking binge, and I got a fucking drunk-driving ticket on my motorcycle.”

Meanwhile, OU812 ended up selling less than 5150, and the band’s attempt to move up to stadiums didn’t quite work. Eddie and Alex again teamed up on Anthony, reducing his share in the band’s partnership to 10 percent. Incredibly, according to Hagar’s book, the singer was the only member of the band who voted against the move — Anthony, who knew he mostly played what Eddie told him to, came out in favor of reducing his own stake.

The night the Eighties ended, Eddie was with Bertinelli’s family in Malibu. Perhaps fearing the end of the decade he’d help define, he was downing Jägermeister and turning belligerent. When he decided he’d drive away, he and his wife tussled over the car keys. Bertinelli’s dad, a boxer in his youth, punched Eddie in the face, shattering his cheekbone. Eddie ended up in rehab again, for 28 days. As 1990 went on, Eddie and his wife reconnected, and by June, Bertinelli was pregnant. Wolfgang Van Halen was born on March 16th, 1991. “Sometimes I caught Ed staring at Wolfie with a look of disbelief,” Bertinelli wrote, “as if he couldn’t have helped create something that miraculous.”

Eddie had curtailed his drinking during the beginning of the pregnancy, but the pressure of writing for what became Van Halen’s third album with Hagar, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, ramped his intake back up. The album was the most ferocious of the Hagar era, with Alex returning to a real drum kit, and Eddie taking a power drill to his guitar on the fantastic single “Poundcake.” But Eddie was losing it. Around September 1991, when Wolfie was still six months old, Eddie visited Bertinelli in North Carolina, where she was shooting a TV show, and went on a drunken rampage, shattering the window of a rental car in front of Bertinelli’s mom.

The biggest MTV hit off of F.U.C.K. (the title was at least superior to the original idea, Fuck Censorship ) was the portentous tune “Right Now,” based around a piano piece Eddie wrote years earlier. Incredibly, the high-concept video for the song (which spawned a lucrative if deeply uncool ad for the short-lived Crystal Pepsi) won Video of the Year at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1992, beating Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

The very success of Nirvana was perceived as a rebuke to the hair-metal era Van Halen helped spawn, but Eddie was a fan of Kurt Cobain. “It was just his feel that moved me,” he said. “There’s no particular technical proficiency, but it didn’t matter. I loved his voice and his songs. It came from his heart. It was real.” Eddie showed up, incredibly wasted, at a 1993 show by the band, and asked to jam, which was never going to happen — even before Eddie directed a racist remark at guitarist Pat Smear.

In October 1993, Ed Leffler, who had gone from being Hagar’s manager to managing the latter-day Van Halen, died of thyroid cancer. He was a gruff, sometimes threatening presence to outsiders, but had kept the band close. Without him, yet another Van Halen lineup would start to unravel.

The Van Halen brothers were sick of Hagar, barely getting through the recording process for what turned out to be their final album with him, 1995’s Balance. “Lead singers are hell,” Eddie said that year, in a conversation with Slash of Guns N’ Roses, who was deeply sympathetic to that point of view. “You gotta be a prick to be a lead singer — that’s half the deal.”

Just as they finished Balance, in October 1994, Eddie took his most serious stab at sobriety yet. “The last time I got hammered, I did an all-nighter, and I stumbled in about 8 a.m.,” he told Rolling Stone the next year. “And my son looks at me and goes, ‘Are you all right, Daddy? What happened?’ When your kid knows, it’s time to give it up.”

Eddie was drinking again by the end of the Balance tour, but stayed sober long enough to realize that his substance use had been hiding severe pain in his hip. He hobbled through the shows on painkillers, and soon learned he had avascular necrosis, a condition often aggravated by alcoholism (though he blamed it on years of feeling-no-pain stage antics), and would require a full hip replacement. Alex, meanwhile, wore a neck brace for the entire tour after damaging his spine. Barely 10 years past their youthful peak, the Van Halens were in rough shape, not unlike the prematurely aged Black Sabbath they had met back in 1978.

After a ludicrous blowup over the lyrics and logistics of soundtrack work for the 1996 movie Twister, Hagar was out of the band. And amazingly enough, after 12 years, Roth was back in. Sort of. They enlisted Roth — somewhat humbled in the wake of a foundering solo career — to record two new songs for a greatest-hits package, while simultaneously exploring other options for singers.

