How listening to the new Bruce Springsteen album helped me to get over Eddie Van Halen’s passing

“I turn up the volume, let the spirits be my guide” (Bruce Springsteen, Ghosts)

Eddie Van Halen was the biggest idol of my wonder years. He created the most exciting noise I ever heard, a noise that finished my childhood cultural tastes and that was imprinted in my mind forever and that made me love Rock music more than anything or anyone. The idolatry only increased during my teens, as I became one of those kids hanging around the nearest Guitar Center, trying instruments and pedals and amps that were conceived after Eddie’s inventions and commercialized with the only goal to emulate his guitar sound. I also idolized him because, in spite of all his talent, he, 1) did not take himself seriously and acted like a kid pranking a school friend, and not as an almighty Rock God, and 2) he kept working hard and inventing new technics and new gear, growing as a songwriter and pursuing the “brown sound” (the tone that only existed in his head, and that fans found in wonderful and different attempts in each of Van Halen albums).

Eddie Van Halen, like a super-hero of Fiction (Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Spiderman) or the best super-heroes of real world (Michael Jordan, Ernest Hemingway, Meryl Streep), never felt that it was enough being the “chosen one”; actually he looked at his own talent as a curse to be defeated (think that his father, also a musician, gave him “Ludwig” as middle name), working more and more to improve his craft year after year.

Talk about a role model for a kid.

As I grew older, though, it became clear that “I live my life like there’s no tomorrow” and “got it bad, so bad / I’m hot for teacher” were not exactly the most adequate brain fuel or inspiration to ignite my maturation. By the time I started thinking about getting a job and a steady girlfriend (instead of partying with my friends) and what I would look like as a citizen, a professional, a friend or a lover — I became more and more unrest about Eddie Van Halen’s ego clashes with his lead singers, and his heavy drinking, and his fairly shallow interviews about his influences and the honing of his craft (although later, already into his sixties, he started to offer deeper reflections). I needed more, I needed to understand the angst and insecurity that were boiling inside my guts, and I needed to face the huge challenges that my not-so-poor-but-certainly-not-wealthy background brought to the pursuit of my dreams and ambitions. I needed to understand women, and needed to know what to tell them when I had the chance to make it real. That’s when the piano intro to Thunder Road gently introduced Bruce Springsteen’s playbook to my adult life.

Bruce, I knew then, was the all-american guy that yelled (a lot) in We Are the World and his mid-‘80s hits such as Dancing in the Dark and Born in the USA. I knew he was more than that, too; I knew that he was well respected as lyricist and chronicler of American life, and that he was the working class hero from New Jersey that became one of the biggest Rock Stars of all time, playing over three-hour shows with the same band he’s been playing since he was a kid. I knew he was the Boss, but until then I had never cared to really understand why. That changed exactly three minutes and forty-three seconds after that piano intro started, as I heard a young Springsteen announcing to his girlfriend, “it’s a town full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win”.

I was pulling out of my place to win, too, and I found everything I needed to know in the lyrics and the chords of Bruce’s breakthrough album, Born to Run — which provided me the boldness and guts to establish my adulthood goals –, the following one, Darkness on the Edge of Town — which helped me to deal with defeat and the harsh face of reality –, and the one that became my favorite album, The River — that showed me the beauty of settling down and having fun in my own low-key, human, local scale. In a couple of months while I was 23 years old, I heard all music Bruce Springsteen had ever produced until that point. But I really got into each of those records while I was reaching the approximate age Bruce himself had when he recorded them. That way, I became a Tunnel of Love guy only after I started to really experience the ups and downs of a marriage, and The Rising brought me a more complex, conciliatory understanding and a less angry, binary view of the post-9/11 world. Songs like American Skin, Land of Hopes and Dreams, and Long Walk Home taught me to increasingly add a human aspect on my view on economy and politics. Because of Bruce, I discovered the books of John Steinbeck and the music of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Jackson Browne. The person I am today, at 45 years old, owes a lot to Bruce Springsteen music.

No wonder Van Halen was moved to the old memories box, like Woody and Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story 3 (and, as watching the abandoned toys in the Pixar movie, listening to old Van Halen songs also became a nostalgic exercise that made me cry, as I realized that I would never have the same fun or feel the same thrill of listening to Eruption when I was a teen, or singing from the top of my lungs that I was “standing on top of the world” with my friends on a Saturday night).

Interestingly enough, these artists’ work kind of followed the roles they played in their respective audiences: if Bruce became the older brother that matured in front of us and helped us to face the harsh truth of life (releasing seminal albums twice a decade since the ‘70s), Van Halen was frozen in time and did not release new music for over twenty years (apart from a comeback album in 2012 with recycled music from the vault). Therefore, Eddie’s flamboyant music and jovial smile were forever encapsulated in the MTV videos that defined our childhood and teen years. Van Halen kept singing about dancing the night away and living at a pace that kills, because they never discovered that life is actually tough; Bruce taught us how spit in the face of these Badlands, and to understand our longing to belong, and to feel good about not being that young anymore. When we listen to Van Halen, we channel our younger self and have license to be nostalgic and pull away the adult-life problems; when we listen to Bruce Springsteen, we reflect about our life and what to do next.

