Eddie Van Halen Helped a Young Black Kid Find Meaning in Rock and Roll
For this kid from Gary, Van Halen redefined hard rock at a time when it really needed reinventing
For a newbie musician, the sound was mesmerizing.
Falling somewhere between the energy of a plane on takeoff and the noise of a steel girder ripped in half, but in a musical way, the playing of Eddie Van Halen on the hit single “And the Cradle Will Rock…” blew my young mind back in 1980.
To be sure, I was late to Van Halen’s game. Growing up in mostly Black Gary, Indiana, no one in my neighborhood was blasting music from odd-looking White boys — especially not one heaving around an instrument that looked like it was held together with duct tape and piano wire.
But I had just started playing drums midway through my first year in a Catholic high school, where some of the musicians I met there turned me on to adventurous rockers like Pat Travers, Jeff Beck, Rush, and a group of party-hearty misfits called Van Halen.
When he nailed the solo on Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It,’ even the musicians in my neighborhood who looked down on anything too loud and distorted had to give it…