In what must stand as one of the most bafflingly self-destructive PR moves in the history of show business, the band agreed to appear with Roth at the 1996 Video Music Awards. They were, at most, lightly considering a true reunion with their old singer, but the world assumed otherwise. When the foursome stepped onstage to present an award for Best Male Video (it went to Beck), the crowd leaped into a prolonged standing ovation. Eddie looked genuinely nauseated. Roth milked the moment, all but tap-dancing across the stage. Eddie told reporters that the band hadn’t committed to a new singer and that he was more focused on his planned hip replacement. Backstage, he and Roth got into a screaming argument, and the reunion imploded.

Van Halen soon announced their third singer: the Freddie Mercury disciple Gary Cherone, of the Nineties hard-rock band Extreme, best-known for their 1991 hit “More Than Words.” Hagar and Roth had been, at least, equals to the rest of the band; Cherone, as if to emphasize his subordinate position in the group, took up residence in Eddie’s guest house.

Eddie, once again talking up a temporary period of sobriety, told journalists that his longtime therapist had helped him finally learn how to write songs without getting drunk first. Alcohol, he was now convinced, had been blotting out “the light” of his talent. For the album that became Van Halen III, Eddie seized control of the band, taking over for Anthony on bass on all but three tracks, and even doing some of the drumming himself. On the Roger Waters-esque ballad “How Many Say I,” he croaked out lead vocals, not unappealingly.

Though it had its moments, Van Halen III became a notorious critical and commercial flop, and Cherone was out of the band by 1999. It turned out that a lead singer was more than just a “throat.” Eddie never talked about it directly, but it must have been agonizing to face the rejection of the only set of songs he ever wrote sober, and his most experimental and wide-ranging compositions at that. He would live for another 23 years, but would never release another album of new songs; Van Halen’s only other album, 2012’s A Different Kind of Truth, was almost entirely revamped Roth-era demos.

“When people see Van Halen … it conjures up a certain image in their minds,” Eddie said in a bitter moment in 2013. “If there’s just one albino pubic hair outside of that image, they won’t accept it. And if we do put something out, the first thing people are going to say is that it isn’t as good as the classics.”

For Van Halen, there really was only one path left: go back to Roth. They gave it another try around the turn of the century, managing to write and record a few still-unreleased songs that Roth always maintained were fantastic. But legal issues between Roth and the band seem to have gotten in the way, and yet another reunion fizzled.

In January of 2000, Eddie learned that a bump he felt on his tongue was cancer. Contrary to later claims, he went through conventional therapy, including chemo. He came up with a theory that his cancer stemmed from electromagnetic radiation after holding a metal guitar pick in that spot in his mouth. His doctors pointed, instead, to his mammoth intake of cigarettes. “Ed, you are never to smoke again,” his doctor told him, after he had one-third of his tongue removed.

For the first time in 33 years, Eddie Van Halen quit smoking. For about a month. As the habit returned, he hid his cigarettes at first, but was soon puffing away in front of his family. After 20 years of marriage, this blithely suicidal behavior was the breaking point for Bertinelli, who had hung around for years of alcoholism and a series of infidelities. A few weeks later, when she caught Eddie with cocaine that he’d brought on a plane while traveling with a 10-year-old Wolfgang, Bertinelli was thoroughly done. The couple separated, and officially divorced six years later.

Over the next six years, Eddie spiraled into the bleakest period of his life. He drank wine straight from the bottle, pulled his own teeth, became terrifyingly thin, and wore ragged clothes and boots covered with tape. He jammed with Limp Bizkit and then supposedly threatened Fred Durst with a gun.

He and Alex reunited with Hagar for one last tour in 2004, and Eddie had sunk so far that those around him told Bertinelli they “feared for his life.” For the first time, his substance use was truly damaging his vaunted musicianship, and sound engineers actually turned him down in the mix. He was so wasted that his very personality seemed altered, He turned angry and violent, at one point smashing a wine bottle against the window of a private jet.

In his memoir, Hagar describes a horrifying failed intervention on that tour. “I will kill the first motherfucker that tries to take this bottle away from me,” Eddie said, if you believe Hagar’s version. “I left my family for this shit. You think I’m going to fucking do this for you guys?”

In the end, Eddie Van Halen somehow found his way out of the darkness. First, he bottomed out in 2006, a year that included an unhinged interview with Howard Stern (Eddie claimed, among other things, to have come up with an illegal cure for cancer) and a collaboration with a porn director named Michael Ninn, whose visual skills Eddie compared to Steven Spielberg, adding, “Everybody masturbates.”

In his only output of the decade, besides three bonus tracks with Hagar, Eddie recorded two instrumental soundtrack songs for Ninn in 2006. One of them, “Catherine,” featured some of the most blatantly anguished-sounding playing of his career; the other, the slightly cheesy “Rise,” had a triumphant air, as if to suggest a rebirth in progress.

