The 1990s weren’t Black Sabbath’s strongest period, but Eddie Van Halen’s uncredited solo on “Evil Eye,” from the group’s 1994 album, Cross Purposes, has become the stuff of legend. And according to Tony Iommi, Van Halen hero deserves all the credit.

In a new interview, Iommi recalls how the pair’s surprise collaboration came about in 1993, when Van Halen invited himself to a Sabbath rehearsal. Iommi — who will release his fourth solo album, From the Dark, on October 23 — tells Planet Rock how a friendly invitation turned into a rare meeting between two of rock’s greatest players, complete with a last-minute trip to a music store.

“We had a house that we rented that we used to use for rehearsal,” Iommi recalls. “I’d always see him if he came to England, or when I’d be in L.A.; we’d always go out for dinner.”

On one particular occasion, however, Iommi’s schedule didn’t allow it.

“He called me up and I said, ‘We’re rehearsing tomorrow. I can’t,’” Iommi says. Van Halen saw an opportunity. “He said, ‘Oh, I’d love to do that.’”

“Do you want to come then?” Iommi asked. “All right, I’ll pick you up at the hotel and then we’ll go and get a guitar and whatever else. And that's what we did.”

As Iommi explained in 2024, the pair stopped at a local music store to pick up one of Van Halen’s own signature guitars. Once they arrived at the rehearsal space, the guest guitarist soon found his way into the music.

“We started playing a new song we were working on,” Iommi recalled (via Guitar World). “He started playing a solo.”

The performance became part of “Evil Eye,” which appeared on Black Sabbath’s 1994 album Cross Purposes. Contractual complications prevented Van Halen from receiving an official credit, but his solo survived on the finished recording. It remains the only known studio collaboration between the two guitarists.

There may be more from that day, too. Iommi has said a tape of the pair jamming on Black Sabbath riffs is somewhere in his home, although he apparently hasn’t tracked it down.

The session with Van Halen sounds like an uncomplicated meeting of musical minds. However, Iommi’s account of recording 13, Black Sabbath’s 2013 reunion album with Rubin, is another story entirely.

According to Iommi, Rubin largely communicated with the band through him, leaving the guitarist responsible for relaying instructions to his bandmates.

“We didn’t have time to absorb what we’d done because Rick wouldn’t talk to the others,” Iommi tells Planet Rock. “He talked to me, and I’d have to tell them.”

That indirect approach sometimes left the other musicians in the dark. On one occasion, Rubin asked Iommi to come up with a song inspired by Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan” over a weekend, ready to record on the Monday.

“We were in Los Angeles, and I came back from the weekend off,” Iommi explains. “Rick phoned me on the fly and said, ‘Oh, could you come up with a song like ‘Planet Caravan’ to record on Monday?’ I thought, ‘Blimey!’”

Iommi worked on an idea and agreed to record it, but apparently nobody had told the rest of the band. When they arrived at the studio on Monday, Rubin announced that they would be recording Iommi’s new song.

“Rick said, ‘We’re going to put this song down,’ and Geezer [Butler, bass] went, ‘What song?’ ‘Well, Tony’s done a song. We’re going to put that down.’ Geezer went, ‘I don’t even know what it is!’”

They went ahead with the recording, but the process left a lasting impression on Iommi.

“We ended up putting it down,” he says, “but it was such an awkward situation.”

Elsewhere, Metallica’s James Hetfield — facing criticism over recent onstage comments that left Roger Waters frothing at the mouth — has called Iommi “the riff lord.”

And Iommi’s new bassist, Becky Baldwin, has revealed that she initially thought an invitation to work on his new solo album was a hoax.

Jas Obrecht’s chance encounter with a then-unknown Eddie Van Halen on July 23, 1978, led to the guitarist’s first magazine interview, published in Guitar Player’s November 1978 issue. The two would meet again, including for a five-hour conversation in 1980 that explored Eddie’s approach to electric guitar, gear and modifications, his musical upbringing, and the techniques behind his groundbreaking playing.

Published in the magazine’s April 1980 issue, that interview found Van Halen discussing everything from his early music lessons to the importance of phrasing and his approach to guitar solos. He also shared his surprisingly dismissive initial reaction to one of Van Halen’s biggest early hits.

At the outset of the conversation, Obrecht asked Van Halen how he developed his speed. Born in the Netherlands, Eddie had moved to the U.S. with his family at age seven. His answer began with a characteristically humorous account of his classical training.

“Well, I’ll tell you. They used to lock me in a little room and go, ‘Play fast!’” he began with a laugh. “I was actually trained to be a classical pianist. I had this Russian teacher who couldn’t speak a word of English, and he would just sit there with a ruler ready to slap my face if I made a mistake.

“This started in Holland, and both my brother and I took lessons. Then when we got to the U.S. my dad found another good teacher. Basically, that’s where I got my ears developed, learned my theory, and got my fingers moving.

“Then when the Dave Clark Five and those bands came out, I wanted to go [plays the riff from ‘You Really Got Me’]. I didn’t want to go clink, clink, clink. I still play piano, and I also play violin.”

Some of that classical training found its way into Eddie’s guitar playing, even if he didn’t consciously set out to apply piano techniques to the instrument.

“Things like this are classical,” he said, demonstrating the continuous left-hand tremolo technique heard in “Spanish Fly.” “I know that had some things psychologically come out, but I don’t actually sit down at a piano and try to apply it to guitar.”

The conversation also turned to his solos — both how he approached them and what he wanted them to achieve. Asked what mattered most, Van Halen had a straightforward answer.

“Feeling,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s melodic or spontaneous. If it’s melodic and has no feeling, it’s screwed.”

That emphasis on feel informed an approach that left room for both careful composition and improvisation. Some solos were worked out in advance; others came together in the studio on the spot.

“Sometimes it’s spontaneous, sometimes it’s set,” he explained. “Like the solo in ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’ was set. And the same with ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.’ By ‘set’ I mean that I figured out something melodic instead of just going for it.”

Other performances were more spontaneous.

“‘Ice Cream Man’ was one,” he said. “That was a first take. The solo in ‘You Really Got Me’ was totally spontaneous. Next time you listen to it, turn the balance to one side, because the way Ted [Templeman] produces, my guitar is always on one side. Listen to it — there’s only one guitar, no overdubs. But it sounds full.”

That willingness to improvise carried over to the stage. Although Van Halen sometimes reproduced his recorded solos, he generally preferred to take a different approach each night.

“I rarely repeat,” he said. “Sometimes I remember the way I did it on the record and kind of follow it, unless they are melodic solos like in ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’ and ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.’ You know, if I start noodling around, kids go, ‘Hey, that ain’t the same song!’”

Perhaps the most surprising revelation concerned “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” a song that became a defining part of Van Halen’s early catalog. Far from recognizing its potential immediately, Eddie initially thought it was a dud — and waited six months before playing it for his bandmates.

“When I wrote ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love’ I thought it was about the lamest song I ever wrote in my life,” he remarked. “It took me six months before I even worked up the nerve to show the guys, but kids go nuts for it! I love the beginning — Am and G.”

A couple of weeks ahead of opening night, Dweezil Zappa’s upcoming North American tour is a work in progress — although not by design.

“Oh, it’s been a challenge,” the second-oldest and most musically prolific child of the late Frank Zappa tells us with a chuckle. “I tried doing things different this time around, in terms of prep. Since the tour was going to be in the fall we said, ‘Let’s try to rehearse in August and get everything up on its feet,’ ’cause there were a lot of new things to learn.”

“Now here we are almost two weeks before, and I’m still struggling to get to where I wanted to be back in August.”

That said, it’s certainly easy to feel confident Zappa will have the proverbial act together when his DZ20: Like Father, Like Son Tour plays the first of its 33 shows on Oct. 22 in Phoenix.

As its title indicates, the six-week trek marks 20 years of Zappa playing his father’s music, initially under the moniker Zappa Plays Zappa until acrimonious machinations with his younger siblings, who control their father’s estate, dealt him dirty.

But Dweezil was musically active and prolific even before that, releasing his own music since the 1982 single “My Mother is a Space Cadet” — co-produced by Edward Van Halen, who also played uncredited slide guitar — and the 1986 album Havin’ a Bad Day. The onetime MTV VJ also released a pair of albums with estranged brother Ahmet and some Zappa Plays Zappa recordings and has appeared on albums by his father, Spinal Tap, Weird Al Yankovic, Steel Panther, Extreme, Don Johnson, Pat Boone and others.

Zappa also offers online educational initiatives and a music camp, Dweezila, and he used his state-of-the-art multimedia studio Hikari to, among other projects, remix Deep Purple’s Machine Head for its 50th anniversary.

At 57, then, Zappa knows how to get things done, but we’ll allow him a little hand-wringing over the course of a wide-ranging and illuminating pre-tour chat, which includes a discussion of his ongoing “What the Hell Was I Thinking” project, featuring guitar solos by dozens of famous players.

Twenty years of focusing on your father’s music — does it feel like 20 years? Twenty minutes? 200 years?

Well, it’s all of the above. Time goes by so fast, but I’m always right in the thick of it. It was 2006 that I started touring, but I actually started really learning the music and changing my whole approach to guitar back in 2004, so it’s been a very long time that I’ve been working with it and living with this music.

What has immersing yourself like that done for you as a player — and composer and bandleader?

It’s as if I’ve gone to music university and I’ve gotten several degrees that I never would have planned on, because I’ve learned so much about how my dad wrote his music and what he wanted to accomplish with it, and then that trickles down into what I would like to do with my own guitar playing and any music that I write.

And it afforded me the ability to write orchestral music, which I never would have thought of doing as a kid, but over the last couple years I’ve done some different projects with different orchestras in Holland. When you’re writing music for a 100-piece orchestra, or something smaller than that, it’s a very different thing than trying to learn Randy Rhoads or Eddie Van Halen guitar solos, y’know?

Is there any one of his techniques that you’re still trying to get a grasp on?

Well, the one thing that has been the biggest challenge is to be able to play the music in a way that is commensurate with what my dad did, but then also find a way to have my own voice be available when I want it during improvisations — but not have it go too far left field to where it doesn’t feel like it’s connected to the music anymore.

So that right there is the ever-evolving skill, which is to be able to filter my playing through the Frank Zappa vocabulary and lens of influence, but then at the speed of thought be able to have my own phrases come into the music while still relating to the era that we’re playing it from.

That’s the thing I always try to do, something that stays connected to the music whether it’s by trying to recreate an exact sound or playing phrases that are very specific and might have actually been from the original solos. I rarely play complete solos note-for-note, but I do try to play specific phrases that give the identity and the flavor of the solo in the way my dad would play it, while using a sound that is evocative of that whole thing. On a lot of levels the challenge for me is always the playing, but then also creating the sound that makes it evocative enough so that you know which era it’s from.

Has that become an unconscious process over time?

To some degree. It’s the kind of thing I would relate to trying to learn a language; after all these years of doing this, I probably am speaking a fourth-grade level when it comes to playing in the style of my dad. That’s because it’s so hard; he has such a huge vocabulary, and to be able to play stuff that sounds like him and that feels like it fits the music is, I think, a very tall order.

So as I’m able to converse at this basic level, there’s other times where there might be moments that feel like there’s some sudden spark of inspiration, or that I’m channeling my dad at times. I can be in the moment and be like, “Wow, that actually didn’t sound like me; that sounded like my dad, exactly what he would have done in this situation.” Then there’s times when I’m going for something outside of that, but I like when they happen spontaneously.

Is there a holy grail kind of piece, or pieces, you’re still gunning to master?

“Gregory Peccary” is the one piece that would fit into that, and it would probably require at least five or six months of rehearsal just to be even able to play it, and I would have to put a very specific band together to be able to recreate all the things that are in that.

If you listen to that piece of music, it makes you just ask the question, Why? Why does this exist? Who would make such a thing? The fact that it got recorded, and it’s so complicated and so brilliant on so many levels — people don’t understand how complicated and ahead of its time it is. I don’t think there’s another artist who’s ever done anything remotely close to pieces like “Gregory Peccary” or “Billy the Mountain” or things where you just listen and think, “How could you do it?”

So what can we expect from DZ20?

On this tour there’s some of my own music that I’m putting into the show. Because it’s stuff that I wrote, I was having somewhat of an expectation that it would come back rather easily.

But as it turned out, when I started doing my dad’s music back in 2006, I drastically changed my guitar playing style and my technique, the way that I played. And some of this stuff I’m bringing into the show reverts back to the way I used to play, so it’s like having to re-learn that stuff again, which made it a little harder. It’s not as much about the technical aspects as it is that some of these songs just have a lot to remember — even the band is finding it hard.

I don’t read music. The band can start to learn complicated things by reading it off the page and getting a good overview of the thing; I have to sit and listen every couple of seconds and learn each little part and try to memorize the whole thing.

Why do this to yourself, then?

Well, every time I go on tour I always do something different. It’s always that challenge, and that’s what my dad did, so it’s kind of in the tradition of it all. I found myself going down a bunch of rabbit holes in terms of what I want to accomplish on the guitar, so not only just playing the music but in an area where I can improvise, I wanted to stretch and get into some new territory because I feel like I’ve always tried to bring something new and different to what I’ve done, every year, when it comes to guitar playing. I wanted to do something that was noticeably very different.

Which, given your history, is a pretty high aspiration. What do you have this time?

I call it, as a joke, “drunken pentatonics.” The idea was you would play anything that you wanted to play that would be a normal pentatonic, but you could bend from the note below it into the note, so it sounds like a slide-guitar playing.

But if you play it not that great, the tuning sounds bad, so it sounds drunken. You get this microtonal sound, which can be very cool but it requires a different way to visualize the neck, and then it also has these weird things it stresses on your hands because you’re bending from the note below to the note.

And then if you want to keep playing while that note is bent up and you use your other fingers on the string, you’re supporting that pitch by still bending the note, and it strains your hand in a different way. So it’s been a challenge to build the strength to do it and not have it sound bad.

