![]() Let me start off by saying, my father was a professional musician, classically trained on clarinet and saxophone, and he travelled the world making music, and he met my mother in Indonesia. According to his Allmusic biography, ‘Edward Lodewijk Van Halen’ was born on 26 January 1955 in the Netherlands, and ‘moved with his family to the US’ in the 1960s – and that’s that.Īnd yet, here’s Van Halen in 2015, speaking as part of a Smithsonian project called What It Means to Be American: Nor do any of the reference books I’ve flipped through. But MTV hadn’t mentioned Van Halen’s mother, Eugenia. Eddie Van Halen as bi-racial hero? ‘It’s all here,’ Kurt Loder had said, presenting an MTV rockumentary about the band in 1989. ‘One very very baad baad man on the axe, no doubt, needless to say, but you know we couldn’t resist pointing out the de-bi-racialization of the Van Halen brothers by the white rock coalition media.’ ‘The Rolling Stone obit doesn’t even mention Eddie Van Halen’s Indonesian mother,’ Tate wrote on Facebook. ![]() But since his death earlier this month I’ve been thinking about him a lot, thanks to Greg Tate, the cultural critic and a co-founder, in the 1980s, of the Black Rock Coalition. I hadn’t thought much about Eddie Van Halen since 1984, an album that was all over American radio the year I turned 12. ![]()
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