Something was, in fact, changing: Wolfgang Van Halen, now 15, had started playing with the family band, and in the process, seemed to be bringing his father back to life. Eddie had long been fed up with Michael Anthony; he and Alex had tried to keep him off of the 2004 Hagar tour, and when he came along at Hagar’s insistence, they forced the beleaguered bassist to sign away his remaining interest in the band. And when Anthony started playing live with Hagar, with the pair sometimes billing themselves as the Other Half, Eddie took it as an official resignation. “You can’t be in two bands,” Eddie told me, cheerfully enough.

Wolfgang filled the hole, and the three Van Halens began jamming daily in 5150. When I spoke to Eddie and Alex in early 2007, they were rehearsing for a planned tour and celebrating their impending induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (to which only Hagar and Anthony actually showed up). At that point, they didn’t officially have a singer, but everyone assumed it had to be Roth. “The most interesting thing,” Alex told me, “is that whoever is singing is going to be surrounded by Van Halens.”

It was Roth. The band announced a 40-date tour, and the singer called up Rolling Stone for his first interview about the reunion. “It was the most obvious phone call ever,” Roth told me of his invitation back to 5150, adding, with a laugh, “It was sort of like they were having a Van Halen family basketball game, and the devil showed up in a pair of sweats looking to throw the ball around. It was very easy. The politics were not fragile at all. … I just showed up, and 20 minutes later, it was the usual: ‘How’s the wife, how’s the kids, let’s play.’” Roth seemed confident that this time the whole thing wouldn’t fall apart, which it soon did. The tour was canceled, with Eddie headed back to rehab at the urging of Alex and Wolfgang.

But it took only a few months for the band to revive itself one more time. On September 27th, 2007, David Lee Roth rejoined Van Halen for their first show together since 1984, kicking off a tour that would run through the following year. ( The show led off with “You Really Got Me, “ with Roth singing the line “I only wanna be by your side” directly to Eddie. ) Technically sober, Eddie soon realized he was now addicted to the Klonopin doctors gave him at rehab the year before. After a couple of rocky shows, the tour paused in the spring of 2008 for what seemed to be one last stop in rehab. This time, it stuck, though Eddie later said the withdrawal from Klonopin and the antidepressants doctors prescribed in its stead left him feeling “catatonic” for months, as an Esquire profile put it. In 2008, he married his second wife, Janie Liszewski, a stuntwoman-turned-publicist.

Though Roth and Eddie never managed to become friends, the band got through two more tours, and the solid A Different Kind of Truth album in 2012. That year, Eddie revealed that he’d had a recent recurrence of cancer, which had spread to his throat; a number of dates on that tour were canceled. Van Halen played their final tour in 2015, with a gleeful, high-jumping Eddie continuing to perform at a high level. After a show-ending “Jump” at their last concert , on October 4th, 2015, Wolfie, Alex, Eddie, and Roth walked to the front of the stage together, and took what turned out to be a final bow.

As the decade progressed, the cancer returned, spreading to his lungs. Eddie’s family and friends maintained silence around his illness. “I don’t know why people want to know what only my wife and son and maybe my best friends have a right to know,” he said in 2001, during his initial diagnosis.

In Eddie’s final months, he heard from many old friends, and some erstwhile enemies. Earlier this year, Sammy Hagar reached out to him, and the two men reconciled. His old engineer and producer stayed in touch as well. “Donn Landee and I would call him up when he was at the hospital at Cedars and try to make him laugh the best we could,” Ted Templeman told Rolling Stone . “Then it got to where they took him home and stuff I don’t want to talk about. The misery he was going through is really hard to relate to or think about, so I blocked that out.”

Eddie Van Halen died on the morning of October 6th, 2020, with his family around him. “I’m so grateful Wolfie and I were able to hold you in your last moments,” Valerie Bertinelli wrote.

His illness was, by all accounts, not an easy one. And he left with work unfinished, with archives full of music. “I’ve got tons of music,” he told me in December 2008. “Close to a million CDs, cassettes, boxes and boxes and boxes.” The styles ranged from classical to world music, Janie chimed in on the phone. “The stuff is gonna come out,” Eddie promised. “Hopefully people will enjoy the many sides of me. I trip on it myself.”

At the time of that conversation, he was looking forward to his impending wedding to Janie and to planned recording sessions with Roth. He was overwhelmingly proud of Wolfgang, who, in his eyes, was not only carrying on his legacy, but surpassing it. “My son is the most insanely gifted person I’ve ever fucking met,” Eddie said. “I never thought my own son is the one to kick my ass.”

After 30 years, Eddie had beaten his addictions.”I feel like it’s just the beginning,” he said. “Sounds like it’s going to be a good year,” I replied. You could almost see Eddie Van Halen break into that smile of his over the phone. “It’s a good life, man,” he said.

