A year after Eddie Van Halen’s death, the new biography ‘Eruption’ shares interviews with guitarist

For journalists Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill, several decades of conversations with guitar legend Eddie Van Halen led to a friendship with the musician. When he died on Oct. 6, 2020, the news hit hard.

“Clearly, the guitar world and the music world lost a giant,” Tolinski says of Van Halen. “But I also felt sad on a personal level.”

For Gill, the emotional wallop of Van Halen’s death felt much the same.

“It was like losing a brother,” he says. “I missed the conversations, you know, just hearing his voice in a room across from me — or the phone calls.

“And just the fact that this resource of knowledge and wisdom was gone,” Gill says. “That I wasn’t going to be able to ask him these questions, and I still had so many questions.

“The fact that I’ll never see Eddie Van Halen play guitar again just breaks my heart.”

Tolinski and Gill had talked in recent years about writing a book together on Van Halen, maybe even with the guitarist’s collaboration. And they’d started shopping for a book deal before his death.

“We knew that Ed wasn’t doing well,” Tolinski says. “And we knew we had an incredible amount of great information.

“I’d actually sort of pitched the idea of doing this book before, and nobody was that interested,” he says.

Then Van Halen died.

And now, on the one-year anniversary of his death, comes “Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen,” the first major biography of the guitarist, songwriter, and inventor who grew up in Pasadena and saw the band that bore his name skyrocket from the Sunset Strip to worldwide fame.

“Literally, the day after he died my phone was ringing off the hook with people that were interested in doing a book,” Tolinski says. “And we wanted to take advantage of it, hopefully for the right reasons.”

‘Unbridled craziness’

Tolinski and Gill grew up as guitar-crazy kids, who later in life made the instrument the focus of their journalism. Tolinski was editor-in-chief of Guitar World magazine for many years; Gill contributed to that publication, and also served as editor-in-chief of Guitar Aficionado magazine.

Both still vividly remember where they were and what they felt the first time they heard the band Van Halen, whose debut self-titled album arrived in February 1978.

Gill, who grew up in Fallbrook, says it was a stormy night in January, and he’d been outside with his parents until 2 a.m. working to divert floodwaters from their home. When he came in, he turned on KMET, which was playing Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks.”

“That was just like, ‘Oh, what a song!’” he says, laughing. “And then immediately after, I remember the DJ coming on and saying, ‘And here’s L.A.’s own Van Halen.’

The debut single, a cover of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” blasted over the airwaves, and Gill says his ears instantly perked up.

“That sound, it was just mammoth,” he says of the band, who, incidentally, had at one time gone by the name, Mammoth. “Just everything about the song was amazing. The guitar sound was huge. These vocal harmonies, very cool. This very cocky lead singer making these weird whistling and yelling noises.

“I was just like, ‘Who are these guys? I’ve got to go find out,” Gill says, describing how as he heard more songs, such as Eddie Van Halen’s solo instrumental “Eruption,” the was just “just like, ‘Bam!’ My brain exploded.”

Tolinski grew up in Detroit and says that in addition to the virtuosic guitar playing of Eddie Van Halen, the wild and joyful energy of the original lineup of the band — singer David Lee Roth, drummer Alex Van Halen, and bassist Michael Anthony — was part of the initial appeal.

“What sort of grabbed me about Van Halen, and I don’t think this really gets talked about enough, is I loved the chaos of it,” he says. “Like, you know, guitar rock had started to get a little formulaic and a little stodgy, Journey and Boston and all that stuff.

“And the first Van Halen record was more like the MC5 in a weird way, just unbridled craziness.”

‘A mind-altering musician’

In the book, the two writers relied on more than 50 hours of formal interviews with Eddie Van Halen they separately conducted over the years.

Part traditional biography, part oral history, the book also includes new interviews with Van Halen friends and fellow guitarists Steve Vai and Steve Lukather, former Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony and the band’s manager Ray Danniels.

Tolinski first met Van Halen at the NAMM Show, the annual musical instrument trade show in Anaheim, years ago. Gill met him around the time of 1994’s “Balance” album, for which he made the first of many trips to Van Halen’s 5150 Studios at his Studio City home.

