The act of cradling a guitar in his arms, settling his fingers on the fretboard, and touching a pick to a string had been drilled into his brain. When I think about that, there were very few times in all the minutes and hours spent with him when he wasn’t holding one guitar or another. That was the first time he had stopped holding the instrument since he first grabbed it from the stand. I can go out and get the tape.” At that point, he laid the Strat on the couch and went outside to fetch the cassette. I had uttered the secret password to enter Castle Van Halen.Īs soon as I posed the question, he said, “Oh, I don’t even remember. I asked him, “Why don’t you give me like a rundown of the songs? Titles? What was involved? Things like that? Can you remember?” and that’s when all the real magic was unleashed. I’d always been a great listener - and what else was a music journalist if not someone who sat and quietly observed as much as anything else? - and someone capable of offering a sympathetic ear.Īfter playing that snippet from “Dance the Night Away,” he told me how the band recorded, working with Ted Templeman and Donn Landee (the band’s producer and engineer respectively), and not trying to copy what he’d done on the first album. So, I tried to be that person or no, I didn’t have to become that person - I was that person.

He had his family of course, but we all know you can say things to a friend that you can’t tell your own flesh and blood. No, what he wanted, and I believed he needed was someone to simply listen, care and try to understand him. They didn’t mean anything to him or at least I didn’t think so. Edward didn’t need me lashing him with superlatives because every single person he encountered was filling his head with them.

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