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Take a Look at Eddie Van Halen's 1978 Touring Rig

The Van Halen guitarist tweeted a sneak preview of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's upcoming 'Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock and Roll' exhibit.

My 1978 touring rig and original "Frankenstein" guitar are on display in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Play It Loud" Instruments of Rock & Roll exhibit. The exhibit opens to the public on April 8th.#MetRockandRoll #NewYork #frankenstein #eddievanhalen @metmuseum pic.twitter.com/j75mFIMner April 2, 2019

Back in November, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City announced that it would be presenting an exhibit called Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock and Roll from April to October 2019.

Curated from 70 private and public collections in the U.S. and U.K., the exhibit will feature more than 130 electric and acoustic guitar s that were used by artists including Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Metallica, Jimmy Page, the Beatles, Chuck Berry, Steve Miller, Elvis Presley and St. Vincent, and iconic guitars like Eric Clapton’s “Blackie,” Eddie Van Halen’s “Frankenstein” and Jerry Garcia’s “Wolf.” It will be opened to the public on April 8.

To that end, last night, Eddie Van Halen tweeted a sneak preview of what Van Halen-related relics the exhibit has in store. You can check it out above.

Aside from the original “Frankenstein” guitar, the exhibit will feature Eddie's entire rig from the band's 1978 tour.

Look out for some coverage of Play it Loud in the pages of Guitar World in the very near future...

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Jackson is an Associate Editor at GuitarWorld.com. He’s been writing and editing stories about new gear, technique and guitar-driven music both old and new since 2014, and has also written extensively on the same topics for Guitar Player . Elsewhere, his album reviews and essays have appeared in Louder and Unrecorded . Though open to music of all kinds, his greatest love has always been indie, and everything that falls under its massive umbrella. To that end, you can find him on Twitter crowing about whatever great new guitar band you need to drop everything to hear right now.

“Eddie Van Halen’s main solo is a greatest hits of all his best guitar licks”: Dweezil Zappa issues update for What the Hell Was I Thinking? – his ambitious mega-track featuring Eddie Van Halen, Yngwie Malmsteen, Brian May and more

“There’s not a guitar teacher in the world that would ever teach anyone to play a guitar like that”: Buzz Osborne thinks Jimi Hendrix is one of the greatest guitarists ever – but says his technique was “wrong”

“There’s very little to fault or criticise. The company is back with a new workshop and all guns blazing”: Gordon Smith Grande and Geist review

1978 10th Anniversary Tour

World tour to support the “never say die” album..

Dates and research compiled by Joe Siegler & Robert Dwyer. If you’d like to use any of this text for non-commercial purposes, please obtain permission first . Commercial utilization of this work in whole or in part is prohibited!

If you have an update to one of the dates below, please help keep the list accurate by telling us !

Touring Personnel

Ozzy Osbourne – Vocals
Tony Iommi – Guitar
Geezer Butler – Bass
Bill Ward – Drums
Don Airey – Keyboards (Maybe – not sure)

Typical Set List

Never Say Die
Dirty Women
Rock & Roll Doctor
Guitar Solo
Electric Funeral
Embryo / Children of the Grave
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (instrumental)
Fairies Wear Boots
Hand of Doom
Shock Wave (only on a few dates)
Swinging the Chain (only on one or two dates at most, I believe)

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1974-1977 – Club Days
1978 – Van Halen I
1979 – Van Halen II
1980 – Women and Children First
1981 – Fair Warning
1982 – Diver Down
1984 – 1984
Best Bootlegs (Grade A)
Decent Bootlegs (Grade B)
All Bootlegs
Tour Date Archive

1978 – Ipswich, UK @ Gaumont Theatre

Audio bootleg.

I’m The One
Runnin’ With The Devil
Atomic Punk/Drum solo
Little Dreamer
Feel Your Love Tonight
Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love
You Really Got Me

Bootleg Info: VHboots.com

[…] May 28, 1978 […]

2/3/1984 – Greensboro, NC @ Greensboro Coliseum

1979 – vancouver, canada @ pacific coliseum, 1984 – quebec city, canada @ le colisee de quebec, 1980 – largo md @ capitol centre, 9/15/1982 – san francisco, ca @ the cow palace, 8/6/1978 – oklahoma jam.

Tour Archive

1979 Tour Dates – World Vacation Tour

1980 tour dates – world invasion tour, 1981 tour dates – fair warning tour, 1982 tour dates – hide your sheep tour, 1984 tour dates.

