According to Fox news
One of rock and roll’s singular and most gifted guitarists, Eddie Van Halen, has died. He was 65.
Van Halen’s son, Wolf, confirmed the news on Tuesday.
“I can’t believe I’m having to write this, but my father, Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, has lost his long and arduous battle with cancer this morning,” he wrote on Twitter
— Wolf Van Halen (@WolfVanHalen) October 6, 2020
“He was the best father I could ever ask for. Every moment I’ve shared with him on stage and off stage was a gift,” Wolf continued. “My heart is broken and I don’t think I’ll ever fully recover from this loss.”
Eddie Van Halen’s ex-wife, the actress Valerie Bertinelli, shared their son’s message on her own account along with breaking heart emojis. The pair was married for 20 years.
According to TMZ, citing sources, Van Halen died at a Santa Monica hospital on Tuesday. Wolf, his brother Alex, and his wife Janie were by his side.
Van Halen told Billboard magazine in 2015 that he had one-third of his tongue removed due to cancer that had also spread to his esophagus.
“I used metal picks — they’re brass and copper — which I always held in my mouth, in the exact place where I got the tongue cancer,” he said at the time. “Plus, I basically live in a recording studio that’s filled with electromagnetic energy. So that’s one theory. I mean, I was smoking and doing a lot of drugs and a lot of everything. But at the same time, my lungs are totally clear. This is just my own theory, but the doctors say it’s possible.”
Van Halen was a guitar virtuoso, whose blinding speed, control and innovation propelled his band Van Halen into one of hard rock’s biggest groups, fueled the unmistakable fiery solo in Michael Jackson’s hit “Beat It” and became elevated to the status of rock god.
With his distinct solos, Eddie Van Halen was the engine behind the ultimate California party band and helped knock disco off the charts starting in the late 1970s with his band’s self-titled debut album and then with the blockbuster record “1984,” which contains the classics “Jump,” “Panama” and “Hot for Teacher.”
Van Halen is among the top 20 best-selling artists of all time and the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Rolling Stone magazine put Eddie Van Halen at No. 8 in its list of the 100 greatest guitarists.
Born in the Netherlands and raised in Pasadena, Calif., Van Halen started his eponymous group in 1974 with his brother Alex on drums, bass player Michael Anthony, and the flamboyant lead singer David Lee Roth.
Mike McCready of Pearl Jam told Rolling Stone magazine that listening to Van Halen’s “Eruption” was like hearing Mozart for the first time. “He gets sounds that aren’t necessarily guitar sounds — a lot of harmonics, textures that happen just because of how he picks.”
Van Halen released albums on a yearly timetable — “Van Halen II” (1979), “Women and Children First” (1980), “Fair Warning” (1981) and “Diver Down” (1982) — until the monumental “1984,” which hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album charts (only behind Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”). Rolling Stone ranked “1984” No. 81 on its list of the 100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s.
In a February 2020 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune, lead singer Roth, who last toured with Van Halen in 2015 after being replaced for a time by vocalist Sammy Hagar, was noncommittal about Eddie Van Halen’s condition. “You know what I know,” he told the paper. “Ed, God bless him, may have a fair amount of time ahead of him, but going out on the road is an unforgiving task. It kills people.”
Reminiscing on the band’s start, Roth said, “I remember the days when we would stand around and say, ‘Let’s go have a cigarette.’ And that’s what we did: Four guys having one cigarette. I remember those days. They go by fast, so enjoy them while you’re in them.”