A Constant Reminder of His Humble Beginnings
In the early ‘80s – 1983, to be exact – Eddie Van Halen built his home studio in the Hollywood hills. On the wall of the kitchen, he hung up a photo of a dumpy old apartment building that sat in a city over 5,000 miles away. Whenever he would head to grab a beer from the fridge during his all-nighter recording sessions, he would look up at that photo.
Jan and Eugenia Van Halen. Source: Twitter
That dumpy apartment, at 59 Rozemarijnstraat in the city of Nijmegen in the Netherlands (near the German border), was where he spent his formative years. It was where he spent most of the first seven years of his life. The man we know as the all-American guitar mastermind – the star guitarist of the distinctly Southern Californian band Van Halen – was actually a biracial immigrant who hardly spoke a word of English until he was seven years old.