What are you getting into with your own material?

It will depend on how much of it I get under my fingers, so at the very beginning of the tour it may be a little bit less than by the end of the tour.

There are four main things, but especially “Purple Guitar.” Somebody asked me, “Did your dad ever listen to your music, and if he did, did he have any favorite things?” I thought about that and he had come to see us play a show that I was doing in the early ’90s and we closed the show with “Purple Guitar.” He liked that song and said, “You guys should open with that,” so I took it as his request for this tour.

And then he produced a record of mine called Havin’ a Bad Day [1986] which had a song called “Electric Hoedown” on it, and I never played that song live before. So we gave that a facelift with some new instrumentation and it will be the first time we’re playing it.

And I have two other songs, one called “Shampoo Horn” and this other thing called “The Adventures of Dindoo.” That is proving to be the hardest of anything I’ve had to learn, because I wrote it on a computer and never really played it. So we’ll see if I get around to being able to play it on this tour.

Are you taking any different route to the Frank Zappa repertoire this time?

Yeah. I wanted it to feel like what it would have been like if you never heard of Frank Zappa and he walked into, like the Whisky in the ’60s, but he also had the material that he had in the mid-’70s — like the earliest formation of the band, but then also give it some of the music he did 10 or 15 years later, but in that same environment. So it’s kind of the quintessential rocking teenage combo version of everything.

And we’re a five-piece, which means the music is more in your face. There’s an immediacy to it that you don’t get in other situations. And when he did a tour with a five-piece he really limited the material to certain things and certain eras. So we’ve kind of done that, but I’ve also just taken it a bit further.

What’s the gear situation this time out?

Guitar-wise I’m bringing out a different version of the SG that I typically play. It’s the Roxy-era SG — Gibson released a handful of those — and I just put some different pickups in this one. But other than that it’s pretty much the way the guitar was designed.

And I have a different Stratocaster that I’m playing. This particular version that I’m bringing has a humbucker in the bridge and then two single-coils, so I’m able to get a lot of rhythm sounds I need for this tour. But we’re also playing the song “Wild Love” and it has a really crazy guitar solo section. This is from a live version my dad did, I think, in ’78 or something. He just goes into a totally crazy new landscape, and the tone he has is really cool ’cause it’s kind of three layers; you have a clean sound that’s in the middle, and then you have two different fuzz sounds on the left and right. It creates this 3-D image that is super cool, and he’s just doing it with the Stratocaster.

The issues with the estate and your siblings have been heartbreaking to a lot of people. Anything new on that front?

Well, I never talk to them. I’ve always been able to do what I want to do. They just tried to create problems, for no reason. It’s worked out enough at this point in time, but it’s far better to have zero communication with them.

You don’t have input to what’s released from the vaults, but if you ran the world are there things you know are in there that you’d like to see released?

They’ve exploited pretty much everything that’s ever existed, and in some cases they’ve put out things I know my dad would never have released. But, yeah, there are things that could be cultivated into another sort of Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar! series. I know I would be able to amass something like that, far better than anybody else. But nobody’s calling me to do that at this time.

Are you still working on the “What the Hell Was I Thinking?” project?

I am. It’s all fully into a computer, finally. I can actually start piecing it together and doing some finalization of it. It has — I don’t even know — 45 different guitar solos from different famous guitar players. The concept of it is that it’s a continuous piece of music that is constantly morphing from style to the character of the recording and the domain it exists in, so the ambient changes and the stylistic changes are morphing constantly through the piece. It’s an audio movie, essentially.

You had spoken previous about trying to get Jeff Beck on it. Were you able to before he passed away?

We did some stuff, but I didn’t necessarily get something exactly like what I wanted to be able to do. But we’ll see if I can manage to make it work.

What’s on there from Van Halen?

I have two guitar solos from Edward. One is like the best musical joke that we could perpetrate together; it’s kind of a “greatest hits” solo — fairly extended, like a minute long, maybe a slight bit longer, which in guitar solo length is significant.

I had these different licks I wanted him to try to incorporate into this solo; there’s probably about 15 different ones, and some of them were a real stretch because there’s this go-to, bebop style like that he did on the Wild Life soundtrack, and people weren’t familiar with this thing but I’d always known about it. He ended up using it later on, kind of tucked in there on the Balance album, but I said, “You’ve got to use that one, and you have to use a little bit of ‘Mean Streets,’ a little bit of ‘Push Comes to Shove,’ a little bit of ‘Dirty Movies,’ a little bit of ‘Ice Cream Man’...” And as we were going through it, he’d say, “I don’t even remember that lick,” and I would have to show him certain licks.

That was funny because it was a complete flip. When I did “My Mother’s a Space Cadet” at 12 years old, he was the one who was sitting with me when I was doing the solo, and I had to punch in and I had never done anything like that before. So he was saying, “When you punch in, you have to play along with what you’ve played before so it doesn’t create something that doesn’t sound like it’s naturally flowing. So here we were in a similar situation with “What the Hell Was I Thinking?” He’s improvising stuff, and we’re like, “Yeah, that’s good, but let’s punch in here” and he was gonna have to play along with what he’d just played, which was not that easy to do because he was just ripping through one lick after another. It was just a really great experience to do all that stuff with him.

And then there’s a second solo which is just a one-take, improvised thing we did at 5150, and he used his original Marshall amps so it had the old-school sound, and it’s great.

Are you privy at all to these archival recordings that Alex Van Halen and Steve Lukather are working on?

I’ve heard about it. I haven’t heard any of it yet, but it’ll be interesting to hear, for sure.

Any ETA for “What the Hell Was I Thinking?”

Well, next year I kinda have some more time — I’m not going to be doing too much extensive touring, so I’m hoping I can do some major focusing on that. I haven’t recorded anybody new for awhile, but there’s definitely a lot of different guitar players out there in the world that are interesting and that are doing cool things.

So when I write the new bits that I need to do I’ll start thinking about a handful of other players I’d have on there. I’d love to get Julian Lage. It’d be nice to get John Scofield. But there’s some other guitar players who do crazy, technical things; there’s a guy named Dussias, a handful of other players I’d love to get on there.

Anything else of your own that you’re working on?

I have all these concerts that we’ve filmed over the 20 years we’ve been doing the Zappa shows. I’ve been editing and mixing those, so hopefully we’ll release a bunch of that stuff next year. And I’m doing a new guitar course that I’m gonna release next year, so with that it’d probably be a good idea to do something, even if it’s just an EP of a few different, new things — maybe the drunken pentatonic stuff I was telling you about.

After the Machine Head reissue, would you like to do more of those kinds of projects?

I would love to. That was a really fun project. I like stuff like that, the challenge of doing something new with something people are so familiar with. It’s very much like what I do with my dad’s music; you want to maintain what people love about their initial experience with it, so you don’t want to change it so much that it’s unrecognizable, but — in the case of the Deep Purple stuff — I just wanted to bring out or enhance some of the details that could just give it a new bit of power and excitement.

I love the puzzle pieces to stuff like that, when you hear it all together and then you realize this is what it sounds like when the guys play music. They were only using 16 tracks, so they were making decisions about what the finished record was going to sound like as they recorded it. You just put the mics up in the room and hope you can capture how amazing they sound. It’s great to hear stuff like that.

Zappa’s DZ20: Like Father, Like Son tour begins October 22 at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix and continues through December 5.

Eddie Van Halen’s ex wife Valerie Bertinelli shared a personal photo of the couple in their younger years to mark the sixth anniversary of his death. Van Halen passed on October 6, 2020, aged 65, following a battled with throat and lung cancer.

She was at his hospital bedside when he suffered a fatal stroke. Alongside her were the couple’s son Wolfgang, drummer Alex, and Eddie’s wife Janie. Although he and Bertinelli divorced in 2007, they’d remained close friends.

“Photos may fade, like old photos do,” she wrote in her Instagram post, “but not the memories and never the love.”

In 2025 Bertinelli said she’d inadvertently turned her difficult history with Eddie into “some sort of fantasy, soulmate recreation of history.” Perhaps illustrating a continuing struggle to deal with conflicting emotions, she reflected that, although they’d started out in a loving partnership, that “rapidly declined” due to her husband’s drug issues and infidelity.

Instead, she added, she’d found herself in a relationship that contained “nothing that makes you feel loved and wanted and cared for… nothing that would scream soulmate, that's for sure.”

But she continued: “What we had together was this beautiful son that we both unconditionally loved. What I got out of that marriage was Wolfie, the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Last year, marking the guitar icon’s fifth anniversary, Wolfgang – who aims to release his fourth Mammoth album next year – posted a picture of him with his dad, and wrote: “The amount of things I wish I could share with you just keep piling up. I know you’d be proud… but I wish I could hear you say it. I’m trying to do the best I can. Love and miss you more than you know, Pop.”

“I've always played what I wanted to play and fortunately for me, I've always played with artists whose music I liked, so I really fitted in at the time,” Albert Lee tells Guitar Player. The country guitar legend has performed and recorded with artists such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Eric Clapton and Bill Wyman, to name but a few. He even participated in the supergroup Biff Baby’s All-Stars, featuring Eddie Van Halen, Steve Lukather and Steve Morse.

But one legendary act he played with remains a career highlight: the Everly Brothers.

“I did a long stint with them,” explains Lee. “During the ’70s they'd broken up and weren’t speaking to each other, so I got to know Don really well. He was playing at a local bar once a week with some old friends, and that turned into a regular thing and it was great fun.

“By that time, I was doing the occasional session in Los Angeles too, and because I didn't have an acoustic guitar with me, I used to borrow one or two of his guitars to take to the sessions. He was fine with it and would say, ‘Take this one, it's amazing.’ He then gave me one of his own Gibson J-200s and it's one of my treasured possessions now.”

Guitar Player asked Lee to look back on five of his memorable moments playing with rock’s finest artists.

Eric Clapton

“I was working on a session for a week with an artist called Marc Benno and at the end of the week, Eric's manager said that Eric had just done a tour without a second guitarist and so, how did I fancy going out with him? I thought, ‘Well, that's great, yes.’

“At the time I was just about to get my first real album released, so I don't know if I did a good thing or a bad thing, but I dropped the promotion of my new record and went out with Eric and it was great fun because we were all friends from the ’60s. I think he liked having me around and it worked really well because our styles are so different. I've heard most of the guys who played with him tried to sound like him, but I didn’t, I just did what I do. And likewise, he did the same thing, too.

“I was with him for five years, and during that period he fired his whole band twice, but I managed to survive. He was very happy for me to do a song or two during the show, he’d say, ‘Go on, Albert,’ and he’d go and sit behind the amp and have his brandy and lemonade and a cigarette. He was really enthused to have me around at that time. Then after five years he decided that I wasn't wanted anymore. I have to say that we're still good friends and since then, I've done most of the Crossroads concerts.”

Ritchie Blackmore

“I did an album with Jon Lord called Gemini Suite [in 1971] and Ritchie, because of his moods, decided he didn't want to do it, so Jon thought, Well, I'll get somebody else to do it. And it was good fun. Ritchie and I knew each other as he used to be with the Outlaws, an English country band that wore Western shirts and played instrumentals and also backed [English rock and roll singer] Mike Berry for a while in the ’60s.

“Ritchie and I played in this studio band called Green Bullfrog with producer Derek Lawrence who was friends with all the guys in that band. Derek had a lot of free studio time and told me, ‘Come tomorrow and we'll put down some tracks, with any songs you want to do,’ and that's how that all came about. He did have some kind of record deal, but rather than having to deal with the contracts for all those different record companies, he decided to give us nicknames. You can tell who's who, though.

“Ritchie did a few sessions with different people in the early years and he did a lot of sessions with [English record producer] Joe Meek, who was getting some very commercial sounds that people weren't getting at that time. Ritchie has always been really friendly with me and has always said nice things about me in articles.”

Jerry Lee Lewis

“I've always been a big fan of Jerry Lee Lewis. There was a period in the early ’70s when American record companies were getting records done in London with well-known British names, so we did a record [The Session, 1973] for Mercury Records and there were lots of artists on it. It was a lot of fun. Jerry always lived up to his reputation as ‘the Killer’ back then. He liked what I was doing and compared with some of the guitar players who were on it, I guess my sound was more to his liking, because of his country background.

“There was this one time at Wembley Arena in London and I was playing with Duane Eddy and I just happened to be walking down the hallway when Jerry's roadies called out to me: ‘Come down and say hello to Jerry.’ I was a bit nervous but I went in and said hello. His manager then pulled me aside and said, ‘Jerry’s guitar players have been drinking all day. Do you want to get up and play with Jerry?’ Of course, I said yes. Little Richard was on the show as well and he'd already done his set. They had agreed that Jerry would close the show so I was up there playing with Jerry and it was discussed that for the encore Little Richard would come on, and it all got pretty wild.”

The Crickets

“I'd always been a huge Buddy Holly fan. I was at a record launch party for my band Heads Hands & Feet and Ric Grech was there and we got to talking over a drink. I had missed Buddy when he and the Crickets came over to England for the first time. Ric said that the Crickets were coming over that weekend and that I better come along. Glen Hardin, the piano player, wasn't going to be able to make it in time because he was finishing up a tour with Elvis Presley, so they asked me to fill in.

“We had a little rehearsal a few days later and it was a lot of fun. We did the first gig at the Speakeasy in London, the late-night drinking establishment. It went really well, and at the end of the night Jerry Allison said, ‘Do you want to do the whole tour?’ So, I did.

“They shared lots of stories with me about touring America back then. It was quite difficult, driving overnight and hardly getting any sleep. Some of them were bus tours and other times they were in a van or a big car with a lot of instruments. And the buses weren’t like nowadays, with bunks and whatever; these were old-school buses, so you’d travel overnight sitting up.

