Sunday’s Grammy Awards may have received some of the program’s best reviews in years (although the audience has dropped to the lowest level ever), but hard rock and heavy metal fans were not happy with the broadcast tribute. to Eddie Van Halen. He was not mentioned at the beginning of the show when Little Richard, John Prine and Kenny Rogers were cited as examples of people we lost last year, and when the In Memoriam segment came, he presented a 20-second clip of “Eruption” against an outlet for your Frankenstein guitar on a stand. (In contrast, Kenny Rogers received a two-minute tribute from Lionel Richie.)
It turns out that the Recording Academy at least tried to create something more substantial. In a tweet the morning after the ceremony, Wolfgang Van Halen said he was addressed about playing “Eruption” in the broadcast. “I don’t think anyone could live up to what my dad did for music, except for himself,” Wolfgang wrote, explaining why he refused. “I didn’t know they were going to show Pop for just 15 seconds in the middle of four full shows for other people that we had missed.”
“What hurt the most,” he continued, “was that he wasn’t even mentioned when they talked about the artists we missed at the beginning of the show. I know that rock is not the most popular genre at the moment (and the academy seems a little out of fashion), but I think it is impossible to ignore the legacy that my father left in the instrument, in the rock world and in music in general. There will never be another innovator like him. “
We don’t know if they approached other guitarists after Wolfgang gave up, but it’s easy to see why they couldn’t find anyone. How could any guitarist, however skilled, play “Eruption” and not look like a poor Van Halen impersonator? It is Eddie’s solo that dates back to Van Halen’s first album in 1978. It can be duplicated by skilled guitarists and there are many such attempts on YouTube, but no one plays it like Van Halen himself.
Here is the video for “Eruption” from Van Halen’s last show, which took place at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on October 4, 2015. As always, he puts excerpts from other songs in the mix, including “Little Guitars”, “Mean Street, ”“ Spanish Fly ”and“ Cathedral ”, but it all leads to an incredible climax of“ Eruption ”. At the nine-minute mark, the band returns to the stage and begins “You Really Got Me”.
In a perfect world, Van Halen would have ended with the mega stadium tour they were planning in 2019, which would feature the return of Michael Anthony, and Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth taking turns on the main vocals. But they had to give up on the idea when Eddie’s cancer returned. But at least he lived long enough to make one last album with Roth and do three arena tours with him between 2007 and 2015. That was a better gift for fans than anything the Grammys could have done.