Jimmy Page at 81: “Why I HATED Eddie Van Halen” — The Truth Behind the Guitar Gods’ Cold War

Picture it: two titans of the electric guitar standing at the edge of different eras, both burning bright enough to melt the stage lights — one, mysterious and mythic; the other, a tap-frenzy comet that rewired rock’s vocabulary. Now imagine one of those titans, Jimmy Page, in the twilight of his life, finally peeling back the gilded curtain and saying what he’s always felt. The words land like thunder.

At 81, Jimmy Page hasn’t lost his edge. He’s had the luxury of time and the burden of memory, and in an interview that feels equal parts elegy and indictment, Page lays out a portrait of Eddie Van Halen that’s shockingly human and heartbreakingly blunt. This isn’t the usual praise-for-praise rocker’s checklist. This is Page’s reckoning — a slow, intimate dismantling of the gleam that made Van Halen a household name.

If you loved Eddie’s tapping, his grin, his impossibly fast hands, don’t panic. Page isn’t writing a takedown in the way tabloids do. He isn’t jealous in the petty sense. He’s speaking from the vantage of someone who’s watched genius flare and burn, and he’s asking, quietly, what that cost.

A Clash of Styles, A Clash of Souls

Page frames it simply: Eddie came out of nowhere and changed everything. The late ’70s were a pivot point — a moment when rock needed shock and novelty, and Van Halen handed it a new language of technique. Tapping, whammy dives, punishing harmonics: to a young audience, Eddie was sorcery. To Page, who’d spent decades mining tone and texture, the new stunt-heavy style felt different — dazzling, yes, but thin at its emotional center.

That difference — not merely generational, but philosophical — is the first crack. Page describes Van Halen as “flashy” and “showy,” terms that read like music criticism but sound, here, like sorrow. “Too dependent on tricks rather than soul,” he says, not out of spite, but with the weary voice of a man who’s seen the tradeoffs of fame. The tradeoff, Page implies, is this: you can innovate and astonish, or you can build a language so intricate it becomes armor that keeps real vulnerability out.

It’s an old rock story: the innovator becomes the idol; the idol becomes a mirror for a whole audience’s hungers. Page recognizes Eddie’s genius — he doesn’t deny the solo that made arenas lose their minds — but he can’t help seeing the human wreckage behind the spotlight.

Beyond Technique: The Private Collapse

What makes Page’s words land is their empathy. He doesn’t caricature Eddie as a mere showman; he traces the slow corrosion: brilliant shows, yes, but also nights of self-medication, moments of paranoia, and the long, quiet slide into isolation. Alcohol, Page says, started as a balm for anxiety and ended as a ravenous companion. The more adoring the crowd, the lonelier the man.

Page paints scenes like a cinematographer: Eddie onstage at his peak, shredding as if to outrun an inner panic; Eddie alone in dim studios, chasing perfection until it becomes a prison. The image of the studio as sanctuary and cell is familiar to anyone who’s watched artists fold under pressure. Page’s description lands like a warning: brilliance can be an accelerant for self-destruction.

He names the collateral damage — volatile relationships inside the band, public feuds with frontmen and producers, the constant scramble to outdo the last triumph. David Lee Roth becomes a foil in this drama: flamboyant, combustible, a man whose public persona fed and was fed by Van Halen’s genius. Roth’s exits and returns read less like tabloid fodder in Page’s retelling and more like the fracture lines of a house built on adrenaline.

Brothers at War

Even family, Page notes, wasn’t immune. Alex Van Halen, Eddie’s drummer and brother, appears as the reluctant peacemaker in Page’s narrative — the man stuck between adoration and self-preservation. Page’s account hints at the ache of watching close ties corrode under the strain of habit and fame. Their story becomes a microcosm of the larger tragedy: mastery doesn’t inoculate you from the human costs of living loudly.

Page’s voice softens when he speaks of Eddie’s private life — the marriage to Valerie Bertinelli, the family moments, the attempt at domesticity amid the chaos. He acknowledges the genuine love there, the small attempts at normalcy that ultimately couldn’t silence the demons. Divorce, Page suggests, wasn’t a scandal so much as survival.

The Long Tail of Addiction and Regret

Page is unflinching about the toll. He chronicles the “unraveling” — seizures, hospital stays, surgeries, the slow physical failing that made the man who once owned the stage become fragile. He tells us the obvious and the terrible: addiction eats technique and talent from the inside. The hands that made such incandescent sound were the same hands impaired by years of coping. That shock of seeing a hero diminished is what’s behind the bitterness in Page’s tone. It’s not pure disdain. It’s the grief of realizing that the fire you loved was burning the person who wielded it.

Page goes further to suggest a systemic element: how the rock industry feeds on, enables, and eventually ignores the self-harm of its stars. Managers, promoters, and even fans often cheer the very behavior that hastens decline — the excess, the chaos. He hints at late-night threats, burned deals, and a professional environment that could be as punishing as it was lucrative.

Legacy: Two Sides of the Coin

Still, Page’s reflections aren’t an attempt to erase Van Halen’s legacy. If anything, they deepen it. He insists that Eddie reshaped rock forever — that guitarists born after him speak his name like a benediction. But he also insists that legacy is complicated. Genius, he warns, can be both gift and curse. The solos that made stadiums chant also echoed the cost.

This is Page’s core thesis: admiration need not be blind. To revere a musician is not to romanticize the wreckage that may come behind the guitar case. You can love the sound and still mourn the man.

A Human, Not a Myth

What makes Page’s confession so striking is its refusal to let Eddie be only icon. He keeps looping back to this idea: success did not save Eddie. Fame did not fix him. Instead, it amplified every wound. Page’s account refuses the binary of hero or villain. Van Halen was both inventor and victim, and the music we love carries the fingerprints of both.

There’s tenderness in this dismantling. Page doesn’t revel in the fall of another musician. He mourns it. He sees the pattern that felled other greats — Moon, Hendrix, Morrison — and recognizes the dangerous template of “burn bright and burn out.” That repetition haunts Page; it shapes his regret.

Why This Matters to Fans

For those who grew up air-guitaring to “Eruption” or learning “Panama” note by note, Page’s words may be jarring. But they are also clarifying. They invite us to appreciate art while refusing to sugarcoat the costs. They also nudge the industry — and fans — to consider whether worship should come with accountability and care.

Page’s reflections are a plea, quiet and indirect: treasure the music, yes, but remember the person. Protect the fragility that genius so easily exposes.

Final Act: A Warning and a Tribute

In the interview’s closing passages, Page’s voice shifts from critique to elegy. He acknowledges the haunting persistence of Eddie’s sound — the way it keeps calling us back even when the man behind it is gone. There’s a humility in Page’s final note: he’s not trying to tarnish a legend, only to add context to it.

“Legends are not made of steel,” he tells us. “They bleed, they falter, and they break like everyone else.”

That line could be the thesis of an entire music history course. It’s a reminder that the icons we elevate remain flesh and bone. Page’s words, less an act of hatred than a complex mix of sorrow and clarity, ask us to hold both the music and the cost in our hands at once.

Eddie Van Halen changed the world of guitar. Jimmy Page, with the generosity and bluntness of an elder statesman, insists we acknowledge the whole truth — the riffs and the wreckage — as part of the story.

If you want the flash and the fireworks, dig into the records. If you want the human truth, listen to Page’s lament. Both are part of the same, complicated melody.