He looked at Whitmore. Then he stood up, picked up both cases without complaint and moved them exactly where the proctor had indicated. Whitmore nodded already turning back to his clipboard. “Thank you. You can wait in the corridor.” Eddie was almost at the door when one of the guitars caught his eye.
It was a 1958 Gibson Flying V, an instrument so rare that most guitarists went their entire careers without touching one. It was propped on its stand with the casual indifference of something that didn’t know its own value. Eddie stopped walking. “That Flying V.” he said turning back toward Whitmore. “Is it being used in the exam?” Whitmore looked up.
“It’s one of seven instruments available for the assessment.” “Why?” “The tuning peg on the B string is slightly loose.” Eddie said. “You won’t notice it until someone tries to hold a sustained note then it’ll drift about a quarter tone flat. In an exam setting that’s going to be a problem for whoever draws that guitar.
” Whitmore stared at him. “And you know this how?” “Because I’ve played about 800 of them.” Eddie said not with arrogance just as a statement of fact the way a mechanic might mention he’s changed a thousand oil filters. Whitmore’s expression shifted slightly but he held his ground. “The instruments were checked this morning by our technician.
” “I’m sure they were.” Eddie said. “Can I show you anyway?” There was something in his tone that was so completely without ego, so genuinely unbothered by Whitmore’s skepticism that the proctor found himself nodding before he’d consciously decided to. Eddie walked to the Flying V and picked it up with the practiced ease of someone for whom holding a guitar is as natural as breathing.
He didn’t make a show of it. He simply sat on the edge of the stage, rested the instrument across his knee and played a single sustained note on the B string. It was perfect. Then he bent it slightly, held it and as the sustain stretched out the pitch began its slow inevitable drift downward. Whitmore heard it immediately.
“I’ll be damned.” he said quietly. Eddie set the guitar down. “You’ve got a small Allen wrench?” Two minutes later with a wrench borrowed from a cabinet near the stage door the tuning peg was tightened. Eddie retuned the string, played the same sustained note and this time it held clean and true from beginning to end.
By now two faculty members who had been arranging chairs at the front of the room had stopped what they were doing. A young woman named Patricia Howell who taught music history at Berkeley and was assisting with exam administration that morning had been watching the entire exchange from 6 feet away.
She was the first one to recognize him. She said nothing. She simply stared. Then she walked quietly to where the other faculty member, a theory instructor named Marcus Webb was standing and leaned close to his ear. Webb’s head snapped up. He looked at the man on the stage edge with the canvas jacket and the paint stain and the expression of someone who was already thinking about the next thing.
“You’re Eddie Van Halen.” Webb said. It came out not as a question but as the verbal equivalent of a man stepping off a curb he hadn’t seen. Eddie looked up. “Yeah.” The word landed in the room like a stone dropped in still water. Whitmore’s clipboard lowered very slowly. Patricia Howell put her hand over her mouth.
Marcus Webb sat down in the nearest chair. Eddie Van Halen. The man who had released Eruption 5 years earlier and rewritten what the guitar was capable of doing. The man whose playing had caused working guitarists around the world to put down their instruments and reconsider their entire relationship with the instrument. The man who in a back room at a recording session in 1979 had recorded a guitar overdub for Michael Jackson’s Beat It in one take because he was bored and curious and didn’t know how to approach anything halfway.
The man who had just fixed a tuning peg and moved two cable cases because a proctor he’d never met had asked him to. “Why didn’t you say something?” Whitmore asked. His voice had lost its administrative authority completely. He sat there like a man who had just realized he’d handed Mozart a mop. Eddie shrugged. “You needed the cases moved.
They were in the wrong place.” He looked around the room with what seemed like genuine curiosity. “This is a nice hall. Good acoustics in here. The ceiling height is doing a lot of work.” Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Marcus Webb who had recovered slightly asked the question that was sitting in everyone’s mind.
“Would you I mean we have students coming in 40 minutes for their guitar assessments. Would you be willing to stay?” Eddie considered this. He thought about the corridor and the 2-hour wait for Calabrese and the fact that he had nowhere particular to be. “Sure.” he said. What followed was something that none of the 14 students who came through that examination room that afternoon ever fully recovered from.
In the best possible sense. Eddie did not take over the examination. He did not insert himself into the formal proceedings or undermine the structure that Whitmore and the faculty had established. He sat in a chair off to the side quiet and unobtrusive while students performed their prepared pieces for the panel.
But when each student finished Eddie asked if he could ask them one question. Every single student said yes. Some of them were shaking. The questions were not what anyone expected. He didn’t ask about technique or theory or practice hours. He asked things like “When did you stop hearing that passage and start feeling it? And what were you thinking about 30 seconds before you walked in here, and did it show up in how you played? And to one student who had performed a confident, well-structured piece with a slightly mechanical quality,
you knew exactly where every note was going. Did you ever let yourself get lost in there, even for a second? The student, a junior from Connecticut who had practiced that piece 200 times, said no, he hadn’t. And Eddie just nodded, like that was the most important information he’d collected all day. And to one student who had executed a technically flawless piece with the emotional temperature of a tax form, you played every note right.
What would happen if you played it wrong on purpose, once, just to see what’s in there? That student, a 20-year-old named David Park from Seoul, who had been practicing his examination piece for 4 months, stared at Eddie for a long moment. Then he turned back to his guitar and played the entire piece again, unrehearsed, and somewhere in the middle of it he made a mistake that turned into something nobody in the room had heard before, a bent note that shouldn’t have worked and worked completely.
And when it was over, Patricia Hall was crying, and David Park looked like a man who had just found a door in a wall he’d been staring at for years. Eddie nodded once. “That’s the one,” he said. “That’s the note.” Whitmore, who had spent 11 years believing that examinations were about assessment, sat in the back of the room that afternoon and watched something he didn’t have a rubric for.
He watched a man who had moved cable cases without complaint because someone had asked him to sit with 14 young musicians and remind them, one by one, that the technical mastery they were being assessed on was only the beginning of what they were actually trying to do. When the last student had finished, Calabrese finally appeared at the hall door, slightly out of breath and full of apologies for the scheduling confusion.