“Then that February day, the heating had broken down on the bus and it was miserable. Buddy decided he couldn’t face it one more night, so he decided to rent a plane, a four-seater for him and his band. But Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper were really putting pressure on the guys, saying, ‘Oh God, I'd really like to get off that bus for a day,’ and we all know the rest of what happened. The weather was bad and the pilot was only about 21 and not really familiar with using flight instruments for night flying.”

Eddie Van Halen

“[The supergroup] Biff Baby’s All-Stars was actually started by Sterling Ball, Ernie Ball’s son. When I was with Heads Hands & Feet, Ernie and his son came along to our gig because they'd heard ‘Country Boy’ on the radio and they wanted to see this English band playing country music.

“I got really friendly with the family and I started to play local gigs with Sterling, who then put a band together and it developed from there. We did a lot of gigs.

“There was this one gig we did on a weekend during the NAMM show. By that time the Balls had gotten really friendly with Eddie Van Halen, Steve Lukather and Steve Morse, and we all played this show together. Eddie didn't want to play ‘Country Boy.’ He told me, ‘No, I don’t want to play on that’ because his style was so different from country, but I said, ‘You just do what you do with the tapping bit,’ and he did and he loved it.”

Sammy Hagar has responded to Alex Van Halen calling him “a complete idiot” — and while he was happy to joke about the insult, he had more serious questions for his former bandmate.

Speaking with SiriusXM’s Eddie Trunk on Thursday, September 17, Hagar argued that Alex continues to dismiss the success of Van Halen during Hagar’s time in the band. He also criticized Alex’s new book project, saying his former bandmate is doing “a lot of stuff wrong for the legacy of Van Halen.”

“Guilty as charged, first of all,” Hagar said with a laugh when Trunk asked about Alex’s comments. “I’m probably the most successful idiot on the planet.”

Alex Van Halen made the remark earlier this month when he was asked about Hagar’s 2011 autobiography, Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, in which the singer related unflattering stories about the Van Halen brothers, including accounts of Eddie Van Halen’s alcoholism. The late guitarist is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric-guitar players of his generation.

“I don’t know what he wrote, and I don’t want to know,” Alex replied. “In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.”

The drummer had already demonstrated his disregard for Hagar by avoiding any mention of his time with Van Halen in his 2024 memoir, Brothers. While promoting the book, he declared that the band’s best years came before Hagar’s arrival in 1985, when the group consisted of the Van Halen brothers, bassist Michael Anthony and original singer David Lee Roth.

“What happened after Dave left is not the same band,” Alex said while promoting Brothers in 2024. “I’m not saying it was better or worse or any of that … but the magic was in the first years, when we didn’t know what we were doing; when we were willing to try anything.”

Alex — who recently reunited with Roth for a TEDx talk — has since praised Roth as “a poet” and said, “We did our best work with Dave.”

Hagar told Trunk he takes issue with that characterization.

“I want to call Alex out and say, ‘Dude, we all know, you act like there was never a Sammy Hagar,’” he said. “You act like there was never a ‘Van Hagar.’” Hagar was referring to the nickname for the group’s years with him as its frontman. “We sold 40-some million records, four number-one albums, and you just scratch that off of your brother’s legacy, saying, ‘No, that never happened.’ You don’t even want to acknowledge it.”

“That’s deep. That’s weird. That’s not right, for Eddie, for me, for Mikey, for anybody.

“I’m asking Alex, like, why? Come clean. What’s your problem? Just come out and say it.”

Hagar speculated that Alex is still upset about his book, and possibly Cabo Wabo, the cantina in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, launched by the band in 1990. Hagar bought out his bandmates after the venture encountered legal and financial problems, then reversed its fortunes. He went on to sell his Cabo Wabo brand tequila for $91 million. That success reportedly became a point of contention between Hagar and the band.

“Maybe if I knew what [Alex’s] problem was, I could fix it,” Hagar continued. “But right now he just acts like there’s not a problem. It just never happened.”

Hagar also criticized Alex’s latest book project, Van Halen, which combines a photo collection with an unreleased early Van Halen demo. The limited-edition book from Genesis Publications carries a price tag of $475.

“Alex wants to just keep releasing all this old stuff and these photographs and charging people for old pictures that you could find on the internet,” Hagar said. “You should be putting them out there for free. To me, he’s doing a lot of stuff wrong for the legacy of Van Halen.”

Hagar launches his Van Halen-celebrating Best of All Worlds Tour residency in Las Vegas tonight. Trunk asked him what he would do if Alex showed up. Hagar made it clear he’d welcome the drummer with open arms — and a kiss.

“Alex? Oh, come in. Oh, 100 percent, I’ll grab him, I’ll kiss him right on the lips. … I’d treat him like the person that I used to love and I could still love.”

Footage of David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen sharing a stage for the first time in more than a decade has surfaced online, offering a rare glimpse of the former Van Halen bandmates together in public.

The appearance took place July 30 at a TEDx event in Fargo, North Dakota, where Roth and Van Halen joined artist Robert Vargas for a conversation titled “Beyond Boundaries: How Human Experience Informs Art and Music.” It wasn’t a Van Halen reunion performance, but the two musicians did reflect on their long and often complicated history together.

“It’s a gas to be here,” Roth declared in the opening moments of the conversation. “This is also a step towards world peace.”

The event marked Roth and Van Halen’s first public appearance together since Van Halen’s final concert at the Hollywood Bowl on October 4, 2015. Although the pair have remained in contact over the years, their relationship has had its share of ups and downs.

Van Halen, in particular, has been candid about the disagreements that derailed plans for a Van Halen tribute tour following the death of his brother, electric-guitar hero Eddie Van Halen, in 2020. He previously told Rolling Stone that the breaking point came when he asked Roth to acknowledge Eddie during the proposed shows.

“The thing that broke the camel’s back, and I can be honest about this now,” Van Halen said, “was I said, ‘Dave, at some point, we have to have a very overt — not a bowing — but an acknowledgment of Ed in the gig. If you look at how Queen does it, they show old footage.’ And the moment I said we gotta acknowledge Ed, Dave fuckin’ popped a fuse. … The vitriol that came out was unbelievable.”

More recently, however, Van Halen has spoken warmly about Roth’s contributions to the band, praising his talent and the music they created together.

“We did our best work with Dave,” he said.

“To me, Dave was a poet,” Van Halen continued. “It was the confluence of the complete opposite ends of the spectrum that made it happen. And it was brilliant soup — until it wasn’t.”

The Fargo conversation didn’t attempt to resolve the pair’s differences, but both men acknowledged their long history of clashing — sometimes literally.

“Alex and I are famous for that,” Roth said. “Oh my God, there should be a star in front of three different clubs in Hollywood where we practiced Brazilian jiu-jitsu over the set list.”

The drummer has also had his share of disagreements with Sammy Hagar, who replaced Roth in the Van Halen lineup. In 2024, he disparaged Hagar’s Best of All Worlds tour, which featured former Van Halen bass guitarist Michael Anthony alongside Hagar, guitarist Joe Satriani and drummer Jason Bonham, saying the lineup wasn’t “doing the band justice.” Most recently, Alex slammed Hagar, calling him “a complete idiot” for comments he made about Eddie Van Halen in his autobiography Red.

Hagar later criticized Alex’s 2024 autobiography, Brothers, in which the drummer largely ignored Hagar’s years in Van Halen, calling the omission “blasphemy.” The singer took another shot at Alex last March, comparing their relationship to the famously fractured partnership between Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Roger Waters.

“I’m the biggest Pink Floyd fan,” Hagar told Classic Rock. “I see David Gilmour say, ‘I will never play with Roger Waters again,’ and I know what he means. I feel that way about Alex Van Halen. They’re negative people.”

Van Halen have dug deep into the band’s vault and are pulling out their earliest known song for release as part of a super-limited-edition book.

“Glitter”, which was written with original bass player Mark Stone in 1974, is being offered up as a surprise addition to Van Halen, a new book penned by drummer Alex Van Halen. It runs 312 pages, features never-before-seen images of the band, and exhaustively chronicles their entire history, but it also includes a relic from their earliest musical steps.

The song has circulated in bootleg form for decades, but this marks the first official, high-quality release, with Alex Van Halen continuing a trend he kickstarted with “Unfinished” in 2024. That song, the last he and Eddie Van Halen ever worked on, was released alongside his book, Brothers, which detailed the Van Halen siblings’ journey from childhood to rock immortality. This time, he’s going right back to the beginning.

Its release predates the band’s debut album and the revolution-starting track, “Eruption”, which arrived four years later, in 1978. It would be one of Stone’s last acts in the band, having been replaced by Michael Anthony later in ‘74 – a role he maintained until Wolfgang Van Halen glued the band back together for 2010’s A Different Kind of Truth. Recently, however, Alex has insisted Anthony was asked to join the reunion.

The book is currently available for pre-order and is priced at $475/£345. The signed limited edition version is being presented in two bindings: the Deluxe boxed set (copies 1–350, already sold out) and the Collector boxed set (copies 351–1,500), after which the chance for fans to get their hands on the surprise 7” picture disc will be gone.

“Written, curated, and personally signed by Alex, Van Halen is the official chronicle of the band, ” says Genesis Publications. “The book traces the brothers’ journey from their childhood in Pasadena, California, and the band’s early days playing backyard parties, to the release and world tour of their chart-topping album 1984.

“Featuring a dynamic blend of iconic photography alongside rare and never-before-seen images, and with exclusive access to Alex Van Halen’s private archives, Van Halen offers a personally guided tour through the band’s legendary rise.”

There’s another side to the release, too. Alex Van Halen has made the headlines this week after calling former vocalist Sammy Hagar “a complete idiot” concerning what he wrote in his 2011 autobiography. Though the 73-year-old admits he’s never read the book, he’s distanced himself from the Red Rocker’s version of accounts of his time in the band.

Hagar has since responded, calling for peace rather than retaliating. But it’s clear that Alex Van Halen is trying to establish a sense of distance between their two books. Notably, too, he’d recently stuck the knife into Hagar by saying that Van Halen did their best work with David Lee Roth – which goes against Hagar’s own beliefs.

Fans won’t have to wait too much longer for more Van Halen, with Steve Lukather assuring fans the band’s forthcoming album is of high quality.

“I’ve had an extraordinary life,” Steve Lukather says. “I’m one lucky guy.”

Indeed he is. Lukather spent the summer touring with Ringo Starr & His All Starr Band before hitting the road with Toto for their massive North American summer tour with Christopher Cross. On September 24, he’ll be back on the road with Ringo on the Fall 2026 Tour running through October 7.

But of course Luke is equally well known for his studio session work. He’s one of history’s most prolific session guitarists, contributing to over 1,500 albums across multiple genres. A definitive studio legend, he played the iconic riff on Michael Jackson’s "Beat It", the solo on Olivia Newton-John's "Physical," and tracked hits for icons like Lionel Richie, Chicago and Aretha Franklin.

“I used to go to work every day not knowing what I was gonna do,” Lukather says. “There were no rehearsals, and no demos. All we could say was, ‘What are we doing today? Who’s on the session? Who’s the artist?’

“One day it could be Alice Cooper, and the next it was writing with Bernie Taupin,” Lukather says. “I found myself in these amazing situations at a very, very young age. I just parlayed it, man. Ironically, it was an era to have cool guitar solos in pop songs. I got to play a lot of them… even the dumb ones!”

With that prolific studio career in mind, Steve Lukather kicked back with Guitar Player to look back on his working relationships — and sometimes friendships — with Ringo Starr, Joni Mitchell, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, George Benson and Eddie Van Halen.

Ringo Starr

“He’s an inspiration. I love that man so much. He’s become such a dear friend. Who would have known? If you’d told me when I was a kid, ‘Oh, yeah, when you’re, like, 69 years old, man, Ringo’s gonna be one of your best friends,’ I would have lost my shit.

“I had the great honor of working with Paul [McCartney] several times, and I became great friends with my first guitar hero, George Harrison, where we hung out and played together. So when I heard that Greg Bissonette recommended me to Ringo, saying I’d be perfect for his band, I was excited.

"He recommended me not only because I can play everybody else’s stuff, but because I’m a team player. I’ll play lead, rhythm, and I’ll even jump on bass. But it’s so much fun, and Ringo treats us so well. He just loves to be one of the guys, and man, it never gets old to turn around and look at Ringo Starr playing drums. It’s like, ‘Just pinch me now, man! Please don’t fucking let this dream end.’

“But the band is like a little family. We really do love and respect each other, and Ringo is the ultimate boss. He’s got wisdom, humor, and he’s as fast and funny as he was in A Hard Day’s Night. Plus, he still plays great! I mean, all those Beatles records had no click tracks, and all those creative, inventive parts were all Ringo, man. He’s so important to the percussion within the family of rock and roll. But he’s just fun to be around, is brilliant, and is just infectious. He still does this for fun because he loves music.”

Joni Mitchell

“I’ve always been a fan of Joni Mitchell ever since I had a girlfriend in high school who was obsessed with her music during the Blue period. And then, when Court and Spark came out, I was starting to get really interested in studio players, like Larry Carlton, because of the creativity.

“So when I got to work with Joni [on 1982’s Wild Things Run Fast and 1985’s Dog Eat Dog], I was really excited to get the call. But I was like, ‘Wow… what am I going to bring to this, man?’

“I walked into the studio, and she was sitting at the piano, playing the song that we were going to cut that day. She was going through it on her own, and singing, and man… it’s hard when you’re in a room with greatness like that. It’s hard not to be affected by it in a visceral way.

“It was so naturally wonderful and beautiful, and I could immediately hear a part in my head because that’s the job. You have to have a ranger’s ears and be able to listen to somebody play a song and hear the parts that you can add to make it something. But you don’t want to get in the way, you want to enhance the hooky part on the arpeggio or add to what she’s already got going on.

“So we started working on the tune, and it was beautiful. I had a nice little lick I came up with that she really liked, and that set the tone for it. And believe it or not, she wanted to rock and roll it up a little bit. [laughs] It was the early ‘80s, and all that shit was happening. I kind of laughed at first, but it took her out of her normal place, which some of her hardcore fans didn’t dig. And of course, I take all the shit for it. [laughs] But that was a fun record to do. She was so nice and fabulous.”

