In the aftermath of Eddie Van Halen’s death on Oct. 6, tributes to the guitar legend have popped up all across the U.S.
We’ve found examples on social media of everything from grand gestures on marquees and billboards to simple, handmade expressions found on sidewalks. Van Halen’s hometown of Los Angeles was filled with messages of love. His handprints in concrete outside Guitar Center in Hollywood were adorned with a couple of guitar picks, a cigarette and a rose, and flowers and a mostly empty bottle were placed on Van Halen’s plaque on the Sunset Strip Star Walk.
The marquees of both the Whiskey a Go Go and the Roxy also honored his memory. In the suburb of Pasadena, Calif., where he was raised, sidewalks were decorated in chalk, and notes and flowers were left outside his childhood home, as was the apartment building in Nijmegen, the Netherlands where he lived before moving to the U.S. in 1962.
Many, such as the giant guitar outside the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Fla., used the red-with-black-and-white stripes motif found on his Frankenstrat. One Nashville billboard even fashioned a teardrop out of it. Fox’s pre-game show prior to tonight’s NFL match between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Chicago Bears had their logo placed over the design, but perhaps the most impressive use of the color scheme was found on the “Oculus,” the one-ton oval video board that hovers above the field at Los Angeles’ new SoFi Stadium.
New York’s Madison Square Garden featured a photo of him in mid-air with “Rest in Peace Eddie Van Halen” written on it. Other tributes were found in Atlanta, Purdue University, South Carolina and West Virginia. See them all below.
