Most of us have heard enough rhetoric about ‘when legends die’ that it almost seems to be a mere redundancy. We see and hear it- especially during these annual music or entertainment awards shows when they run reels showing who passed away during the year in question. The more elderly these former luminaries are, the less likely it is for much communication buzz outside of the people who knew them well and except for age and genre contemporaries. However, the announcement on October 7th on GMA, early in the morning, stunned me. I’m talking about Eddie Van Halen and Johnny Nash passing away on the same day. Johnny had just turned 80 last August but Eddie… well, let’s just say that he’s a direct contemporary of mine. Barely in his 60s and gone from throat cancer. This is just sad. Additionally, I can’t think of two other people being such polar opposites but equally gifted and successful in the realm of music.
Let me start with John Lester “Johnny” Nash, Jr. better known as just Johnny Nash. Most of his fans will think of him as a Jamaican because that is where his career took off. However, Johnny was a U.S. citizen, born in Houston, Texas (August 19, 1940) and he remained an American citizen his entire life. Most people will recognize or recall what is referred to in the media as his comeback hit “I Can See Clearly Now” which came out in 1972 and stayed on the charts for more than a year, if I’m not mistaken. He was the first black American to record reggae music at Kingston- the capitol city of Jamaica. Interestingly, the above mentioned song is the only song I knew that he’d recorded but it is not particularly reggae. It was referred to at the time as Zydeco. I blame that happy accordion which runs through the length of the song. The next hit was a cover of Bob Marley’s Stir it Up and his career hit a zenith in England which he enjoyed for the remainder of his active career.
At any rate, Nash started his singing career at the age of 13 singing gospel at Progressive New Hope Baptist church and eventually landed a spot on the KPRC Houston TV show called Matinee and broke a color bar ‘glass ceiling’ in so doing. He sang in nearly every genre- R & B, country, pop, soul, and calypso. In 1956 he got his real break by gaining a spot on radio and TV shows hosted by Arthur Godfrey and he performed regularly for Godfrey for seven years! He also eventually became a popular actor with his earliest award-winning credit in 1959 appearing on screen for Louis S. Peterson’s Take a Giant Step at the Locarno Intl. Film Festival. In 1971 he starred in the Swedish romance Vill så gärna tro (Love is Not a Game) as Robert and co-composed the film’s soundtrack, partly instrumental reggae (with strings!) with Bob Marley and including arranger Fred Jordan. His film career, however, only contains four acting credits. Obviously, drama wasn’t his primary vocation but music took the forefront most of his life. Very few people realize that he sang the theme song for the cartoon The Mighty Hercules which was popular from 1963 to 1966.
He began recording music in the states from 1957 (the year Eddie Van Halen was born) with a stint on ABC-Paramount singing A Teenager Sings the Blues. He hit the charts in 1958 with A Very Special Love which made it up to the #23 spot and followed that with a collaboration between himself, Paul Anka and George Hamilton IV in 1959. By the 60s he was recording for Warner Bros but had little chart success with more klinkers in the decade with Groove and Argo. Some of his recordings were covered by other artists, such as What Kind of Love is This? which became a Top Twenty hit for Joey Dee in 1962.
After 1965, Johnny Nash eventually formed the JAD label with Danny Sims from New York. Nash got a Top Five hit on the US Billboard R&B chart, with Let's Move and Groove Together. They signed the Cowsills as kids. These four brothers from Newport, Rhode Island, who were ages 9, 11, 15 and 16, went on to sign with Mercury/Philips and eventually MGM and recorded their first million-selling hit single, “The Rain, The Park & Other Things”. Nash went to Jamaica in early 1968, (the same year that Eddie and Alex Van Halen moved with their parents to Pasadena, California) and while there he was introduced to TV, radio host and novel writer Neville Willoughby by his girlfriend, who had family links with Neville. This brought him right into the middle of the local scene which included working with the Wailers- specifically, Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh. He brought them in by signing all three to an exclusive publishing and recording contract with a new label he’d formed with Danny Sims, Cayman Music, and financed a number of their recordings and built his own studio. Additional musicians and collaborators included Byron Lee’s Dragonaires, Jackie Jackson and Lynn Taitt. Johnny formed his own reggae label JoDa before coming out with Hold Me Tight, a Top Five hit in 1968 and in England, a cover of Sam Cooke’s Cupid was another hit song by 1969. One clear success in all that was a hard rocksteady song Reggae on Broadway (1972) and it was recorded in London where reggae music was the rage! It was recorded along with the same sessions which eventually produced I Can See Clearly Now. That last mentioned album sold over one million copies and was awarded a gold disc by the R.I.A.A. by November of 1972. Hit songs from that included four originals by Bob Marley which were Guava Jelly, Comma Comma, You Poured Sugar on Me and the follow-up Stir it Up. A third hit from the album was There Are More Questions than Answers.