This site is not affiliated with Van Halen, their management or record label. The only goal of this site is to share, celebrate and chronicle Van Halen's history from 1973-1985. The resources and documents presented here are strictly for archival purposes only. This site does not condone the sale of unauthorized recordings. Photo credit has been given when known. If there's a photo you want credited or removed, please let me know: [email protected]

The Mighty Van Halen

5 Essential David Lee Roth-era Van Halen Deep Cuts 50 Years After Their Debut Sunset Strip Show at Gazzarri’s

I n 1974, Van Halen played their first Sunset Strip show at Gazzarri’s, a former West Hollywood nightclub. Though the band had previously performed at house parties and high school events, booking a show on the Sunset Strip was a crucial step forward for them.

David Lee Roth explained the importance of Gazzarri’s in his memoir. He said, “This is where all the heat’s coming from, this is where all the light’s coming from.”

According to Alex Van Halen, only four people attended the first show, and their set consisted of only covers. However, soon, they became Gazzarri’s house band, like The Doors before them.

Here are five essential deep cuts from the David Lee Roth era to celebrate Van Halen’s April 4 Sunset Strip debut 50 years ago.

“Take Your Whiskey Home” from Women and Children First (1980)

Roth sings about the dangers of addiction over this heavy blues track. Eddie Van Halen’s acoustic intro demonstrates something many guitarists forget—the magic was in his hands. On the early Van Halen albums, Eddie often soloed over drums and bass without additional guitar overdubs. His guitar is hard-panned to the left speaker, and when the solo hits, it sounds like you are sitting in the middle of the band’s Pasadena, California, rehearsal room. The swinging groove of “Take Your Whiskey Home” wouldn’t be out of place on ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres .

Well, that liquor in the nighttime leaves strange memories

Seems a lifetime since yesterday

Come the daybreak, and come tomorrow

That woman’s waited up all night for me again

“Atomic Punk” from Van Halen (1978)

Eddie forever changed the electric guitar on Van Halen’s self-titled 1978 debut. “Eruption,” “Runnin’ with the Devil,” “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” and The Kinks cover “You Really Got Me” get most of the attention from this record. But “Atomic Punk” equally showcases Eddie’s talents. He’s using his picking-hand palm to create the phased scratching noise while Roth sings about the ruler of a dystopian future. It foreshadows Tom Morello’s guitar-DJ technique with Rage Against the Machine 14 years later.

I am a victim of the science age

A child of the storm, whoa, yes

I can’t remember when I was your age

For me, time’s no more, no more

“Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)” from Diver Down (1982)

Following the Fair Warning Tour, Van Halen was planning on a break. To appease fans, they released a cover of Roy Orbison’s “(Oh) Pretty Women,” which became an unexpected hit. Warner Bros. Records pressured the band to produce a new album, so they quickly recorded Diver Down . Roth suggested covering the 1924 tune “Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now).” Showing the band’s diversity, Eddie plays through complex jazz changes using a hollow body guitar, supported by Alex’s brushes and Michael Anthony’s acoustic bass. Jan Van Halen, Eddie and Alex’s father, plays clarinet.

Well, way down yonder in Louisville

Lived a cat named Big Bad Bill

I wants to tell ya

Ah, the cat was rough and tough and would strut his stuff

“Fools” from Women and Children First (1980)

The wailing intro and interplay between Eddie and Roth eventually break for an “Eruption”-like shredding guitar solo that becomes the heaviest riff from the Roth era. The song also features Anthony’s signature backing vocals, a crucial part of Van Halen’s sound. “Fools” is reckless and full of the kind of swagger missing from the Sammy Hagar era of the band. Roth v. Hagar debates rage among the diehards, but Eddie’s playing never sounded so inspired as it did during the Roth years.

My teachers all gave up on me

No matter what they say, I disagree

And when I need something to soothe my soul

I listen to too much rock and roll

“Drop Dead Legs” from 1984 (1984)

Midway through 1984 , Roth lets loose with some of his finest poetry: Dig that steam / Giant butt / Makes me scream and Throw my rope / Loop-de-loop / Nice white teeth / Betty Boop . It’s the kind of Kabuki lyric writing Anthony Kiedis of Red Hot Chili Peppers might admire. Eddie’s stabbing riff is sluggishly driven by brother Alex, whose drum groove feels half a beat behind the rest of the band. Then, Eddie burns a mind-blowing fusion solo over the outro while Alex hammers his ride cymbal like he’s chiseling marble against a looming deadline.

Dig those moves, vampire

Set me loose, get it higher

Throw my rope, loop-de-loop

Nice white teeth, Betty Boop

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Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images

The post 5 Essential David Lee Roth-era Van Halen Deep Cuts 50 Years After Their Debut Sunset Strip Show at Gazzarri’s appeared first on American Songwriter .