Michael Jackson/Quincy Jones

“I got the call from Quincy for ‘Beat It,’ and when I got to my parts, I initially cranked the riff out on a bunch of quadrupled Marshalls. But then Quincy called and said, ‘It’s great… but it’s too much. I gotta get this on R&B radio. Use a little Fender amp and turn down the distortion.’ That’s what you hear when the riff comes in.

“And then when I heard Michael sing, ‘Your butt is mine,’ I was just a smartass 20-something-year-old kid, and I laughed. But Quincy goes, ‘Stop it, bro. This is gonna be a big record. I’m telling you.’ I went, ‘Yeah, right!’ But it was—and still is—massive.

“But with Michael, there was nothing weird at all. He was my age, he laughed at my shit, and he thought I was amusing. He was a real pro, though what did make me laugh was his monkey, Bubbles, ripped apart the vocal booth. [laughs] That was the weirdest thing I saw. It made me laugh on the floor, of course.

“Michael was funny, man. His body language told you if he liked a part or not. He’d start dancing, and it would just be me, Quincy, and Michael, and I’d start playing something, and Michael would say, ‘What about this? You should change it to this because you don’t want that going over and over.’

“He was very collaborative. He wanted my input. And Quincy welcomed that, but he didn’t write my parts. With songs like ‘Human Nature,’ Quincy would go, ‘Make it funky for me, man. I gotta get this on R&B radio.’ I came up with that part on the spot, and that’s what ended up on the radio.

“So Michael was a pro. And Quincy was a great casting director, who had a great ear for songs and got the right guys on the right songs.”

George Benson

“I love George Benson. I was into the CTI-era records, which I grew up listening to when I was like 12 years old. [CTI was a legendary jazz record label founded by Creed Taylor in 1967.] I used to listen to all that shit when I was in junior high and early high school because I was getting into jazz, started studying music, and really learning how to learn and read music, and about harmony theory.

"I got deep into it, and I was into George. And then, when I heard him sing, I lost my shit. I go, ‘This guy sings like fucking Stevie Wonder! Are you kidding me? Where’s he been hiding that?’

“So, later on, Jay Graydon, one of my best friends and a big mentor to me, was producing George. He goes, ‘Lukey, come on over. I’m working on George’s greatest-hits album and I need a single. What do you got for me?’

“I had the opening piano riff for ‘Turn Your Love Around,’ and I brought that over to Jay’s house. And then, over a copious amount of alcohol and whatever… we wrote the song in about 20 minutes. And then, George heard it, loved it, and by the grace of God, it was a big, huge hit record. We won a Grammy for it, and that was my first. And then, I wrote three or four other songs for George.”

Eddie Van Halen

“Eddie was good to me, man. We were very encouraging to each other. But here’s the funny thing: our music hangs were not many, but our friends’ hangs were deep. We talked about our families, and everything, you know? But early on, I remember I was doing the solo to [Toto’s] ‘Girl Goodbye,’ and someone walked in with the Van Halen album.

“I was sitting there doing a few takes and shit, and then someone said, ‘Stop everything. I want you to hear something.’ He dropped the needle on ‘Eruption,’ and I’d never heard anything like that. I was like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ It was jaw-dropping, obviously. The first time I heard that, I was 19 years old, while working on that record, and I fell off my chair.

“I said, ‘Well, there’s really no point in continuing on anymore…’ [laughs] I was like, ‘What was that? How do you do that? Who makes that noise? I must be friends with him now.’ That’s really what I thought… and that’s kind of what happened. I met Eddie at the California World Music Festival in ’78, we got to know each other and started hanging out a lot around 1980.

“And then, we became really, really close friends. We lived near each other and had a lot in common in terms of our views on life, music, and family. And even though we didn’t play anything like each other, Ed and I were always so supportive of what each other was doing. Ed was always supportive of what I was doing and what my band was doing.

“He’d always show up at the gigs, and Ed and I would play each other’s stuff whenever we had new stuff. I remember hearing the demo for ‘Jump’ in 1983. I said to Ed, ‘There’s your number one record, Ed. Jeez.’ And when he started with Music Man, I was the tiebreaker for which pickup he liked best. He went with mine, so that was cool.”

Jason Becker looked back on his 1996 meeting with Eddie Van Halen, and listed some of the things the late guitarist had done for him.

Becker was at the start of a promising career when he was diagnosed with wasting illness ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) around 1989, aged just 20. It quickly became impossible for him to perform live and he had to leave David Lee Roth’s band, although he’s continued making music ever since.

Asked by Ultimate Guitar about the time Van Halen first came to meet him, Becker replied: “It was very bittersweet. I couldn’t really talk. My voice was so weak, and it took so much energy. [Partner] Serrana and my parents were the only ones who could barely understand me. I hadn’t started using the communication system my dad invented yet, so I didn’t say much.”

He continued: “Eddie brought me a guitar, but he went in another room with my mom and cried, and told her he felt stupid bringing it because I couldn’t play. He was very affectionate, hugging and kissing my head. He really wished David Lee Roth had come too, and had stayed in touch with me.“

The pair made a public service announcement for a health telethon run by the Muscular Dystrophy Association. At the time, Becker was struggling to breathe in a sitting position, so he had to push his lower jaw out to create an airway. Despite that, he noted, “The MDA had asked him to do a satellite thing from LA, but he wouldn't do it unless he could come meet me in person.”

Becker was still making music, albeit much more slowly, and in 1996 released second album Perspective. “He really loved it," he said of Van Halen. “He said he did music like that, but Warner Bros. didn’t want to put it out… He made Warner release Perspective and got them to give a really nice advance, which was sorely needed. He also gave my family money privately.”

He added: “ALS takes a huge toll on everyone; Eddie understood that instinctively, as does the whole guitar community and fans through the years. I wish he was here to see the non-profit Serrana and I co-founded. He would be proud, and probably involved. Through generosity from fans and others, we’ve been able to give significant financial assistance to 15 people with ALS, so far, helping them remain cared for at home, as I have been.”

Meanwhile, Alex Van Halen announced a limited-edition book titled simply Van Halen. It comes packaged with a 7-inch vinyl disc containing Glitter, a previously-unreleased demo from 1974 (although it’s been bootlegged over the years). Only the signed Collector edition remains available for pre-order, complete with clamshell case and souvenir keyring and picks.

Alex Van Halen has reignited his long-running feud with Sammy Hagar, calling his former Van Halen bandmate a “complete idiot” while dismissing Hagar’s 2011 autobiography, Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock.

The latest round of insults comes via an interview with Brazil’s Roadie Crew magazine. The recently knighted drummer was asked to offer his thoughts about the autobiographies written by Van Halen’s two classic-era frontmen: David Lee Roth’s Crazy From the Heart and Hagar’s Red.

His assessment of Roth’s book was largely positive, describing it as “quite entertaining” and saying it “faithfully reflects [Roth’s] sense of humor.”

“While the text is somewhat abstract and occasionally loses the thread, it remains a very interesting perspective on that era,” Alex added.

He was far less charitable when it came to Hagar, whose book chronicled some of Eddie Van Halen’s struggles with alcoholism and included other unflattering accounts of the guitarist. Alex dismissed the book out of hand.

“I don't know what he wrote, and I don't want to know,” the drummer said. “In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.”

Alex’s latest comment is just the latest volley in a war of words that has gone on for years. In 2024, he disparaged Hagar’s Best of All Worlds tour, which featured former Van Halen bass guitarist Michael Anthony alongside Hagar, guitarist Joe Satriani and drummer Jason Bonham, saying the lineup wasn’t “doing the band justice.”

Hagar had reportedly invited Alex to join the tour in an attempt to put their differences aside. When the drummer didn’t respond, Hagar grew increasingly frustrated.

“Al, you’re fine. Just leave me alone. I’ll leave you alone. Everything’s good,” Hagar told Rolling Stone in 2025. “I’m making you money, by the way, Al. I’m out there selling Van Halen records and keeping the name alive, keeping the music alive.”

In the same interview, Hagar suggested that Alex was “angry” because “he seems like he doesn’t want to play drums or can’t play drums anymore.”

Hagar later criticized Alex’s 2024 autobiography, Brothers, in which the drummer largely ignored Hagar’s years in Van Halen, calling the omission “blasphemy.” The singer took another shot at Alex last March, comparing their relationship to the famously fractured partnership between Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Roger Waters.

“I’m the biggest Pink Floyd fan,” Hagar told Classic Rock. “I see David Gilmour say, ‘I will never play with Roger Waters again,’ and I know what he means. I feel that way about Alex Van Halen. They’re negative people.”

Hagar also explained why he remains enthusiastic about the Best of All Worlds project, arguing that the lineup offers the closest thing fans can get to the Van Halen experience today.

“Because frickin’ Mike Anthony’s in the band, I feel good about playing a lot of Van Halen stuff, ’cause no one will ever hear it again,” he said. “That was the biggest part of my career — everybody’s career, for God’s sake. It was the biggest band in the world.”

Notably, Alex recently spoke glowingly of Roth, calling the former Van Halen singer “a poet” and saying, “We did our best work with Dave.” His contrasting views of Van Halen’s two classic-era frontmen underscore just how little the decades-old feud with Hagar has faded.

Alex Van Halen is now a knight — and he received the honor in the Dutch city where he and Eddie spent their childhood.

The Van Halen drummer and co-founder was knighted Tuesday, September 1, in Nijmegen, the city where the brothers grew up before their family emigrated to the United States. Van Halen, who was born in Amsterdam, was appointed Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion (Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw), one of the Netherlands’ highest civilian honors.

The 73-year-old musician attended the ceremony at the Berchmanianum, the academy building of Radboud University, where Nijmegen mayor Hubert Bruls presented him with the royal decoration and praised his role in writing a “remarkable chapter in the history of rock music.”

Van Halen was characteristically modest when reflecting on the honor.

“My cousin organized most of this. I’m very grateful,” he said. “I think institutions like this are important in people’s lives because it adds a dignity and a gravity to what we do. Whether it’s actually deserved or not, that’s another question. But we can live up to it. That’s the whole thing, is you got to have something to live up to.”

Van Halen also signed Nijmegen’s Book of the City, a ceremonial volume reserved for distinguished visitors. His name now appears alongside those of Bruce Springsteen and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands.

The ceremony had particular resonance given Van Halen’s enduring connection to Nijmegen. Alex and Eddie were born in Amsterdam and moved with their family to Nijmegen when they were young. The brothers lived there until their family emigrated to the United States in 1962, eventually settling in Pasadena, California.

“Alex still feels a connection with Nijmegen,” the city said in a statement, “and Nijmegen in turn honors the band.”

The connection between the Van Halen brothers and the city has been celebrated before. In 2019, part of Nijmegen’s Hunnerpark was temporarily renamed Van Halenplein, while a mural honoring Eddie was unveiled there.

Alex and Eddie went on to form the band that would bear their family name in California. After years of playing clubs and backyard parties, Van Halen broke through with its self-titled 1978 debut and became one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Alex and Eddie remained the constants throughout the band’s nearly five-decade history, until Eddie’s death in 2020.

Alex’s thunderous, precise drumming was a fundamental part of the band’s sound, powering classics including “Runnin’ with the Devil,” “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” “Unchained,” “Panama,” “Jump” and “Hot for Teacher.” Van Halen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

Now, Van Halen is also working to preserve another part of that history: a collection of previously unreleased recordings he and Eddie made together.

Steve Lukather, who has been assisting Van Halen with the project, has been effusive about what he has heard. Speaking to Guitar Player earlier this year, Lukather dismissed the idea that the recordings are merely scraps being assembled for the sake of releasing something with Eddie’s name attached to it.

“I’m telling you, this is not throwaway shit,” Lukather said. “When I heard them, I said to Al, ‘How fucking come you didn’t use these?’ And the answer was because nobody could write to it. So if you think this is a bunch of throwaway crap that we’re trying to Mickey Mouse together to suck the dollar out of poor, unsuspecting Van Halen fans, it’s not.

“These are fucking finished tracks with Ed and Al, and Ed’s playing bass on a lot of it.”

Steve Vai has also heard some of the recordings. He recalled visiting Eddie at his home studio, where the guitarist pulled tapes from a room filled with archival recordings.

“I was up at Edward’s house once, in his studio,” Vai told Guitar Player. “He invited me. He had a room filled with tapes, and he was pulling them out and we were listening. He would just sit and record and play.

“And I’m listening to this stuff and, I’ll tell you, nobody plays like they do when they’re sitting in their room alone. It was a whole library of tapes, and it was such great stuff.

“So I’m sure there’s a lot there to play with, and it’ll be great,” Vai says. “And I’m really glad Alex is working with Luke. More than anybody I knew through the years, Luke and Edward were like this.” Vai crosses his fingers. “So that’s the best guy to help with this.”

Eddie Van Halen’s arrival on the scene in the late 1970s bowled over a generation of guitar players and kickstarted a shred revolution. But it wasn’t just contemporary players left aghast; plenty of the old guard were won over, too.

Eric Clapton had a famous disagreement with the virtuoso regarding their definition of the blues. But ZZ Top’s bandleader, a perennial bridge between the classic bluesmanship of the three Kings and fresh, outside-the-box thinking, understood Van Halen’s mind-boggling approach from the start.

“I knew him well from the very first record,” Gibbons told Eddie Trunk shortly after his counterpart’s passing in 2020 (via Far Out). “And he was actually, as it came to pass, a neighbor, very close to the house back in Los Angeles.”

Naturally, it didn’t take long for the two players, who have made plenty of innovations on the electric guitar, to link up.

“I first heard the words, ‘Hey, man, there’s a guy that plays some interesting guitar riffs, maybe you should get together,’” he recalls, “only to discover that sitting in the record bin was the first Van Halen record. They had already picked up steam, and fortunately, I was able to go out and catch a live show, and that blew my mind. I said, ‘Oh my gosh, these guys have got it going on.’”

