“I can’t believe I have to write this, but my father, Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, lost his long and arduous battle against cancer this morning,” the musician’s son Wolfgang Van Halen told us on Tuesday.
Tongue cancer was diagnosed in Van Halen in 2000. Doctors then cut out a part of this organ and two years later announced that the musician was healthy. In later years, however, cancer cells metastasized to the throat.
In recent years, Eddie Van Halen has regularly flown to Germany, where he underwent radiation therapy to stop the progression of the disease. The musician was supposed to look for the cause of his illness in the metal guitar picks, which he put too often in his mouth while touring.
Grupa Van Halen appeared on the music scene in 1971. She is famous for her hits “Runnin ‘With the Devil”, “Jump” and “Why Can’t This Be Love”.
Eddie Van Halen was an American rock keyboardist, one of the founders of the hard rock band Van Halen (until 1974 under the name Mammoth). He composed under the influence of Jimi Hendrix’s music. He was ranked 70th in 2003 and 8th in Rolling Stone’s Top 100 Guitarists of All Time in 2011. In 2004, he was classified on the 5th place on the list of 100 best heavy metal guitarists of all time by Guitar World magazine.
The music world held its breath when Van Halen’s debut album, simply entitled “Van Halen”, was released in 1978. Like Eddie Van Halen, the guitar has never been played by anyone. Even Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore, who was never eager to praise others, admitted it.
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