Recent interview with Eddie Van Halen 2015
 

Probably his best interview to date. He is sober, lucid, and covers a lot of ground including early family life, piano lessons, experimentation with guitar, amps, and electricity, and making it in the biz. It is 55 minutes long but if you are a guitarist or EVH fan it is worth a look.

http://youtu.be/sXoHyiJUItQ

If I had had any confidence this event really would take place, I'd have gotten tix and flown out there for it. Glad it happened. Ed stuck around and posed for photos with a lot of the attendees too.

Looks and sounds like he's healthy these days. Good thing to see.

Thank you for that link.

Without question, one of the best interviews I've ever seen him give.

He used to own a Convertible D previously campaigned by the original owners of Automotion. When I spoke with him many years ago, he was hard to understand, as it wasn't that long after he'd had some of his tongue removed (the first time).

We used to chase these guys around the LA club circuit in 75-76 and when they spotted our gig van they would wallpaper it with Van Halen flyers. Clowns!

Eddie has been through the ringer both physically and emotionally and it's good to hear him settled and grateful for his life experiences. Still got some chops too!

Now if he'd just schitcan his kid and hire back Michael Anthony.

Yeah
 

Heartily agree .... extreme nepotism huh.

I had no idea the following was true:

1) EVH invented wax potting
2) Guitar tab was invented because EVH's playing defied all other means of muscial notation
3) Nobody in rock did tapping/tap harmonics/etc. before EVH

None of that is true. I'm as big an EVH fanboi as there ever was. But you have to take every word out of his mouth with barrel of salt. Unless it was a recent event and corroborated by witnesses, EVH's tales tend to be tall ones.

Being a drummer, his playing didn't influence me but the band certainly did.

I liked hearing about the early years and how much his parents supported what he and Alex were doing. The part about his dad being off stage and beaming with pride was nice to hear.

Yes, bring Mike back. He was such a pivotal piece of VH for all those years.

Still has good fingers. I thought tabs were invented for the interneti that can't read music.

Not tapping for sure...
 

Tapping was done years ago (maybe not rock though), one thought was that tapping first done electrically speaking by Harry De Armond, the guy who first made and marketed electric guitar pick-ups. He did it to show off the sensitivity of his pickups.

Oh, I am well aware of this. ;)

Ol' Eddie is a talented musician, no doubt. But there were a number of factors that contributed to Van Halen's success, and EVH's guitar playing skill was only one factor.

There's a story going around that George Lynch and EVH were in a bar in LA and saw Harvey Mandel tapping around 1977 and that's almost corroborated by a bootleg of EVH doing Eruption before then sans tapping. And Steve Hackett did it in Genesis long before too.

So much folklore around EVH's methods. I stopped trying them out at boiling my strings. And, as much as I'd love to try out a Variac on a dimed Marshall Plexi, those amps are just too precious to risk such a thing.

He was probably the one to bring tap harmonics to the masses.

There's a guy on the Miata board that grew up in Pasadena and jammed with them from the early days when they were kids all they way up to the time when they got somewhat famous on the local scene. Pretty cool interview, I think.

He most certainly was. He popularized a ton of things he wasn't the first to do. He's a born innovator and always found a way to do stuff he heard in his heard, even if he didn't have the chops to play it. He'd find a way around it.

so.... best VH album, or favorite? Fair Warning for me.

I've been working on this one a lot in the last year. I should have Mean Street ready for band practice next week. But the most killer rhythm work on the album is Dirty Movies. I have a Seymour Duncan '78 Custom in my Frankenstrat. When running it through my EVH 50w head, I can just touch the brown sound.