Remembering Eddie Van Halen: A Marathon Broadcast
Everybody has their “remembering Eddie Van Halen” story about that sad day when he passed away. This is my story. It was October 6, 2020. It was a Tuesday. I…
(Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Everybody has their "remembering Eddie Van Halen" story about that sad day when he passed away. This is my story.
It was October 6, 2020. It was a Tuesday. I had been back in the studio for a few months after spending a couple of months broadcasting from home, thanks to the Coronavirus pandemic. I remember thinking that fall how nice it was to be back in the routine of being in the studio and on the air weekdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. after everything went sideways earlier that year.
I was just about to kick off two hours commercial-free at the end of my show and yield the airwaves to Al Beck, who was hosting afternoons at the time. That's when the news broke: Eddie Van Halen had passed away from a stroke at the age of 65. I first saw the story on Twitter, so I made it a point to verify via a second source. That second source was Wolfgang Van Halen himself.
Remembering Eddie Van Halen: A Marathon Broadcast
Down the hall I ran to Program Director Ken West's office. He'd seen the news, too. We made the call right then and there: Al was to take the afternoon off, and I was to stay on the air, taking phone calls and playing Van Halen requests. So back to the studio I went, putting your calls on the air, and playing your songs as fast as Ken could round them up for me.
I vowed to stay on the air until the phones stopped ringing, and that didn't happen until around 8:30 p.m. A nine-and-a-half hour shift, with the last four-and-a-half hours wall-to-wall Van Halen. So many great songs, so many great stories, such a fitting tribute to arguably the greatest rock guitarist of all-time. I went back into my archives to find some of it to share in honor of the anniversary.
Your Stories
I put a whole bunch of your phone calls into an EVH tribute comp that you can listen to here.
The Pros Weigh In
ROCK 92.9 Program Director Ken West and Eddie disciple Bill Bracken joined me for a pair of longer conversations.
Happy Birthday
Here's something I wrote in tribute to EVH on what would have been his birthday in January.
I Gotta Pee
Seriously. I don't think I left the studio between 3:45 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. that day.