Although I had adopted Bruce’s work as the soundtrack of my life, I’’ve always reserved some cyclical space in my heart and time to reconcile with my teen version: I bought a yellow and black stripped Strat just like Eddie’s iconic guitar during Van Halen II era; I traveled to the US and got first row tickets to see Van Halen live in their later tours; I took each opportunity when driving alone to turn up the volume and let Eddie’s guitar solos to assault my senses with their irresistible fluency and lack of flair. In other words, as any other middle-aged man, I had my young-again moments.

And then Eddie Van Halen died.

I’ve been preparing myself to deal with the death of my idols — after all, Paul McCartney and Jimmy Page are almost in their eighties, and Springsteen is into his seventies now, as is Stevie Nicks. But I was totally caught off-guard when I heard about Eddie’s passing.

Of course I knew about his cancer, which he fought hard for years, but in the later years Eddie was doing fine, looking good, having a great time playing with his son (who was named Wolfgang and became a great musician himself) and sharing his legacy in a more generous way, like the simple and tender interview at the Smithsonian about his inventor approach to Rock’n’Roll or the exposure of one of his stripped guitars at the MoMA, in New York. And I could not avoid feeling like someone really close died. I spent days, probably two weeks, reading obsessively everything about him and eventually crying while listening to, say, Dreams or 5150. I felt not like a brother died, but as if a very close friend, someone who was with me during my discovery years, a very special bond with my youth (and a very integral part of it), was gone. And I couldn’t handle it.

Three weeks later, Bruce Springsteen released his twentieth album, Letter to You.

At 71 years old, Bruce had an epiphany himself. During the last decade, two original members of the E-Street Band died, including the beloved and gigantic saxophone player in whose shoulders skinny Bruce leaned in the Born to Run cover. Other close friends were gone, too. And last year, with the passing of the co-founder of The Castilles, Bruce’s band in his teens, he realized he was the last surviving member of his first Rock band. He dealt with losing a dear connection with his youth the way you would imagine Springsteen does: writing not only a song, but a whole album. The Last Man Standing was the first song that led to a collections of songs reflecting on ageing, death, rupture with a defining time of our lives, and reconciliation with your coming of age period. Bruce talks about his long, deep, one-way conversation with his audience in the title track. He remembers his departed bandmates in Ghosts — an instant classic with a powerful chorus that will certainly make Boomers, Gen Xers and Millennials pump their fists and jump around and sing together in football stadiums around the world very soon. Burnin’ Train heals all the mourning with urgency and lust, sounding fresh and fierce as if Bruce and band were recording their very first record — and it’s not a coincidence that song was preceded by Janey Needs a Shooter, a song Bruce wrote in 1972, before his debut album, and was never registered in studio until now. Other two songs from that era are part of the album, showing mature Springsteen revisiting his “the new Dylan” days, with a different style of writing. They sound complete and hopeful, yet somehow sad.

As I sat listening again and again to Letter to You — which is easily the best album Springsteen has released since 2002’s The Rising –, I started connecting those songs to my own mourning of Eddie Van Halen. When Bruce imagines Heaven as The House of a Thousand Guitars, you cannot avoid thinking of Eddie being welcomed in a heavenly version of his beloved 5150 home studio, where someday he will meet again his brother Alex (“the only drummer I ever played with”, as he announced many times) and his son Wolfgang (who became Van Halen’s bassist at 15 and developed a deeper and deeper human and musical connection with his father until the final days). When, in Ghosts, Bruce talks to his pals that their old guitars hanging on the wall and their amps “still set on ten” make him realize he’s alive and feeling the blood shiver in his bones — that’s exactly how I feel listening to my old Van Halen live bootlegs that I have been listening for more than thirty years.

But finally, as in any mourning process, there’s the need to let go and say goodbye and move on, and that’s what Bruce does beautifully in the last song of the album, the majestic I’ll See You in My Dreams. A documentary showing the making of the album (available on Apple TV+) shows the band listening to the song around the mixing board, with Bruce’s longtime manager and friend Jon Landau listening to it for the first time. Landau literally breaks down, helpless, mumbles that there is some kind of magnificence in the song, and then leaves the room to cry on his own. As much as I was as moved as him by the beautiful melody and inspired lyrics and particularly by the uplifting line, “for death is not the end”, that was the moment I actually stopped crying. For death is not the end and, and, although “my soul feels like it’s been split at the seams” (another great line), we will always have other chances to meet and live and laugh again — through music. I know I cannot plan or predict when it will happen, though: it can be while driving home after leaving my daughter in school, or the middle of a flight during a business trip, or in the quintessential uncontrolled life experience — a dream. It’s a matter of being open and ready to it. In the end, maybe that’s what dreams are made of.