Eddie Van Halen was born on January 26, 1955 in Nijmegen, Holland. When Eddie was 13, his family moved to California.

The Van Halen brothers grew up taking classical piano lessons, switching to guitar (Eddie) and drums (Alex) as teenagers. In 1974, they hooked up with David Lee Roth (vocals) and Michael Anthony (bass), while gigging around town in their band Mammoth.

The band got a break in 1977 when Kiss bassist Gene Simmons noticed them at a local club and financed a recording session for the band. On the strength of Simmons' recommendation, as legend has it, Van Halen was signed to Warner Bros.

Their debut album, Van Halen, was released in 1978 and included the hit singles "Runnin' With the Devil" and a cover of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me." Eddie Van Halen took electric guitar technique to new heights with his patented two-handed tapping and pull-off effects. Within six months of its release, Van Halen was certified platinum. The album not only launched Van Halen's career, but it came to influence countless American rock bands during the next decade.

During the next few years, Van Halen became one of the hardest working and most profitable bands in the recording industry, releasing a string of multi-platinum albums in quick succession; 1979's Van Halen II, 1980's Women and Children First, 1981's Fair Warning and 1982's Diver Down. But it was the album 1984, released on New Year's Day of that year, that solidified the band's superstar status.

All was not well within the band, however. Rising tensions between Roth and the other band members were increasingly evident. Finally, in 1985, Roth parted ways with Van Halen. Roth was quickly replaced with former Montrose frontman Sammy Hagar.

By the mid-'90s, tensions between the clean-and-sober Eddie and the unrepentant wildman Hagar began to surface and 1995's Balance proved to be Hagar's swansong with the band.

Shortly after Hagar's departure (and possibly contributing to it) Roth returned for a much-publicized Van Halen reunion. The reunion was short-lived, however, when Roth once again parted ways with his former bandmates after recording two songs for a greatest hits album (1996's Best of Van Halen Vol. 1) and making an appearance with the band on the MTV Music Awards.

Shortly thereafter Gary Cherone, formerly of the heavy metal band Extreme, was recruited as the third lead singer of Van Halen. The new lineup's much-anticipated album, aptly titled Van Halen III, was released in the spring of 1998.

Credit: eurasiannation.com