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Remembering Van Halen, guitar legend with Indonesian roots
Van Halen's mother, Eugenia van Beers, who hailed from Rangkasbitung met and married the guitarist’s father Jan soon after Indonesia won its independence from the Dutch. The senior Van Halen was a traveling jazz musician employed by the Dutch Air Force.
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Guitarist Eddie Van Halen performs during a private Van Halen show to announce the band's upcoming tour, at Cafe Wha? in New York, the United States, on Jan. 5, 2012. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)
T
he passing of guitarist Eddie Van Halen hit Indonesia’s rock music scene particularly hard, not only because he was a master of the instrument and part of the pantheon of rock music alongside artists such as Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page but also because he could trace his ancestry to the city of Rangkasbitung in Banten.
Van Halen's mother, Eugenia van Beers, who hailed from Rangkasbitung met and married the guitarist’s father Jan soon after Indonesia won its independence from the Dutch. The senior Van Halen was a traveling jazz musician employed by the Dutch Air Force.
After spending six years in Indonesia, the senior Van Halen and Eugenia relocated to Amsterdam in 1949. Eddie, born Edward Lodewijk van Halen, was born six years later, in January 1955. The family then moved to Pasadena, California, in 1962.
But for many Indonesian musicians who mourned his passing last week, it was mostly his guitar pyrotechnics and jubilant rock compositions like "Jump," "Running with the Devil," and the virtuosic "Eruptions" that left an indelible mark.
Legendary guitarist Eet Sjahranie crafted a sound and employed guitar techniques inspired by Van Halen for the debut album of his band Edane, The Beast, released in 1992.
Eet's playing was so similar to Van Halen’s that he became known as Indonesia's version of the guitarist and rumors spread that he was a mentee of the American guitarist.
"That's a total hoax. I went to the United States in the early 1980s to study sound engineering, and there was no way for me to study under him. He was so popular; how could he have time for me?" Eet said at a live memorial for Van Halen on Thursday of last week.
But Eet did acknowledge that his eureka moment came when he went to a Van Halen concert in California and saw the guitarist’s virtuosity in person.
“I was flattered that people compared my work to Van Halen’s. But Eddie was only a part of my musical journey. He was impossible to imitate. There was only one Eddie,” he said.
The guitar legend passed away on Wednesday at the age of 65 after battling throat cancer. Eddie had been fighting the illness for well over a decade and had been in and out of hospital for the past year.
Millions of his fans remembered him for his melodious guitar solos, courtesy of his signature two-handed tapping technique, his impish grin and his larger-than-life artistic persona associated with his eponymous band – which he co-founded with his brother Alex in the mid-1970s to great success.
For millions of young people who grew up in the 1980s and early 1990s, Van Halen's music was a soundtrack to their growing pains.
"His song ‘Runnin' with the Devil’ was my battle cry against my Catholic school teachers and friends who campaigned against the satanic themes in rock music," said Arian Arifin of the Jakarta-based metal band Seringai.
And like millions of young people in the country listening to Western popular music in the early 1990s, Arian said his first exposure to Van Halen's music was courtesy of cheap, pirated tapes.
"I have been a fan for so long, so when I finally learned that he was half Indonesian, it did not change anything. I liked his music already," Arian told The Jakarta Post.
Music critic Adib Hidayat said Van Halen owed his popularity in Indonesia to record pirates who distributed bootlegged compilations of the band’s greatest hits of the period, such as “Unchained” from Van Halen’s fourth studio album Fair Warning (1981) and “Panama” from the band’s sixth studio album 1984 (1983).
“Many of us were first exposed to Van Halen through bootlegged records back in the day,” he said
“In this regard, those record pirates played the role of tastemakers. The tracks they cherry-picked for the compilations went on to define the notion of Van Halen as it has been known to the Indonesian public until this day.”
Adib recalled listening to Van Halen’s hit single “Jump” from 1984 countless times during his youth in the 1980s, as it was played on repeat by a local radio station in his hometown of Salatiga, Central Java. He said it was nothing short of a watershed moment for Indonesian pop culture.
Even musicians who found Van Halen's technique too hard to imitate felt his influence in their musical DNA.
"I once learned his tapping techniques from a bootlegged DVD, but I gave up. It's difficult. I am more of a Jimmy Page [of Led Zeppelin] person," said Rekti Yoewono, the lead singer and guitarist of the Bandung-based band The S.I.G.IT.
