After briefly considering the unprepossessing monicker Rat Salade, the quartet dubbed themselves Van Halen. However, they then discovered there was another outfit calling itself Mammoth. Mammoth’s line-up was completed when the bassist Michael Anthony joined from another local band, Snake. Roth brought an extrovert outrageousness, which would be a key factor in their subsequent rise to stardom. They started off renting a PA system from Roth, then the singer with the Red Ball Jets, but soon concluded they could kill two birds with one stone by recruiting Roth for their own band. They initially had called themselves Genesis, before learning of the British band of the same name.Įddie’s first guitar was a Teisco Del Rey six-string bought from Sears for $110. Eddie played drums and Alex guitar, but by the time they formed their first serious group, Mammoth, they had switched instruments. The brothers attended Pasadena City College, as did the future Van Halen vocalist David Lee Roth, and Eddie and Alex also took piano lessons in San Pedro with the venerable teacher Stasys Kalvaitis. Their sons, Eddie and Alex, both born in Amsterdam, had learned classical piano from the age of six, but it was inevitable that, finding themselves on the west coast in the late 60s, they would be drawn to rock’n’roll. Meanwhile, his Indonesian-born wife, Eugenia (nee Van Beers), initially worked as a maid. Jan was a freelance saxophonist and clarinettist who was versatile enough to find work in a number of musical styles, from classical to big band, though in California he had to supplement his musical earnings by washing dishes. When Jan Van Halen brought his family over to Pasadena, California, from the Netherlands in 1962 – Eddie once commented that they arrived “with $50 and a piano” – he can scarcely have imagined the mayhem his offspring would wreak on American popular culture. In 2012, Van Halen was ranked top of Guitar World magazine’s list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Eleven of their studio albums reached the US Top 10, and four reached No 1. The band sold more than 80m albums worldwide.

Few other acts have come close to matching their commercially combustible mixture of spectacular and addictive rock, flamboyant stage performances and outsized personal behaviour. Formed around the Van Halen brothers, the guitarist Eddie and the drummer Alex, the band rode a tidal wave of multi-platinum albums over a 15-year period. If Aerosmith was the premier US hard rock band of the 1970s, it was Van Halen who stepped into their shoes during the 80s. The death of Eddie Van Halen from throat cancer, aged 65, brings to a close one of the most colourful and lucrative sagas in American rock music.

Van halen members