“I think the reason he ended up gravitating towards both of us is because he viewed the world through the guitar,” Tolinski says of Van Halen. “It was really difficult for him to express his creativity and his ideas; he had to express it through that matrix.

“If you don’t really understand that matrix, it’s hard for him to explain how he’s feeling and what he’s doing,” he says. “He got that both Chris and I understood that.”

Like Tolinski, Gill says Van Halen made him feel at home from their very first meeting.

“I went into the studio with him, and he was playing stuff for me,” he says. “He had one of his Ernie Ball Music Man signature model guitars, and he would play something, and then he hands it to me.

“It was just like, ‘Wow, I’m sitting here with one of my friends who I play guitar with.’ That’s what it felt like.”

The book incorporates that mutual love of guitars and guitarists in its approach, telling Eddie Van Halen’s story through conversations about the art and craft he brought to rock ‘n’ roll, guitars, and the music he made.

While it doesn’t skip over Van Halen’s trouble with drugs and alcohol or any other personal challenges he faced at times, it was important, Tolinski and Gill say, that their book not emphasize that more than the music.

“Ed had a pretty wild life and certain controversial moments,” Tolinski says. “And we sort of dreaded the idea that the first major book would be all about just the sort of sensational stuff.

“I mean, all that stuff happened, all that stuff is in the book,” he says. “But the most important thing about Ed is that he was this sort of mind-altering musician.”

The lasting legacy

After Warner Brothers signed Van Halen in 1977, it was three months before they went into the studio to record the debut album, time during which the band stopped playing five or six shows a week on the Sunset Strip and in Pasadena.

Tolinski and Gill say that Eddie Van Halen came back from the break a remarkably stronger player.

“It was one of those revolutionary moments in music history,” Tolinski says. “Like when Robert Johnson disappeared for six months and came back fully formed, you know, as a great Delta guitarist.

“It’s this interesting period of time: Ed goes into the wilderness and comes back with it,” he says.

“Hints of that stuff was there,” Gill says. “But I think when Ed finally had that time off Ed was really refining his sound, refining his playing technique.”

As Van Halen’s life and career unfolds in the pages of “Eruption,” the authors divide the narrative between his groundbreaking performances in the studio and live with Van Halen’s physical innovations to the equipment he was constantly tinkering with to find new sounds and ways to get them.

The “Frankenstein” guitar, also known as the “Frankenstrat,” was created when Van Halen decided to customize a Fender Stratocaster body with a Gibson pickup. Painted black with white stripes, and later red with black and white stripes, it became his signature guitar and was acquired by the Smithsonian for its permanent collection.

But that’s only the most famous of his creations, as Van Halen was constantly tinkering with his gear, in one case, taking a hacksaw to his guitar in the middle of a recording session.

“Ed was not sentimental about his guitars,” Gill says. “You know, so many guitarists are kind of like they’re Nigel Tufnel (of the fictional movie band Spinal Tap). Like, ‘Don’t touch that, you can’t even look at it!’

“And Ed was the opposite,” he says. “Like, ‘Oh, let me pull that part off of this and put it over there. And let me take that neck off. I’m gonna hack this off now.’”

In later life, Van Halen launched EVH, his own guitar company, and that’s part of his legacy as well. But for many, it will always be the music he made on whatever guitar he had at the moment.

Tolinski said he asked Steve Vai, who’d learned many Van Halen songs while in David Lee Roth’s band, how he thought Eddie Van Halen’s posthumous legacy would develop, and was surprised by the answer Vai gave in his interview for the book.

“I posed that question to him, totally expecting him to say, ‘Well, the tapping, the whammy bar, the this, the that,’” Tolinski says. “And Steve’s answer was, ‘The songs.’ He said without the songs there’s nothing, and Ed just doesn’t get enough credit for writing the songs that became the soundtrack for people’s lives for 20, 30 years.

“So I think that’s part of it, that the songs are gonna last,” he says. “If the songs weren’t good, we probably wouldn’t care that much about Eddie Van Halen, because there are a lot of other virtuoso guitarists out there that nobody really cares about.”