The great rock guitarist Eddie Van Halen, the lead guitarist of the band “Van Halen,” passed away yesterday. I can distinctly remember the first time I heard his guitar playing.
It was 1979. My brother had purchased “Van Halen II” and was listening to it on the stereo in his room. He opened the door just as the second song on the album, “Dance The Night Away” came on. Suddenly the house filled with Alex Van Halen’s drum beat, and then came Eddie’s opening guitar riff. . .
At the time, I knew immediately that I was listening to something special. In my mind, I came to associate the band and its music with California, where the Van Halens were from.
It was only much later that I learned that Eddie and Alex Van Halen’s mother was “Indo” (Eurasian), and was from Java. I then started to link the Van Halens and their music with a different world.
Not all that long before the Van Halen brothers started to rock America, there were Indo musicians who were rocking the Netherlands, bands like The Blue Diamonds and The Tielman Brothers. Indeed, Indo musicians have been credited with introducing Rock-and-Roll to the Dutch world.
How did that happen? With the end of Dutch colonial rule in the East Indies, or what is now Indonesia, there were many Indos who migrated to Holland, fearing that they would be discriminated against in an independent Indonesia because of their mixed heritage. Some of these people were musicians.
What is more, they were musicians who had been exposed to a wide range of musical styles. Hotel bands in the Netherlands East Indies in the 1930s, for instance, had played an eclectic range of music, from European hits to Hawaiian songs to the locally-developed style of music known as Kroncong, with roots in Portuguese and Indonesian musical styles.
Then in the 1940s, The Voice of America, a shortwave radio station that was established to counter German propaganda, broadcast the latest American music into the Dutch East Indies while in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation during World War II, it was apparently more difficult (or dangerous) to tune in to such broadcasts.
As such, when Indo musicians migrated to the Netherlands in the 1950s, they brought with them a rich variety of musical influences and were able to create a unique sound of their own.
Known as “Indorock,” that sound took the Netherlands by storm in the 1950s and 1960s.
While young people in the Netherlands liked the Indorock sound, many of the Indo immigrants were discriminated against as “Brown Dutchmen,” and this led some to immigrate to the US.
I’m not sure if such discrimination is what led the Van Halen’s parents to migrate to America, but the America that they migrated to segregated blacks and whites, and as immigrants who could not speak English, the Van Halen boys were (at least initially) not considered part of the latter group.
As Eddie Van Halen stated in an interview in 2015, “Believe it or not, the very first school I went to was still segregated where people of color were on a certain side of the playground and white kids were on the other side. Since I was also considered a second-class citizen at the time, I was lumped with the black people.”
In 1979 when I heard Van Halen for the first time, I didn’t know anything about all of this historical background, which in some ways shows that by that point it didn’t matter.
The Van Halen brothers were not “Indorockers,” as people like The Tielman Brothers had been a few years before in the Netherlands.
They were just a couple of kids from Pasadena, California who had a band that made rock music unlike anything people had heard before.
And as a 13-year-old myself, all I could think was “Damn that sounds cool”!!