Van Halen News Desk

The Latest News & Info about The Mighty Van Halen

Listen To ‘Extremely Rare’ 1979 Interview With Eddie & Alex Van Halen

March 21, 2021 —by VHND Leave a Comment

A July 1979 interview with Eddie and Alex Van Halen during Van Halen’s first headlining tour has surfaced.

In the interview, uploaded by YouTuber Paulo Micheli , Eddie and Alex are hangin’ out in the studio of St. Paul, Minnesota’s KQRS FM to promote their second of two shows at the St. Paul Civic Auditorium. Van Halen played at the St. Paul Civic on July 24th and 25th of ’79.

“We’re gonna blow the roof off and make the sunrise the ninth encore,” said Alex.

The interview took place while Van Halen was in the midst of the World Vacation Tour , whch kicked off on this week in 1979. The trek started off at the Selland Arena in Fresno, California on March 25th of ’79.

The brothers gave a brief history of the band (for those few left who hadn’t already knew about the mighty Van Halen by this time!), talked about David Lee Roth singing with strep throat and what it was like to be headlining for the first time.

“Everything you’ll see tonight is purely Van Halen,” said Eddie. “Last year we had to use the other act’s sound system and lighting, things like that. Now, total freedom. We can do whatever we wanna do.”

Alex said,” We have enough lights to light up a small city.”

Eddie: “Some small cities we play don’t have enough power!” [laughs]

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Music and Concerts | Forging his own path: Wolfgang Van Halen talks…

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Music and concerts | forging his own path: wolfgang van halen talks tour, oscars performance and his legendary father.

The son of legendary guitarist Edward Van Halen and actress Valerie Bertinelli was only 16 when he played bass and toured the world with his famous father and the legendary band that bears their name. Wolf would later go on to have a role in what would become the band’s final studio album, 2012’s A Different Kind of Truth.

Shortly after the passing of his father in 2020, Wolfgang Van Halen released his first band album, Mammoth WVH; the name a reference to both Wolf’s initials and an homage to an earlier band that featured his father and uncle, Alex, prior to forming Van Halen. The album would reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hard Rock chart and the single, “Distance,” would earn the legendary guitarist’s son his own Grammy nomination for Best Rock Song. Even more impressive is that all of the writing, vocal and instrumentation (including guitars, bass, drums) on the album was done by Wolfgang exclusively.

Wolf’s most recent album, Mammoth II, also topped the Hard Rock album chart when it was released last summer — a feat that not only speaks to the maturity of Wolf as a player but also solidifies him as a consummate artist.

On Saturday, Wolfgang Van Halen will bring his monstrous Mammoth II tour to the Wind Creek Event Center in Bethlehem for a night of rock music and ferocious guitar playing.

I recently spoke with Van Halen about his upcoming performance in Bethlehem, music and more in this exclusive new interview.

You recently attended the Oscars where you got to perform with Slash and Ryan Gosling on “I’m Just Ken,” a song nominated for an Academy Award and one you helped record for the “Barbie The Album” soundtrack. What was that experience like?

Wolfgang Van Halen: It was very crazy but an exciting thing to be a part of. That is not my normal place to hang around in or operate from, so I felt a little like a fish out of water [laughs].

Did you know at the time how special your contributions to that film would be?

I knew at the time that it was awesome but I had no idea it was going to blow up the way that it did. After I’d seen the clips and [producer] Mark Ronson explained the whole story to me I knew it would be great. To have a small part in something like that was a really cool thing. I loved playing on it and being a part of the movie.

What can fans expect from your upcoming performance at Wind Creek Event Center?

It’s the top of the tour back in the States. It’s our first show with the wonderful band, Intervals, opening for us. So if you feel like hanging out and listening to some cool rock and awesome guitar playing it’s going to be a good time.

What inspired the name of your band, Mammoth?

Mammoth was a band name my dad [Eddie Van Halen] had used when he was younger for a three-piece band he was in where he sung. I’ve always felt really close to that name. I even told my dad when I was growing up that if I ever had a band I would call it that, and here we are.

Wolfgang Van Halen (Travis Shinn Photography)

Can you talk a bit about your latest album, Mammoth II, and its evolution?

The first album I recorded in 2018 so there had been a lot of time in between. With the first album I was trying to figure out who I was as an artist. By the time the second album came around I had established everything I wanted to, so it was more about experimenting and being a bit more confident in what the project was. I had a lot of fun exploring what the band was capable of.

Your dad inspired thousands of people to want to play guitar, so here’s a two-part question: How did you get the gig in Van Halen and more importantly, what was it like for you to perform live with your dad (and uncle)?