That was often people’s reaction when they first heard Van Halen play. Hearing “Eruption” for the first time was game changing for Alex Skolnick; Jerry Cantrell says EVH and Jimi Hendrix “tilted the world on its axis.” Joe Satriani, meanwhile, said that he “scared the hell out of a million guitarists because he was so damn good” (via BBC).

Gibbons was equally as moved.

“He was always ready to deliver,” he said. “Even [with] the most ferocious riffs and with that technique, it was really gratifying to be in front of a guy who genuinely appreciated and enjoyed every single moment.

“Eddie’s technical prowess is nearly unsurpassed,” he then said. “When it comes to hammer-ons, he’s one of the guys who not only did it best, but did it fast; he did it furiously.”

Two-handed tapping was, of course, Eddie Van Halen’s calling card. It’s a technique that would go on to dominate the next decade-plus of guitar music. It saw his left hand constantly hammering, and he has credited Jimmy Page for the inspiration.

Yet others have claimed they invented tapping first, with Harvey Mendal saying Eddie copied it from him. Rocky Athas and Brian May have also been mentioned. And while Joe Satriani once said he started tapping before hearing any of his soon-to-be-hero’s music, Gibbons was experiencing the exact stroke of fated luck.

“Eruption,” never intended as a solo, was released in 1978, after being recorded in September ’77. Five years earlier, Gibbons did a bit of tapping himself on the Tres Hombres cut “Beer Drinkers and Hellraisers.”

As it turns out, it came about spontaneously.

“Totally by accident,” Gibbons assured Guitar Player in February 2016. “As Frank Beard — our man with no beard — waited for the tape to roll, I was attempting to illustrate with Dusty [Hill, bass] the high note for the bass guitar track.

“I held the low fret down and tapped the high octave, and that did it. Dusty leaned back and said, ‘Man, do that and do it again!’”

He says he never fully incorporated it into the ZZ sound out of respect for Eddie’s legacy.

“Well, it’s still in the technique corral,” he said, nodding. “Van Halen made it a regular thing, and now it’s a genuine part of the player’s approach to shred. I dig it.”

Jan Hammer is nothing but appreciative when it comes to considering the roster of guitar players he’s recorded and toured with since joining the original Mahavishnu Orchestra back in 1971.

“I must have done something right to get them all interested,” the Czechoslovakian-born, Grammy Award–winning keyboardist tells us via phone from the New York suburb where he resides. “I listened to guitar players, and obviously I was influenced as far as playing on the synthesizer by the approach to melodic improvisation and the tone. It just brought me into the whole big family of guitarists, and I have always been amazed that if I was playing somewhere, how many guitar players would come and see me play.”

Hammer was born in Prague. His father was a doctor who played music to help him pay for medical school, while his mother was the well-known jazz vocalist Vlasta Pruchova. Hammer started playing piano when he was four and began touring and recording professionally as a teenager.

His time at the Prague Academy of Musical Arts was cut short by the Warsaw Pact’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia; he finished his studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, after which he became part of jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan’s band and moved to New York City. (He became a U.S. citizen during 1978.)

Hammer says the allure of guitar players — including Mahavishnu’s John McLaughlin, Jeff Beck (with whom he recorded six studio albums), Al Di Meola (four), Journey’s Neal Schon (two) and others — was their ability to do something he could not.

“There’s a certain flow I couldn’t achieve on a keyboard, meaning a piano, even electric,” he explains. “It’s something to do with vibrato and bending and slides and these things I kept hearing in my head but couldn’t translate until I got deeper into electronic stuff and using some pitch-shifting gizmos on my electric piano.

“But it wasn’t until I got my hands on a Mini Moog [synthesizer] where I said, ‘Okay, this is it’ and found my recognizable voice. Then I could start improvising and trading solos in a way that wouldn’t be possible on a piano. It really allowed me to play with these guitarists in a different way.”

Beyond those collaborations, Hammer has released nearly three dozen albums of his own and won Grammy and Emmy Awards for his work on TV’s Miami Vice. These days, the 78-year-old considers himself “pretty much retired,” but he’s certainly satisfied by his legacy and is happy to share stories about some of the artists he spent time with during his career.

Miles Davis

“I had just moved to New York City to go on the road with Sarah Vaughan, and I’m at home and get a call: ‘Come over tomorrow morning. Miles’ house.’ I said, ‘Okay.’

“I’d never met him before, but coming from eastern Europe, for me Miles was basically God. I knew every single record, every note he ever played. He was probably the strongest influence on my approach to improvisation.

“So I went over to his house and John [McLaughlin] was there, Steve Grossman, and it was very smooth, just workshopping something. It was exciting. He gave these cryptic directions — like, for instance, he was really into the rhythm section of Crosby, Stills & Nash. He said, ‘Make it feel like that groove,’ and I said, ‘Wow, great. That’s totally up my alley,’ because, among many other rock bands, I loved Crosby, Stills & Nash. I don’t know if people realized how much that groove had to do with their appeal, so it was really a very positive sign from Miles.

“There was all kinds of recording going on, but Keith Jarrett was the first call [for Davis], so I tried not to get my hopes up. But after I spent a year on the road with Sarah Vaughan, we ended up putting together Mahavishnu, and that made up for not being able to play in Miles’ band. He would come to see us, and I remember hanging out in the dressing room, talking about stuff, which was cool.”

John McLaughlin

“I didn’t know about him until I saw him with Tony Williams in Boston when I first came over, and he totally blew my mind. And then later, in New York City, we would meet; there was the loft scene, which was sort of like jam sessions where people would come over, and we had a nice place with a drum kit, electric piano and everything.

“One time we invited John and Billy Cobham, and it went really well, and eventually I was asked to join the band that was being formed, Mahavishnu Orchestra.

“Once we started going we knew exactly what was happening and what we were doing. The impact was immediate. It’s hard to predict, but you feel things, profound things changing around in the music. Some musicians, jazz musicians, were looking down on it, like, ‘Oh, you’re just trying to be rock stars,’ or whatever.

“But it was all music, and the type of improvisations were doing and the fresh influences we included made it a big revolution.

“Playing with [McLaughlin] was, again, totally smooth. I knew what he wanted and he knew what I wanted, and the five of us were really clicking so well. It was an amazing combination of people. John was super dedicated, like obsessively so, and it shows up in his incredible virtuosity and technique.

“You cannot do anything else but just follow him — I don’t mean in a religious sense, but to put up on what he was doing, musically. You have to be on top of everything, so I tried to do that, and I discovered something in my musical history that was very valuable to the whole enterprise of the band that I didn’t know I had. I had these trains of musical history that I learned about, and it was very valuable.”

Jeff Beck

“Jeff and I were inspiring each other for many years. We met in Switzerland. I was there with Mahavishnu Orchestra and Jeff was there with Beck, Bogert & Appice, and it happened to also be Jeff’s birthday. We ended up staying at the same hotel and at his birthday party, and Jeff and I started talking about different things we have in common, what kind of music we liked.

“And it was really interesting that we had so much in common; people think I was much more of a jazz player, but I liked rock and rhythm and blues, and Jeff was really intrigued and we talked about possibilities of working together on something.

“It wasn’t until a year or more later that we ended up recording on Wired. There was no need to develop anything; it was all organic, and we just clicked right away. He came over and I had picked up his instruments at the airport, and when he opened the guitar case, it was empty. His guitar got stolen. In my studio we had a nice little Strat, probably early ’70s, blond wood, for anybody to use, so Jeff picked it up and played it on ‘Blue Wind’ — it wasn’t even his guitar.

“That was the first thing we did together, and the first take, the first layer was just me playing drums and Jeff playing the rhythm, and the lick. We played the whole thing through, just me and him, and we overdubbed whatever else was needed. He did the solo. I did the bass on a Moog. It was just an amazing experience.

“When we worked together was usually up to him, because he had periods where he wouldn’t be interested in doing anything, and then all of a sudden he would call up and we’d go out on tour. In ’76 we did a big tour, did a live record and everything, and in ’77 we went to Australia.

“And then a couple of months later we were supposed to be going to Japan and God knows where else, and he just pulled the plug, totally unexpected. Me and my group were left hanging. That was kind of a drag, but I was ready to do it, any time he wanted, because he was just a fantastically gifted person — but mercurial.”

Al Di Meola

“We had these parallel groups, Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever, so we were aware of each other. Then Al invited me to play on [1977’s] Elegant Gypsy, and everything grew out of there. He kept asking me to play on following things. Again, I don’t know how to describe it, but Al is an incredibly gifted guitarist, and we worked together really well.

“Al always had this Spanish undertone to what he did; he worked in the Phrygian mode, which is the basis of a lot of his approach to music with the Spanish guitar that’s electric. One time we were rehearsing and one of the guys said, ‘I think I’ve got Phrygian poisoning,’ which was very funny.

“The most interesting thing we worked on was Electric Rendezvous [1982], with just the two of us with electronics and synthesizers. Phil Collins played drums on one tune and Bill Bruford played on one tune. That was really interesting, and then also playing live on tour with Steve Gadd, which was just an amazing treat.”

Tommy Bolin

“He was a revelation. He was one of the people who can actually play amazingly, without any effort. He was really not working at it, and it just came out totally naturally.

“I met him through Jeremy Steig, the flute player. We went to the studio once with Tommy and Billy Cobham, and then I ended up playing on his album [1975’s Teaser]. It was funny: we were supposed to start and the studio was all set up, and Narada Michael Walden was late because he was stuck in traffic. The drums were all miked up, so I said, ‘All right, let me have a go,’ and I ended up playing drums on the album as well, which was great fun.

“Bolin was just an amazing creature, and I cannot get over how terrible it was that he went away so soon.”

Neal Schon

“Neal is a complete beast, a natural source of incredible music. It just bursts out of him; he cannot help it. He cannot stop.

“We met when I was touring with Jeff, and Journey was the opening act. We’d go to sound checks in the afternoon, and after we finished they were setting up for Neal, so I just got on Billy Cobham’s kit and we started jamming, me on drums and him playing all these incredible rhythm riffs. I don’t know if people realize that, as great a lead player he is, he’s also an amazing rhythm player. I guess you have to be to write all the Journey hits.

“After we did it a couple of times, that’s how the idea of Neal and I making a couple of albums together came about [1981’s Untold Passion and 1982’s Here to Stay]. We were unfortunately... I don’t want to say pulled back, but there was competition. Journey’s big album [Escape, featuring “Don't Stop Believin’”] was coming up at the same time, so the label didn’t put their best effort on our behalf. I was really disappointed. Over the years I played on a couple of things with him, together, but over long distance. I did the same with Beck, too.”

Eddie Van Halen

“We did a one-off [the Les Paul & Friends concert August 18, 1988 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music] that was just fantastic. I got involved, again, because it was all about guitars and I loved it, even though I was not playing guitar. With Eddie, it was breathtaking; the energy coming out of him. He can walk into the room and he’s already going. I was really impressed.

“He was telling me he knew my records and he was talking about how much he liked this and that. He kept going on about the tune called ‘Jetstream,’ which was the Black Sheep album [1978]. He was going on and on about the solo I played on that, and I was just thinking, Wow, you really do know my records. I did not expect that.”

“Of course, I could never play like him. I never tried. Only an idiot competes with Eddie Van Halen.”

So said Steve Vai to Rolling Stone in 2020, as he reflected on his friendship with Eddie. Vai certainly spoke from wisdom — after all, he was David Lee Roth’s guitarist after Roth left Van Halen. He knew what would be expected of him and that he needed to cut his own path to avoid being compared to and overshadowed by the great Eddie Van Halen.

“When I joined David Lee Roth’s band, it was great opportunity for me to play such well-constructed rock songs,” Vai said. “Of course, nobody can play them like Edward, but you do your best.”

Eddie was certainly aware of the guitarist who had taken his place alongside Roth. And while Ed knew his own talents were immense, he remained humble and believed other guitarists had something to teach him. Allan Holdsworth for example: Ed was a huge fan of the guitar giant and did everything he could to help him land a recording contract. With Ed, there was never competition, just a desire to play guitar and keep getting better.

So he kept his eye on Vai and was pleasantly surprised at what he heard. Unlike the numerous EVH clones, Vai combined his limits-stretching electric guitar techniques with lyrical melodies. Joe Satriani — who stepped into Ed's shoes on last year's Best of All Worlds tour — might impress you with his bluesy fusion, and Yngwie Malmsteen with his neoclassical chops. But Vai combined an almost operatic beauty with the sort of avant-garde eccentricities of his former employer, Frank Zappa.

And when Eddie heard Vai apply his magic to his own songs in Roth’s band, he was duly impressed.

“I’m going, ‘This guy is better at what I do than I am’, you know?” Eddie told interview Shaun Baxter in 1995.

“But,” Ed added, “ he lacked the vibe… the feel. He was technically very proficient but stiff. It always made me feel bad in a way. Because it made me feel like, ‘Wow, is that how people perceive me?’ ”

Vai stayed with Roth from 1985 through 1989, during which time he performed on the singer’s albums Eat ‘Em and Smile and Skyscraper. Once he was out, Ed felt it was safe to give him a call.

“The day after I left David Lee Roth’s band — I don’t know how Edward found out — but he called me,” Vai told Rolling Stone. “That was the start of a nice relationship and friendship.”

Vai recalled that they hung out frequently over a six-month period, during which he visited Ed’s 5150 Studios and was treated to private listening sessions of his work tapes. “He played me stuff that was never released,” Vai recalled. “I said, ‘Why don’t you make a solo record?’ And he always felt that the Van Halen records were his solo records.

"But this stuff he was playing me was really quite nice. It was all the things we loved about the way he played.”

While Ed considered Vai the one guitarist who out–Van Halened him, Vai believes Ed was a rock and roll game changer with only one peer.