Nash’s greatest success was in reggae music but he continued with his film career- even though it paled by comparison to his financial success with one song - I Can See Clearly Now. At that time the U.S., as a whole, did not know reggae music existed. His music career was solidly in Caribbean music and England embraced him the way they did with reggae music in general. More recently American audiences have been introduced to Nash's music with the appearance of Jimmy Cliff's cover of I Can See Clearly Now in Disney's 1993 hit film Cool Runnings but JAD Records ceased to exist by 1971. In 1997 an American ‘Marley specialist’ by the name of Roger Steffens and a French musician/ producer Bruno Blum mixed or remixed the Complete Bob Marley & the Wailers 1967-1972 ten-album series. Several of the singles were Nash-produced Marley and Tosh tracks. Nash’s biggest hits were Hold Me Tight (#5 hit in the U.S. and the U.K.) and Stir it Up. In the UK, his biggest hit was with the song Tears on My Pillow which went #1 on the U.K. Singles Chart in July of 1975 for one week. Some of Nash’s later hits include the remakes of Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World and Let’s Go Dancing in 1979. There was a long silence until the mid-80s when he released Here Again in 1986 which was a hit in England along with Rock Me Baby. As recently as May 2006 he was active again, back in Houston to work with Sugar Hill chief engineer Andy Bradley and Tierra Studio’s Grammy-winning Randy Miller to start work on transferring analog tapes of his songs from the 70s and 80s to the Pro Tools digital format. A little more than two weeks ago he passed away in his hometown of Houston due to declining health. A compilation of his hits was released in 1996 as The Best of Johnny. Altogether, he made seventeen albums during his prolific career.
Edward Lodewijk Van Halen was born January 26, 1957 at Nijmegen in the Netherlands, a town that lies next to where the Waal flows into and over the border into Germany. It makes sense that his birthday is one day’s difference from that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (albeit two centuries and one year later), that his musician father also paved the way for his son’s musical aspirations and that they had to travel far from home to get the attention of the world to this prodigy’s talent and perhaps even genius. There are a lot more parallels but what really grabs my attention is that it took so long for history to basically repeat itself. Then again, musical geniuses are quite rare and it’s also true that no composer has written so much beautiful music in such a short time as Mozart. He will remain a musical anomaly as far as that goes and he did so by being quite different from every composer during his brief lifetime and after. It would be impossible for anyone to try to claim Mozart’s music for his own because it is so recognizable. As I said, there are a lot of parallels here but let’s take a look at Eddie, shall we?
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| R to L: Eddie and his son, Wolfgang |
When Van Halen made their recording debut in 1978 they took the world by musical storm. Eddie was the songwriter and lead guitarist when he and his older brother Alex co-founded the band along with bassist Michael Anthony and singer David Lee Roth. Because they became popular in their genre at the same time it exploded in popularity in the U.S. many of Eddie’s techniques were not invented by him but made those dynamics in guitar playing his own and many have tried to emulate him with limited success. The term screaming guitars was invented for him. In 2012 Guitar World Magazine placed him at #1 on the reader’s poll list for “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of all Time”.
Alex and Eddie were the sons of Jan and Eugenia van Halen (née van Beers). Their father Jan, was a Dutch native Jazz woodwind and keyboard player but the mother was an Indonesian who hailed from Rangkasbitung, Java. Both Alex and Eddie, of course, were given formal piano lessons as young children and after moving to California in the 60s they became more interested in rock music with Alex beginning with guitar and Eddie on the drums. Eventually, they switched and the rest is history. They called their first band Mammoth, then skipped on a suggestion of Rat Salade eventually settling simply on Van Halen!