It was wonderful. A time in my life I was very happy to have experienced. Being able to bond with my family in that was very special to me. When I joined they were at a point in time where they didn’t know what was going on. We just started jamming for fun and before you knew it, it felt like something really special and important was happening. That’s how it began.

I’m going to put you on the spot now — what’s your favorite Van Halen song?

Wow, it’s difficult to pick favorite songs because I really love all of it. The closest I could narrow it down to would be two albums from each era. I think the Fair Warning and 1984 albums are two of my favorites. “Hear About it Later” off of Fair Warning is a really great song I don’t think gets enough praise.

What was the biggest thing your dad taught you about playing guitar?

He actually never taught me how to play guitar so we never really did any lessons. I actually taught myself. The funny thing I always like to remember is something his dad told him, which was if you ever make a mistake, play it twice so that people think you meant to play it [laughs].

How about his advice on music or the business in general?

He always said be careful and aware of everything and only work with people you trust. Luckily things have been going well so far. We’ve built a very wonderful group of people around Mammoth I’m very proud to be working with.

Musically speaking, what excites you the most about the future?

I’m excited to keep working Mammoth. It’s my passion and the one thing I want to do in life. We’re having all of these opportunities to open for amazing bands. We’ve been opening for Metallica and recently opened for Slash in Europe. Now we’re playing with one of my favorite bands, Intervals. We also have some dates opening for Foo Fighters. It’s crazy to have your whole year planned out for you but now it’s fun to be able to execute and play all of these exciting shows. I feel very lucky and grateful to be doing what I’m doing right now.

James Wood is a freelance writer. You can reach him at [email protected].

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IMAGES

Watch Lost Performance From Van Halen’s First World Tour
Van Halen 1978 Tour Poster
Eddie Van Halen on Van Halen's First Tour 1978 : r/vanhalen
Live Photos: Van Halen at the 1978 “Day on the Green” Festival
Van Halen ️ 1978
VAN HALEN

VIDEO

Van Halen Live In Devore US Festival 🇺🇸
Rare Van Halen Interview in England #vanhalen #eddievanhalen #davidleeroth #rockandroll
Van Halen: reCOLLECTION 01
Van Halen early 1978 Japan TV
Van Halen ~ Live & More 1995
Van Halen