“If I had to use my intuition,” he said, “it’s Hendrix, it’s Van Halen, in rock guitar. So many great guitarists came along and contributed, but those guys just did something for us that reshaped not just the way we played instruments, but the way we write the music, the way we dress, and the way we act onstage. It goes really deep. So I firmly feel that he was one of those monoliths.”

Vai certainly has his own share of fans who consider him a game changer. Tosin Abasi recently spoke of working 16 hours a day in a salmon processing factory in Alaska to buy his Steve Vai signature guitar.

For those who want to channel some of Steve's guitar mojo, his three top guitar tips will prove worthwhile.

Two well-worn Kramer guitars that belonged to Eddie Van Halen have gone up for auction — complete with what are claimed to be cigarette butts the guitarist smoked, still wedged beneath the low strings behind the nut.

The electric guitars are among the headline lots in Backstage Auctions’ latest sale, which runs through August 8. Listed as “Edward Van Halen 1986 Zeke Clark Customized 5150 Kramer Guitar” and “Edward Van Halen 1987 Zeke Clark Customized 5150 Kramer Guitar,” each carries a starting bid of $50,000.

While their exact recording history can’t be verified, Backstage Auctions president Jacques van Gool says there’s little doubt the guitars saw extensive studio use during one of Van Halen’s most successful periods.

“Those two guitars were definitely and extensively used by Eddie in the studio,” van Gool said during an appearance on Final Resonance TV. “They were never taken out on the road. But Zeke doesn’t remember if those guitars were used on recordings. Most likely they were. But again, you cannot just fill in blanks. I mean, you either know or you don’t. And even if you know, then I always say, ‘We have proof.’

“But they have so much wear and tear on them and the usual cigarette burns on the headstock and all that good stuff. It’s fantastic that those pieces survived and that he hung on to them.”

Among the guitars’ more unusual features are the cigarette butts reportedly smoked by Van Halen himself, each left tucked beneath the strings on the headstock — a small but unmistakably personal detail that has become one of the auction’s biggest talking points.

Final Resonance TV host Jeff Goebel added that former Van Halen guitar technician Zeke Clark had shared the story behind the instruments, explaining that Van Halen initially had Clark build them to prove his abilities before keeping them as backup guitars.

“These were ones that Eddie made [Zeke] build to kind of get Ed’s approval of his skills,” Goebel said. “Then he had these as sort of backups, as well.”

Clark’s connection gives the instruments particularly strong provenance. A respected luthier and technician, he worked as Eddie Van Halen’s lead guitar and amp tech from 1985 to 1993, overseeing the guitarist’s gear throughout the 5150, OU812 and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge eras.

According to the auction listing, Clark’s career also included building, repairing and maintaining equipment for artists including Prince, Sammy Hagar, Journey, Heart and Poison.

The sale features dozens of Van Halen-related artifacts drawn from the collections of Clark and longtime Van Halen associate Nick D’Andrea, offering collectors a rare glimpse inside the guitarist’s inner circle. Few lots, however, are likely to attract as much attention as the two battered Kramer guitars — not least because they still bear traces of Van Halen’s daily habits decades after they left his hands.

Bidding remains open through August 8. For collectors willing to meet the hefty opening price, the sale offers the chance to own not only two studio-used Kramer guitars with impeccable provenance, but also an unusually intimate piece of Eddie Van Halen history.

When a die-hard fan spray-painted “Clapton is God” on a London wall in the middle of the British blues boom, it was evident that a modernized interpretation of the blues had successfully captured the imagination of contemporary audiences.

By Clapton's own admission, playing the blues, let alone reshaping it for a new era, required not superhuman talent but plain-old hard work. As he continued to push the genre forward in Cream — after a glimpse of Buddy Guy's live show convinced to form his own power trio —– other artists helped take it to new places in the following decades. Clapton believes Robert Cray did that better than anyone.

“It’s the most difficult thing to write, a modern blues,” Clapton told Rolling Stone in 2017 mused. “The only person I know who can do it well is Robert Cray. It comes straight out of him. I saw him recently this year, and he’s still doing it. He’s on fire, the real thing.

“I wish I could be like that,” he added. “Really, I’m a musician. I try to be a singer and songwriter, and it’s interesting to me. But I would never think of myself as that.”

Clapton, of course, speaks with humility — his success includes 17 Grammy awards. But he felt Cray had the whole package, with his guitar playing and voice working together in perfect harmony.

Despite getting a metaphorical pat on the back from a blues legend, Cray wasn't a purist. Part of his brilliance came from the fact that he peppered his blues with elements of gospel and soul, the musical styles of his upbringing. Blues was, in fact, not his primary source of inspiration.

“My dad would play gospel music on Sundays,” he tells Guitar Player. “It was Swan Silvertones, Sensational Nightingales, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi — and Alabama — and all kinds of stuff like that. During the week, it would be Ray Charles, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Sarah Vaughan...

“It’s funny, because as a kid I heard all that music, and then, as kids do, of course, you listen to your own music. When I got into my late teens and picked up the blues bug, I started taking my parents’ records from the house, and then embellished that collection by buying my own records. So getting the gospel music or getting Curtis Mayfield or the Impressions was all just part of what I grew up on.”

He also played an accidental role in inspiring the hit film The Blues Brothers, having played bass previously in the house band from the film Animal House. While those two instances are comedic footnotes to a journeyman career, Cray is as authentic as modern blues can get.

Unfortunately, for all of Cray's and Clapton's mutual admiration, their friendship wouldn't last. Cray took exception to his friend's decision to sing some lines on Van Morrison's anti-lockdown song, "Stand and Deliver," and ended their relationship.

As he told Clapton, he was particularly taken aback by the lines “Do you wanna be a free man / Or do you wanna be a slave? Do you wanna wear these chains / Until you’re lying in the grave?”

“His reaction back to me was that he was referring to slaves from, you know, England from way back,” Cray told The Washington Post.

Cray, who was born in Georgia during segregation, found the reply wanting. He was further dismayed to see a photo of Clapton and guitarist Jimmie Vaughan posing with Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, in September 2021. As The Washington Post noted, Abbot had “recently signed the country’s most restrictive abortion law and a Republican-backed measure to limit who can vote in the state.”

In addition, Abbott is opposed to vaccination mandates, as is Clapton, who has posted statements against vaccines and described scientific data as "propaganda."

In response to the photo, Clapton's business manager Michael Eaton said at the time that posing with the governor didn't amount to an endorsement of his positions.

“[Clapton] is a great believer in freedom of choice which drives his position on vaccinations,” said Eaton. “And his views on other matters would reflect that belief in freedom of choice.”

It all brings to mind the old saying: You may lose your friends, but you never lose the blues.

David Lee Roth has canceled almost all of the remaining dates on his current U.S. tour — and received an unexpected message of support from his longtime rival, Sammy Hagar.

The original Van Halen singer launched the tour in April and later extended the run through September. But on July 23, all but one of the remaining dates were removed from Roth’s official website without explanation.

Roth had been scheduled to play six shows between July 23 and September 4. As of now, the only date still listed is an August 7 appearance in Sturgis, South Dakota.

The news prompted a surprisingly sympathetic response from Hagar, the singer who replaced Roth in Van Halen in 1985. The two have spent much of the past four decades taking shots at each other, but Hagar took a markedly different tone when addressing Roth’s tour cancellation.

In a seemingly earnest video message, delivered while sipping a tequila cocktail, Hagar said he had heard about the canceled dates from former Van Halen bass guitarist Michael Anthony. He also invited Roth to join him and Anthony at an upcoming Las Vegas show.

“Hey Dave, Sammy here. I just got a call from Michael Anthony as I’m sitting down having my favorite cocktail, I don’t have to tell you that this is about your tour getting cancelled,” Hagar said.

“And I want say from the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry. I hope you’re well. I hope there’s not a physical problem.”

Hagar then acknowledged that both he and Roth have continued to perform songs from their former band almost six years after the death of guitarist Eddie Van Halen.

“Honestly, Mike and I love the fact that you’ve been out there doing it, supporting the greatest band in the world that we were both part of,” he said. “And, yeah, I’m really sorry. That’s fucked up... You and I, Mikey, Al [Alex Van Halen], Ed, cannot be replaced.

“So, when you’re ready to carry on, you go, brother. Mike and I support you.”

Hagar then invited Roth to join him and Anthony at their Las Vegas residency in September.

“Come on, join us, sing a couple of songs, MC the damn show. Come out and just do what the fuck you do, which is pretty damn entertaining,” Hagar said.

“Anyway, hope you’re well, I really do. God bless, brother.”

The message is a striking departure from the singers’ usual public exchanges. Hagar replaced Roth in Van Halen in 1985, and the two spent much of the following decades criticizing each other in interviews and through the press.

They did manage to share a stage again in 2002, when Roth and Hagar both took part in a Van Halen tour. But the reunion did little to permanently settle their long-running rivalry, and the two continued to clash in the years that followed.

They were still taking shots at each other as recently as last year, when Roth mocked Hagar’s claim that he had been visited by the ghost of Eddie Van Halen.

Hagar’s latest message, then, is an unusually warm gesture from one former Van Halen frontman to the other — particularly given their history.

Two years before Sammy Hagar became the lead singer and second guitarist in Van Halen, his former bandleader had some remarkably harsh words for his guitar playing.

“I just don’t think he is a good guitarist,” Ronnie Montrose told Guitar Player in 1983. “He’s adequate for what he does and just ends up using every cliché in the book. Although he does that well.”

Montrose was not some random critic. He had formed the hard-rock band that bore his name in 1973, with Hagar as its lead singer, and had fired him after the band’s first two albums. Hagar had since gone on to a successful solo career and would soon become one of the most famous singers in hard rock.

But Montrose still believed his former bandmate was a limited musician.

“I set that band up to be an experimental, integral, working rock and roll ensemble,” he explained in the October 1983 issue of Guitar Player. “I wanted it to become the American version of Led Zeppelin, because they were able to do acoustic things as well as metal. They were able to bring their audience with them. I wanted to get to the point where our audience would allow us to experiment.

“Unfortunately, it was not a creative situation, because the members of the ensemble were not of a creative nature. Sammy was the only one who had enough ambition to attempt creativity, but he was musically uneducated. A guitar to him was an accompaniment to vocals and a rock and roll performance.

“On the way home from a European tour, I told Sammy he had to go his own way and do what he was going to do, because I wanted to move in a different direction toward something that was more musically exciting and of a broader scope. I’m not saying this with any malice, but he has stayed on the same musical level, working in the same narrow rock vein.”

Montrose had formed his namesake band in 1973 with Hagar, bassist Bill Church and drummer Denny Carmassi. Their self-titled debut arrived the following year and became a landmark of American hard rock, with Hagar’s powerful vocals helping establish the band’s sound.

But the partnership did not last. Montrose and Hagar parted ways in 1975, and the singer went on to build a successful solo career. By the time Montrose gave his 1983 interview, Hagar had released several albums under his own name and was an established rock star.

Montrose, however, remained unimpressed by Hagar’s abilities as a guitarist.

When asked why he had never played in a band with another guitarist, he admitted that he enjoyed jamming with other six-stringers. But he had never considered Hagar a suitable musical partner.

“There’s never been any question of allowing Sammy to pick up a guitar,” Montrose said. “There was no way you could ever interplay in a jam with him.”

By 1983, Montrose was pursuing a musical path that was far removed from the heavy rock of his namesake band. After leaving Montrose, he had moved into increasingly experimental territory and released Open Fire, a 1978 all-instrumental album featuring acoustic guitar, mandolin, synthesizer and a 30-piece orchestra.

The record was not a commercial success. In fact, Hagar apparently enjoyed telling a story about the reaction of one particularly unhappy Montrose fan.

“The best line I’ve heard about that album from a Montrose fan was told to me by Sammy Hagar,” Montrose recalled. “Sammy was playing somewhere in the South, and the guy came up and asked if he had heard my latest album. When Sammy said he had, the guy said, ‘Boy, I bought a copy of that thing, took it home and put it on, and it fucking made my stereo gag.’”

Montrose was amused by the story, but he did not regret making the album.

“Warner Brothers was shell-shocked by that album, but I opened up an audience with it that I will never regret,” he said. “That album enabled me to do a soundtrack for a Canadian film about skiing called Powderheads. It also enabled me to go to Japan with Tony Williams.”

But Montrose’s career would never reach the commercial heights enjoyed by Hagar, who blamed the guitarist’s self-destructive tendencies for his lack of success. Just two years after the guitarist offered his assessment of his former singer, Hagar joined Van Halen, replacing David Lee Roth and embarking on a new chapter that would make him one of the biggest stars in rock.

Montrose, meanwhile, remained committed to the idea that he had been more than the heavy-metal electric guitar player who first made his name with Hagar.

“People who wondered who the real Ronnie Montrose was had to see he was both,” he said.

Four years after Montrose gave his assessment of Hagar, no less than Eddie Van Halen weighed in on Sammy’s guitar talents. Speaking to Guitar Player alongside the singer for an interview in the October 1987 issue, Van Halen noted Hagar’s passion and ability to inspire.

“He gets the point across very well,” Eddie said. “He’s a soulful player. He’s inspired the hell out of me, writing-wise. I ripped one of his licks off — which he ripped from Neal Schon,” he added with a laugh.

But it was Sammy who got the last laugh — at the expense of his former guitarist.

“Actually, it’s an old Ronnie Montrose lick that was invented by Jimmy Page or Jeff Beck,” he said.

Offered Van Halen, “You do it best.”

Alex Van Halen has never been shy about preferring one era of Van Halen over another, and he believes David Lee Roth brought something to the band that no one else could replace.

While Sammy Hagar fronted Van Halen through its most commercially successful years, Alex says the group’s defining chemistry belonged to the original lineup.

Speaking with KazaGastão, the drummer reflected on what made Roth such an essential part of Van Halen’s rise.

“To me, Dave was a poet. It was the confluence of the complete opposite ends of the spectrum that made it happen. And it was brilliant soup — until it wasn’t.”

