Eddie Van Halen only met Pantera counterpart "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott a few weeks before he was shot dead on stage with his band Damageplan on Dec. 8, 2004. But Van Halen’s touching personal tribute, in burying one of his famed guitars with Abbott, demonstrates how close a relationship they’d already built – and suggests how much closer they would have become. “Van Halen” were Dimebag’s last words before a mentally disturbed man named Nathan Gale opened fire at Alrosa Villa, a club in Columbus, Ohio, where Damageplan had just begun their set. The guitarist died instantly with five shots to the head. Two others died and seven were wounded before Gale was killed by a police officer -ADVERTISEMENT- The message “Van Halen” was an important one between him and brother Vinnie Paul, Damageplan’s drummer. Through their time together in Pantera and before that, it had held special meaning to them. “The last thing that really matters to me is the last thing we said to each other before we went on stage,” Paul said later. “We were warming up on the side of the stage like we always did and we were both really excited… Our code word to let it all hang out and have a good time was ‘Van Halen,’ man! And that’s the last two words we ever said to each other. I said, ‘Van Halen’ and he said ‘Van Halen,’ and we high-fived each other and went on the deck to do our thing... and a minute-and-a-half later I’ll never see him again.” Dimebag listened to Eddie Van Halen before every show, he’d once reported, adding, “He plays ‘Eruption’ and you go, “Shit, I never heard a guitar sound like that in my life.’ He was to our generation what [Jimi] Hendrix was to his.” Indeed, the fact that both Van Halen and Pantera feature brothers on guitar and drums had led to Dimebag’s band being called the Texan Van Halen. “We had just seen Van Halen in Midland, Texas, a few weeks earlier, and the was the first time Dime ever got to meed Eddie,” Dime’s girlfriend Rita Haney said later. “They hung out before and after the show. Dime even got to play Eddie’s rig at soundcheck. He was like a kid in a candy store.”