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.