Roth fronted Van Halen on the band’s first six albums before leaving in 1985 to pursue a solo career. The relationship had already begun to fracture by then, and Eddie Van Halen’s secret recording session playing the electric guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” proved to be the final breaking point.

Looking back, though, Alex says those disagreements disappeared after Eddie’s death in 2020.

“That’s the important part: Remember the good times,” he said. “All the fights and disagreements that we had went by the wayside when Ed passed.

“Dave was the first person I called. He’s the only person I called, because it goes beyond words. It goes beyond the fact that we made music together and traveled together. We were kindred spirits.”

When the interviewer asked about Sammy Hagar — who replaced Roth in 1985 and sang on four studio albums with the band — Alex acknowledged what they accomplished together but insisted Van Halen’s defining chemistry belonged to the original lineup.

“There was good music made and all that, but the essence and the spirit and the balls-to-the-wall was the first model,” he said. “Everybody has a peak in their life, and he wasn’t there during that time period. We did our best work with Dave.”

For Alex, part of that success came from Roth’s unpredictable personality, which he says fueled the band’s creativity rather than undermining it.

“Dave was a restless guy,” he explained. “He couldn’t settle on one thing for one day. The next day, he is on something else. Some people might think it is a negative, and it is if it’s left alone to fester and become something it shouldn’t be. But you need conflict. You need contradiction. You need friction. Without friction, you’ve got no heat. Without heat, you’ve got nothing.

“A creative environment is an extremely difficult thing to foster and to keep in check and keep it balanced. Now, you don’t want to be completely balanced because then it becomes inert. Then it becomes predictable. We were very concerned about ending up doing the same thing over and over again.”

Alex also argued that Roth’s greatest contribution wasn’t his vocals or stage antics but his ability to connect with audiences.

Although Roth’s larger-than-life personality often put him at odds with those around him, Alex insisted he was “never in competition with anybody.”

“We stole the show because Dave had a way of connecting with the people, which was extremely important,” he said. “He has that skill, and nobody’s going to stop that. I don’t care what anybody says. I love the guy.

“Music is about people. People don’t really remember what you played. They remember how you made them feel.”

Meanwhile, songwriter Desmond Child recently reflected on his difficult songwriting sessions with Van Halen and Roth, while Joe Satriani revealed that Roth approached him about a Van Halen tribute tour in the 1990s — an experience that left the guitarist stunned by what he saw as disrespect toward Eddie Van Halen.

When Neil Young sat down for an interview with Guitar Player in 1992, grunge had upended the guitar world and reignited a long-running debate over technique versus expression. More than three decades later, his views on the 1990s return to punk-infused music still feels strikingly relevant.

“It’s just rock and roll, but it’s real rock and roll,” he told GP associate editor Jas Obrecht. “Punk and rock and roll are all the same thing. What has degenerated from it — what ‘rock and roll’ is now — is not rock and roll. It’s pop. It’s fabricated for the masses. It’s an imitation — a shoddy semblance of what it was. It’s Perry Como music compared to real rock and roll.”

Young's argument was bigger than the changing tastes of the early '90s. To him, the divide wasn't between punk and classic rock, or grunge and shred. It was between music driven by expression and music shaped for mass consumption.

“Remember when it all started?” he continued. “There was real rock and roll, and then that other music your parents listened to. It’s like rock and roll now is the music that our parents listened to. It’s, like, gone.”

That philosophy extended directly to his guitar playing. When asked what he looks for in an electric guitar solo, Young didn’t bring up speed, precision or technique— he was focused on a sensation.

“Elevation. You can feel it. That’s all I’m looking for,” he said. “You can tell I don’t care about bad notes. I listen for the whole band on my solos. You can call it a solo, because that’s a good way to describe it, but it’s really an instrumental. It’s the whole band that’s playing.”

That perspective also informed his view of formal music education. The 1980s shred boom led to a massive influx of guitarists to Berklee College of Music and music schools like the Musicians Institute. Young saw it as the beginning of the end.

“It paints a pretty doomed picture of the future, doesn’t it?” he asked. “First of all, it doesn’t matter if you can play a scale. It doesn’t matter if your technique is good. If you have feelings you want to get out through music, that’s what matters. If you have the ability to express yourself, and you feel good when you do it, then that’s why you do it. The technical side of it is a complete boring drag, as far as I’m concerned.”

Young — who has steadfastly played a 1953 Gibson Les Paul and 1959 tweed Fender Deluxe for the better part of 60 years — also acknowledged that technical virtuosity has never been his goal.

“I can’t play fast. I don’t even know the scales. A lot of the notes I go for are notes that I know aren’t there. They’re just not there, so you can hit any note.”

But his comments weren’t a dismissal of technical ability. In fact, he reserved some of his highest praise for two of rock’s most celebrated virtuosos.

“I appreciate these guys who play great. I’m impressed by metal bands with their scale guys. I mean, Joe Satriani and Eddie Van Halen are genius guitar players. They’re unbelievable musicians of the highest caliber.

“But I can’t relate to it. One note is enough.”

Whether they’re played in a club, a theater or a stadium, most rock shows are sweaty affairs for musicians. But what’s it like to perform on some of the coldest stages on Earth?

From Metallica’s record-breaking 2013 Antarctica expedition to Van Halen performing in a blizzard and Tesseract gracing a stage made entirely of ice, rock history has delivered some frosty gigs. As far as experiences go, there’s nothing quite like them.

Thrash-metal giants Metallica entered the record books 13 years ago when performing a 10-song set in a packed-out dome near the Argentine Antarctic Base Carlini. In doing so, they became the first musical act to have played a show on all seven of the Earth’s continents.

The 120-strong audience comprised Coca-Cola competition winners from across Latin America, research station scientists from Russia, South Korea, China, Poland, Chile, Brazil and Germany, along with the ship’s crew.

“Part of the deal was we couldn’t disturb the environment, the penguins, and all the incredible wildlife down there,” drummer Lars Ulrich said of the show in 2023 (via Metal Hammer).

Not only was it the first metal show where penguins were of paramount importance, but it also meant that the band had to ditch their tube amps and anything else that might get loud.

The solution was to send the band’s live feed to the audience via headphones, essentially turning the performance into a silent headbangers’ ball. At a time when digital amp modelers were still looked upon dubiously by gear nerds, the band turned to Fractal.

“The initial question is, can we make this work?” James Hetfield’s tech, Chad Zaemisch, later told Guitar World. “From a technician’s point of view, you don’t want to say to the guy you’re working for that what you’re doing is not going to be as good as before.”

Yet, the show went down without a hitch, and Metallica has stayed loyal to Fractal’s Axe Fx modeler ever since. But other bands haven’t been so lucky.

In 1995, Van Halen were in Denver on the Balance tour when a freak blizzard whipped through the city. The weather conditions deteriorated as the show went on, leading to snow accumulating onstage. Still, the band refused to cut the show short, given that so many fans had made the effort to get there. Even with frozen fingers, Eddie Van Halen and company tore through a 21-song set.

It’s a sentiment that U.K. progressive metal band Tesseract can relate to. Two years after Metallica’s glacial gig, the seven-string guitar advocates made their own way into the record books.

As part of Jägermeister’s Ice Cold series of shows at Snow Village in Kittila, Lapland, they became the first band to perform on top of a structure made completely out of ice.

Snow Village in Kittila is built each year from 44 million pounds of snow and 78,000 pounds of ice, and while it looked impressive, the onstage temperature of -4°F was anything but. As Metal Hammer reports, several band members suffered a loss of feeling in their hands after just the first song of soundcheck.

“One of the main challenges is keeping the instruments at the same temperature,” Amos Williams, the band’s bass guitar player, explained. “If the strings become colder during the set, then tuning will become a massive issue.”

“The strings are ice, and that’s making our fingers pretty dead,” Williams told Total Guitar from backstage. “I’ve actually got a heat pad on my palms [under my glove].”

“The bit I’m worried about,” he added, “is snow getting into [our gear], because it isn’t, basically, water? Hopefully nothing’s going to short-circuit.”

Unlike Metallica’s carefully controlled Antarctic performance, neither Van Halen nor Tesseract had the luxury of insulating themselves from the elements. Together, they prove that some of rock’s greatest gigs are remembered not just for the songs that were played, but for the conditions the bands overcame to play them.

Desmond Child has written for a litany of rock greats, but in the mid-’90s, Van Halen became the one that got away.

The producer and songwriter has helped shape hits like Aerosmith’s swaggering “Dude (Looks Like a Lady”, Bon Jovi’s talkbox-powered “Livin’ On A Prayer”, and Kiss’s disco hit, “I Was Made for Lovin’ You”. He’s got a proven track record of helping rock songs resonate with massive audiences, which often puts him in high demand.

Yet, remarkably, he found himself in line to work with both David Lee Roth, whose commercial star was waning, and his former band, Van Halen, within just a few months in 1996. Both gigs ended up intertwining in an unexpected way.

First, he was in line to enter songwriting sessions with Diamond Dave when the singer rocked up to their first meeting armed with two things: a cassette and strippers.

“He was going to explain what his music was all about, so he gave me a cassette and said, ‘Put this on,’ and it was like real old-fashioned stripper music,” Child told Chuck Shute. “Then all of a sudden the strippers, who wear trench coats, fedoras, and stiletto heels with nothing on underneath, slip in, and then they start doing all these moves. And this was in an office that was like a little closet.”

For most artists, this would seem a surprising and highly unprofessional move – even if it did hit the nail on the head, aesthetically – but for David Lee Roth, it feels incredibly on-brand.

“Then suddenly he turns off the music," says Child, "and they jump up, grab their coats, and they say, ‘Give us a call if you want some more inspiration!’” 

There was no second meeting, although Child says that was on Roth.

“He didn’t come back, maybe I didn’t enjoy the strippers enough for his taste,” he jokes. But he see the singer again not long after.

“I think Hagar had left, and now they were looking for a new lead singer,” he says, referring to his potential collaboration with Van Halen. “I was recommending Mitch Malloy, who is a great rock singer. I thought he could pull it off and, you know, he had the golden locks.”

Malloy would go on to audition for the gig, which Extreme vocalist Gary Cherone ultimately got. But for Child, his time with the band was about to get a whole lot weirder. Dave Lee Roth was still in the picture, and about to make a brief return to the band.

“I went up there, and he [David Lee Roth] shows up, top down, looking like a video shoot,” he says. “Then he gets out of the car, and before you know it, no song was started, and I had to leave. He came in there and busted it all up. I never got asked back.”

It’s strange that Van Halen were even considering outside help with their songwriting, considering the fallout of Eddie’s secret guest solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”. The rule in the band was ‘Van Halen, nothing else.’ Maybe that, rather than Roth’s actions, was the reason the collaboration never happened.

But how did Roth know what was going on?

“Somebody must have tipped him off,” Child guesses. “Who knows how that transpired, like ‘We’re writing with Desmond Child, we don’t need you!’ There was a high school-ness to it all.”

Either way, the party was crashed, and Van Halen never worked with Desmond Child. Instead, they pressed on with Cherone and released Van Halen III in 1998 before going on hiatus.

As for Roth, who had handpicked Steve Vai to help launch his solo career, he went on to form the DLR Band with future Rob Zombie and Mötley Crüe guitarist John 5, but not before he tried to recruit Joe Satriani for a Van Halen tribute band. Satch couldn’t believe the cheek of it.

British indie rock band Wet Leg have had a hugely successful past 12 months, and much of their success hinges on the “demystifying” discovery that guitarist/vocalist Rhian Teasdale made early in her career.

Following the release of their second album, Moisturizer, last July, the band embarked on a sell-out UK tour that included a show at London’s historic Royal Albert Hall, while standout shows at Glastonbury and Coachella have been the icing on the cake for a band that continues to grow.

But when it comes to the fundamentals of their songwriting, Teasdale says she’s in love with simplicity, despite the “many loser gatekeepers who want you to believe that you need 20-plus chords in a song for it to be worthy.”

Indeed, she’s making the case that guitar players only need two chords to write a “banging” song.

The guitarist, who is often seen wielding a green perspex B.C. Rich Mockingbird has been talking to The Cut about the band’s rapid rise and newfound status as Britain’s premier indie rock darlings.

Her less-is-more revelation came early in her playing days, and it’s a mindset that she’s in no rush to abandon.

“The first song I ever tried to play on guitar was ‘Molly’s Chambers’ by Kings of Leon — back when the band was super-trashy and fun,” she recalls. “It was a real epiphany to learn that you don’t have to be a virtuoso guitarist to enjoy playing music with your friends.

“It’s been a bit of a journey demystifying music-making for myself,” she adds. “I’m not from a musical household, and I even got kicked out of my GCSE music course because I was too far behind the rest of the class. There are so many loser gatekeepers who want you to believe that you need 20-plus chords in a song for it to be worthy. In reality, there are so many banging songs that literally are just two chords.”

Despite the band’s streamlined musicality, Teasdale has said she wants the world to see Wet Leg’s riff-slingers as guitar heroes, but the Isle of Wight outfit is doing so on their own terms. Don’t expect blazing guitar solos and tapping galore.

For further proof that the two-chord song formula is successful, we can look to Eddie Van Halen, a player many consider one of history’s best. As Michael Anthony once said, “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love” shows what you can do with just two chords – in this case, A minor and G major.

The song, he says, hinges on a singular lick, and was written as a nod to punk and the Ramones’ no-nonsense hitmaking. Released as part of the band’s certified diamond 1978 debut album, and a song that has racked up 276 million Spotify streams, it has proven to be a cross-generational hit, even if it flies in the face of the flair and flamboyance Van Halen was notorious for.

“It was a stupid thing to us, just two chords,” Eddie Van Halen once told Guitar World of the song’s genesis. “It didn’t end up sounding punk, but that was the intention.”

Producer Ted Templeman, meanwhile, pinned the track’s success on EVH’s “incredible” guitar playing, which perhaps suggests that a high-quality musician working within more limited confines can often produce magic moments.