Once they had developed their sound in the 70s they started playing the Pasadena/Santa Barbara bar circuit for a few years. Eddie has cited many 60s bands and supergroups as his influences such as Cream, Eric Clapton solos and Jimmy Page was his idol. He has described himself as a Page wanna-be in that he felt that he emulated him best with even more reckless abandon in his style and riffs. Closer to the truth, he had a very unique sound which carried him off. Eventually they elevated to the L.A. scene at clubs such as Starwood and Whisky a Go Go. In 1976 Gene Simmons of KISS spotted them there and financed a demo tape for them. A year later they were offered a record contract by Warner Records.
When the first LP Van Halen reached 19 on the Billboard music charts directly after its release it became one of rock’s most commercially successful debuts. It was listed as both heavy metal and hard rock and eventually sold over 2 million copies. When they hit their stride in the 80s they were writing big hits of their own such as Jump and Panama but they were also making oldies ‘smokin’ new’ such as the Kinks 1964 hit, You Really Got Me. They dominated the 80s with their highly successful LPs and live performances with David Lee Roth supplying the drama and prodigious vocals. He was a dominate front man in the best sense of the word. The album 1984 went platinum five times only a year after its release. Their single release Jump became the band’s first and only #1 pop hit which garnered them a Grammy nomination. If album sales could supersede rock award nominations then Van Halen will go down in rock history as the greatest hard rock/ heavy metal band for all time.
Even though both genres waned in popularity in the 90s Van Halen still won a Grammy in 1992 for Best Hard Rock Performance with Vocals for their LP that year. Only last year the RIAA list of best selling artists listed Van Halen with 56 million sales in the U.S. alone and more the 80 million worldwide! In 2007 the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame citing Eddie’s guitar work specifically! Also, Eddie worked on film soundtracks and quite a few collaborations with the likes of Michael Jackson, Brian May, Sammy Hagar, Roger Waters and LLCool J and many more. Eddie created inventions for the guitar which were ground-breakers and held three patents on add-ons for various parts of the guitar. His techniques were phenomenal with or without the additions and he was well known for them. In short, he was a guitarist’s guitarist.
His most famous guitar is the Frankenstrat, a custom guitar he built from parts. This chopper has an ash body and maple neck which cost $130, while the body was bought for $50 as the wood had a knot in it. The tremolo arm was originally taken from a 1958 Fender Stratocaster, and was later replaced with a Floyd Rose arm. The guitar had a single Gibson PAF (patent applied for) bridge pickup from a Gibson ES-335, which he enclosed with paraffin wax to prevent feedback! The Frankenstrat was originally painted black, but was recoated with Schwinn red bicycle paint in 1979 and may be the most famous guitar in the world.
Back at the beginning of the 1980s Eddie met actress Valerie Bertinelli at one of his concerts in Louisiana and they married a year later in California and had a son who they named Wolfgang. They had a successful marriage but in 2005 Valerie filed for divorce since they had been separated since 2001 and the divorce was finalized in 2007. It must have been the most amicable divorce associated with Hollywood because he remarried another actress by the name of Janie Liszewski who happened to be his publicist. They married in 2009 at his home in Studio City with both his son and Valerie in attendance! A tribute to him by his ex-wife can be found on the Van Halen web site www.vhnd.com accompanied by a brief bio on their twenty years of matrimony and continued appreciation for each other.
Up until twelve years ago Eddie struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse through most of his life. Whether that contributed to his stage acrobatic injuries, illnesses and eventual bouts with several types of cancer is not clear but the problems started in 1999 clear up to this year. By 2015 he was dealing with throat cancer and was only hospitalized last year for it. Unfortunately, he lost the battle on October 6th and we are left behind with a wonderful wealth of music that set itself apart from the rest of the metal crowd. This was four days before David Lee Roth’s 65th birthday! His son Wolfgang has played with the band in more recent years so it will be interesting to see if he can rise to the level of his magical Dad who had a smile that could light up the night.
Interesting note: Speaking at an event at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in 2015, Eddie discussed his life and the American Dream, saying "We came here with approximately $50 and a piano, and we didn't speak the language. Now look where we are. If that's not the American dream, what is?" Indeed!
