A few times every hundred years or so someone appears who takes everything we know about a musical instrument and expands it beyond comprehension. It wasn’t so much that what he did was impossible, it was that there was simply no precedent.
That was Eddie Van Halen. The world thought rock and roll guitar was one thing, Eddie reimagined it as something else entirely.
People like this show us what we’re capable of. Before Eddie, that style of playing guitar didn’t exist. Almost immediately after he appeared, it became the new standard.
He changed, overnight, both how we viewed the instrument and what we thought was humanly possible.
Game-changer, visionary, otherworldly virtuoso.
RIP. The world was more fun with you in it.