COMMENTS

Van Halen 1978 World Tour
The 1978 World Tour was the first concert tour by American hard rock band Van Halen.The world tour, which was in support of their debut album, covered mainly North America with 125 shows in the United States and two shows in Canada, 38 shows in Europe, and seven shows in Japan.At 172 shows total over a 10-month period, the tour was one of the band's most extensive overall.
Van Halen's 1978 Concert & Tour History
Van Halen's 1978 Concert History. 166 Concerts. Van Halen was an American rock band formed in Pasadena, California, in 1972. Credited with "restoring hard rock to the forefront of the music scene", Van Halen was known for its energetic live shows and for the virtuosity of its lead guitarist, Eddie Van Halen. The band was inducted into the Rock ...
How Van Halen Conquered the World in Just 10 Shows
Van Halen quickly won over fans and impressed musical peers during a debut tour which kicked off on March 3, 1978. ... Read on to find out more on these fascinating Van Halen 1978 tour stories.
Van Halen 09 22 1978 Fresno
Witness the legendary rock band Van Halen in their prime, performing live in Fresno in 1978. This rare footage captures the energy, charisma and talent of the original lineup, featuring David Lee ...
Anniversary of Van Halen's First World Tour!
The 1978 World Tour kicked off at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, IL. Photo courtesy Chuckman's Photos. After four years paying their dues playing the Southern California rock scene, Van Halen hit the road. It was just three weeks after the release of their self-titled debut album that the band kicked off its first world tour.
Amazing Footage: Van Halen in Fresno, 1978!
Watch INCREDIBLE audience-filmed footage from that tour below! On September 22nd, 1978, Van Halen performed at the Selland Arena in Fresno, California. On this special night, Van Halen owned the stage. Thanks to a very clever rock concert enthusiast, who smuggled in his 8mm film camera, we are able to relive this night, "…Live in front of ...
When Ozzy Went Missing on the '78 Black Sabbath/Van Halen Tour
40 years ago today, Ozzy Osbourne went missing during the legendary Black Sabbath / Van Halen 1978 tour. Here's the funny story in David Lee Roth's own words, newly-unearthed newspaper articles, and a rare audio recording of the makeup show. Enjoy! David Lee Roth shares a tale from Van Halen's first world tour:
March 3, 1978: Van Halen Begins First Tour
By the tour's end, Van Halen were well on their way to being rock stars. From March through April the foursome of David Lee Roth (vocals), Eddie Van Halen (guitar), Alex Van Halen (drums) and Michael Anthony (bass) opened for Journey and Montrose. This understated ad appeared in the Feb. 18, 1978 issue of Record World
Category:Van Halen concert tours
Van Halen 1978 World Tour; Van Halen 2007-2008 North American Tour; Van Halen 2015 North American Tour; Van Halen World Vacation Tour; W. Van Halen World Invasion Tour This page was last edited on 30 March 2013, at 18:05 (UTC). Text is available under the Creative Commons ...
Van Halen Concert Setlist at Pogos, Wichita on April 3, 1978
Get the Van Halen Setlist of the concert at Pogos, Wichita, KS, USA on April 3, 1978 from the 1978 World Tour and other Van Halen Setlists for free on setlist.fm!
Van Halen Archives
Friday, May 3rd, 2024. Tours. Van Halen: 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982/1983 1984 1986 1988/1989 1990 1991/1992 1993 1995 1998 2004 2007/2008 2011 2012 2013 2015: David Lee ...
Van Halen
It is down-and-dirty but short of hedonistic and got its lyrical inspiration from the Ohio Players song "Runnin' from the Devil". While released as a single, it failed to chart in 1978 but has become a classic rock radio staple and still a signature tune of Van Halen. The instrumental "Eruption" contains some of the best 100 seconds ...
Eddie Van Halen: The Joy and Pain of Rock's Last Guitar Superhero
In May 1978, Eddie Van Halen sat in a Parisian hotel room, weeping. His band had a hit debut album, had just played their first European headlining dates, and would soon embark on a tour opening ...
Take a Look at Eddie Van Halen's 1978 Touring Rig
It will be opened to the public on April 8. To that end, last night, Eddie Van Halen tweeted a sneak preview of what Van Halen-related relics the exhibit has in store. You can check it out above. Aside from the original "Frankenstein" guitar, the exhibit will feature Eddie's entire rig from the band's 1978 tour.
Never Say Die! Tour
Van Halen [ Concert Reviews] Nov 13 1978: Atlanta, GA: The Omni: Van Halen, The Ramones: Rescheduled from 10/31/78: Nov 14 1978: Mobile, AL: Municipal Auditorium: Van Halen: Nov 15 1978: ... Van Halen [ Concert Reviews] Make-up gig from 11/16/78: Nov 20 1978: Oklahoma City, OK: The Myriad: Van Halen: Nov 21 1978: Amarillo, TX: The Amarillo ...
Unseen Super 8 Footage Of Van Halen In '78 Surfaces [VIDEO]
Amazing unseen Super 8 footage of Van Halen performing live back in 1978 has surfaced! The video below of Van Halen performing at the Niagara Falls Convention Center in Niagara Falls, New York on September 8th, 1978 was uploaded to the YouTube channel "Speedy".The channel was launched as a tribute to Jim Kelly aka "Speedy", who passed away in January of 2021.
Van Halen
Van Halen - 1978 - Tour Dates. 3 years ago […] May 28, 1978 […] 0. Reply. Similar Posts. 1984 - David Lee Roth Interview - Discussing Crazy From The Heat. ... North America, Europe, Japan Van Halen's first tour was in support of the debut album in 1978. The... Read more. 1979 Tour Dates - World Vacation Tour. 1979 - Van Halen II Mar ...
5 Essential David Lee Roth-era Van Halen Deep Cuts 50 Years After ...
"Atomic Punk" from Van Halen (1978) ... Following the Fair Warning Tour, Van Halen was planning on a break. To appease fans, they released a cover of Roy Orbison's "(Oh) Pretty Women ...
Van Halen 1978 World Tour T-Shirt
Van Halen 1978 World Tour T-Shirt Every rock fan remembers where they were when they first heard "Eruption" off Van Halen's 1978 debut album. Celebrate the landmark LP with this replica 1978 tour tee showing a faux-distressed graphic of a globe with the giant VH logo over it.
Listen To 'Extremely Rare' 1979 Interview With Eddie & Alex Van Halen
A July 1979 interview with Eddie and Alex Van Halen during Van Halen's first headlining tour has surfaced. In the interview, uploaded by YouTuber Paulo Micheli, Eddie and Alex are hangin' out in the studio of St. Paul, Minnesota's KQRS FM to promote their second of two shows at the St. Paul Civic Auditorium.Van Halen played at the St. Paul Civic on July 24th and 25th of '79.
Wolfgang Van Halen previews Wind Creek Event Center performance
Shortly after the passing of his father in 2020, Wolfgang Van Halen released his first band album, Mammoth WVH; the name a reference to both Wolf's initials and an homage to an earlier band that ...

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