That’s why Wet Leg are keeping things simple. And the buzz about them – on both sides of the Atlantic – underscores their argument with aplomb. Just don’t tell Yngwie Malmsteen.

This interview originally ran in Guitar Player’s October 1986 issue.

Steve Vai is the most exciting hard-rock guitarist since, well, Eddie Van Halen. He is as unique in his own way as Van Halen or Adrian Belew — or Allan Holdsworth, for that matter — are in theirs. Flashy, funny, and unpredictable, he boldly goes forth where no man has gone before. And now, performing for his biggest audiences ever with David Lee Roth, he may well become a touchstone for new directions in rock guitar.

On Eat ’Em and Smile, Roth’s group is rounded out by former big band drummer Gregg Bissonette and the inimitable Billy Sheehan. The pairing of players the caliber of Vai and bassist Sheehan is almost unprecedented in rock, and it works.

From the album’s opening sounds — Dave’s conversation with Steve’s talking guitar in “Yankee Rose” — it’s clear that listeners are in for an extraordinary performance. The musicians deal in swampy grooves, uptown blues, big band jazz, and heavy metal. Stunning unison fingertaps on bass and guitar break new ground. Vai laces his fills and solos with amazing whammy feats and unexpected turns. At the heart of it all is his unique personality and sense of humor — his attitude, as he calls it.

Vai first met singer David Lee Roth at a Hollywood after-hours club. At odds with the rest of his band Van Halen, Dave tapped Steve for songs for his upcoming movie Crazy from the Heat. When Van Halen reformed with singer Sammy Hagar and the Crazy from the Heat film deal fell through, Dave asked Steve to help him form a band.

The duo composed “Yankee Rose,” “Goin’ Crazy!,” “Elephant Gun,” “Big Trouble,” “Bump and Grind,” and “Ladies’ Nite in Buffalo?,” and brought in producer Ted Templeman to man the consoles at Fantasy Studios in California and the Power Station in New York.

On the day of this interview, Vai was home preparing for a year-long tour. Afterwards, he plans to record another solo album.

Do you feel much pressure replacing a famous guitar sound behind a famous voice?

No. I don’t feel like I was replacing Eddie, but I know we’ve got to go out there and prove ourselves. This is one of my biggest stabs, and I’m aware that every single thing I do is going to be under a microscope. But I can’t think of that, or else it’s not going to allow me to be at my best. I was nervous for about a minute, and then I said, “Forget it. It’s not worth my energy.” A lot of energy goes into being nervous.

How does playing with David Lee Roth stack up to past projects?

It’s completely different. I’m freer to do a lot more things. He pushes me; he really likes to hear a lot of guitar. When I think I’m just about to go on the verge of overplaying, he says, “No, keep going.” Dave’s very constructive. He’s a crazy man [laughs], but he really knows what he’s doing. I trust the guy. I’m thoroughly enjoying the gig, and I’m honored to be here.

What’s it like working with Billy Sheehan? Was there ever a danger of overkill?

[laughs] There always is a danger of overkill with me and him on the same stage! I had seen Billy perform before with his band Talas, and I was pretty amazed by his technical prowess. But I thought that I could never play with a guy like that. He’s really good, but he plays like a guitar player. I was nervous when I heard that he was going to be doing the gig. I thought, how is this going to work? Upon rapping with him, though, I realized that he’s a very mature musician. He respects me as a guitar player, and together we work things out. We set aside places for each guy to do his thing. There are really no weird vibes or attitudes. Our relationship gets closer every day. We do some pretty funny stuff together, which you’ll hear and see onstage.

The unison two-handed bass and guitar parts in “Shy Boy” may well be unprecedented in rock.

Yeah. See, that’s why Dave’s a really smart guy. That’s why he got Billy and me — for things like that. It’s funny — people think it sounds so amazing, but Bill and I are scratching the surface of what we’re going to be doing together in the future. Honest.

Is it tough confining yourself to 4/4 after all your time with Frank Zappa?

I can play in odd meters just as well as I can play in 4/4. But no, I don’t find it hard at all, because there are things that I have to do inside of this 4/4 framework that are different than what I had to do with Frank. Now I get to express myself more as Steve Vai, as opposed to expressing myself as Steve Vai playing Frank Zappa’s music.

Does much trial-and-error go into the parts you come up with, or do you work them out before playing them?

When I’m writing a song, my best stuff usually comes when I pick up the guitar and play. “Goin’ Crazy!” was like that. I had been working with Ry Cooder on Crossroads, and he inspired me. I’d be playing all these notes, and Ry would sit down and start tapping his foot and playing these grooves — and I felt embarrassed. God, man, this guy knows where the beat is! This guy’s got serious soul. You ask him to play thirty-second notes in 10/16 time, and forget it. But I was very moved.

One day he was warming up, getting ready to lay down a track, and I couldn’t have paid enough money to be able to watch what he did in a half-hour. Later on, I was in Dave’s basement, picked up my guitar, and said, “I wonder how he fingerpicks like that?” I started using three fingers to play this lick that I used to flatpick, and that’s how the “Goin’ Crazy!” lick came out.

Writing, for me, is a reflection of my state of mind at the time. I wrote “Big Trouble” in a hotel room in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was a beautiful day out, I loved being on the road, and five minutes before we had to get onto the bus, I picked up my guitar and blam — the song came out verbatim. Then there are things like “Ladies’ Nite in Buffalo?” which took a long time. I pieced it together a little bit each day. It’s more of a construction.

Do you come up with lyrics, too?

No. Dave comes up with all the lyrics and every ounce of vocal melodies, like he always has in the past on all those Van Halen albums. I come in with different guitar parts, and we collaborate at putting them together. Sometimes the band pieces the music together before the lyrics are written. We try to get it tight before Dave comes down and does his thing. Then he helps get the arrangement together, we work it up, and he starts doing his vocals. If he’s working on a vocal line, I might say, “Why don’t you try it like this?” And he might make suggestions about a guitar lick. It’s a really nice chemistry.

Did it take less time to record Roth's album than, say, Alcatrazz’s Disturbing the Peace?

It took less time than Alcatrazz, but more time than the average Van Halen album because we had horns to do and stuff like that. At times I didn’t know if I liked it or not, because I wasn’t quite used to Dave’s and Ted’s approach. But then I realized, boy, it’s really fun. Get in there and do it. We kept about 50 percent of what Dave sang on the basic tracks.

I’m used to sitting in the studio and tweaking and playing and punching and tweaking some more and EQ’ing and punching again. With this, it’s get in there and kill the guy with the ball. It really works.

Were you constantly aware of how the music would translate to the stage?

Yeah. A lot of it’s live, and then I doubled many of the guitar parts. I’ll give an example: The rhythm guitar in “Yankee Rose” was played all the way through, and then I doubled the whole thing verbatim. The halftime section in the middle had this nice little arpeggiated chordal thing that was kind of open and bare. So I said, “Let me try putting a solo on it. Let me try something weird.” I hooked up a couple delays set to some long delay, checked my volume, and made sure I was in tune, and they rolled the tape. They liked what I did and kept it.

For the solo at the end, Dave said, “You should try to do something that’s going to be very animated in the video.” He had seen the Alcatrazz video where I shove the guitar between my legs and throw it down, so he wanted something like that. I said, “Hey, sure. What am I here for?”

Were the talking wah-wah guitar and vocal exchanges at the beginning of “Yankee Rose” cut at the same time?

Oh, yeah. When Dave and I first started doing that, we sat and just talked to each other for hours like that.

Was the opening of “Shy Boy” recorded at a high volume?

[laughs] When we did that, I was in the studio, as opposed to sitting in the control room or being isolated from my amps. I ran over to the amp at the beginning of that song, got down, and let it feed back like crazy. I ended up doubling that really fast lick when the band comes in. And then I just played through the whole song with one guitar — a couple of punches here and there.

How did you and Billy cut the unison duet?

That whole thing was almost all done live. I cleaned up a couple parts on it — I’m not going to tell you, “Yeah, sure, I went into the studio, plugged in, and just wailed.” That happens a lot on this record, but there are times where I wanted to clean up little things. The very first part of the “Shy Boy” solo was done on the original track, and it wasn’t doubled. I just played along and then stopped. I overdubbed the second part, the real fast thing, and doubled it. You can hear it when it comes in: it’s panned left and right.

For the siren effect, I switched on my delay, which was set to like a 792-millisecond delay with a lot of echo. I hit a harmonic and pulled up on the tremolo bar. If the pitch rises slowly, the echo pitch rises too, but it’s a little delayed. This creates a real dissonance.

Is that your horn arrangement in “I’m Easy”?

Yeah. I wrote the score and directed the horn section. You should have seen it: I had snakeskin pants on, my hair was flipped out, and I was sitting in this director’s chair with a baton in one hand and a big score in the other. Twelve of New York’s best studio players were there, and I’m going, “Okay, now, can you make this a little more staccato over here?” [laughs] That was a pretty straight-ahead arrangement.

I loved doing that — Berklee training, you know. I’ve always written big band charts. I have a stack of orchestra scores that I’m waiting to hear one of these days when I’ve got the money to have them done. I love big band music. Listen to Frank Sinatra and Count Basie at the Sands — incredible stuff, man, conducted and arranged by Quincy Jones. It’s so big, it’s like heavy metal in a sense. There’s a lot of energy to it.

What inspired you to play blues fills through that track?

I originally comped through the whole thing with a tinkly clean guitar tone, but it was a lot more complicated. It was real voice-leading and had a lot of movement. Ted gave me the idea to maybe put bluesy-sounding guitar over the whole thing. So after I recorded the laid-back comp guitar, we did the horns. Then I did the guitar over the top of it with my pink Jackson.

My tone and everything I play on that is a reflection of Ted Templeman getting me to do it, because I always view myself as being the world’s worst blues player. I’m always thinking, “This isn’t working; this isn’t happening.” I enjoy it in a sense, but I’m not an authentic blues player. But Ted kept saying, “It sounds good. Keep going.” So I said okay, and just did it.

How do you finger the very last note of the solo?

I just tapped it with my right-hand finger. It’s not a harmonic, but you can do it with your tongue right on the harmonic [picks up guitar and quickly demonstrates]. Sounds great and feels tingly.

How do you think up strange approaches like that?

It’s weird; I don’t know what comes over me sometimes. It’s like walking into a room where there’s a putter and a cup five yards away. You hit the ball, you know it’s going to go right into the cup, and it does. You’d scare the greatest putter alive.

Sometimes you just know when it’s going to connect. You don’t know why it does it, and you can try it again but it will never happen. Every now and then when I’m playing, that happens. I feel like I’m in a frenzy or something. I could know a solo perfectly, but when I get in front of people and play it, I might do something completely different that’s twice as good. I feed off of other people’s energy. When the sound is there and the attitude is right, I get so excited.

I wonder if it’s good for me sometimes. I just get crazy. And with Dave, this is the situation where it happens most of all.

How did you put together “Ladies’ Nite in Buffalo?”

The whole album was written, but there was a certain area that we wanted to attack that wasn’t quite established by Dave yet — something in a dance area, something that had sort of a cool New York sound. I went to work and came in with a completed demo, except for the vocals. My demo was much more elaborate, but Ted decided to chop a lot of stuff out, which was probably for the best of the song.

We had all the parts, and we just exchanged some of the spots, like the chorus became the bridge. Then Dave just did his vocals on top of it.

It’s interesting how that riff expands as it goes along.

There were originally three different guitars — one track just for solos, one for the chorus melody, and one for stuff so it all overlapped. When we were recording it, the band needed a scratch guitar track to lay parts down with, so I said, “Okay, let me try to play all three guitar parts at the same time.”

I threw on my guitar, didn’t even tune up or play with the settings on the amp, and bang — one time through, we did it. I was going to redo all the guitars later on, but Ted liked the feel that I produced just from sitting in there with no pressure or anything.

Of course, being an artist I hemmed and hawed: “I want to do it again. There are mistakes, blah blah, woof woof.” But they convinced me that it was really beautiful the way it was.

Did you double part of the solo?

Yeah, the second half. It’s funny — I started out with a completely different solo in mind, and just when the tape was rolling, I said, “Ah, the hell with it,” and that’s what came out.

At the beginning of the solo, I hit a note and used the bar to play a melody. The second half of the solo was originally the first half — the sextuplets. I decided to build it, add some speed to it, and climax — that’s a high G that I’m stretching to. And doubling always gives something like that a nice effect.

What was your approach on “Goin’ Crazy!” and “Tobacco Road”?

“Goin’ Crazy!” is just one pass all the way through, except for the solo, because I wanted to have a rhythm guitar underneath it.

“Tobacco Road” was almost one take all the way through; I broke a string during the solo, and I had to punch in the last lick. One of the most uncanny things that ever happened to me in the studio occurred during “Tobacco Road”: if you listen to the last time Dave sings “In the middle of Tobacco Road,” the guitar goes bill and says “tobacco” right along with Dave. It’ll never happen again in a million years.

Of all the songs on the album, “Elephant Gun” seems to have the most Vai-like characteristics.

Yeah, the sort of high-energy approach. I literally did that one time through and then doubled it. We were in a rush to finish it, and we had another few minutes in the studio before Cyndi Lauper had her time booked. I said, “Let me double this. I know what it’s going to sound like.” And nobody thought I could do it in five minutes. I said, “Just let me try it. Roll the tape.” Plugged in, rolled the tape, and boom — done.

You must have a phenomenal memory.

No. I just work really hard. I’ve got a good memory, but it’s short. We worked out a lot of “Elephant Gun” in the basement. Bill and I are doing a lot of stuff in there together.

Did you work out the “Big Trouble” solo in advance?

I knew what I was going to do. First, I did the song with the band and doubled it. There was one lick in the bridge section that I couldn’t get quite right; I had to do it a couple of times. We did a first take on the solo, but it was a little sloppy here and there, so I did the same thing again and the parts were cleaned up. I had a blast doing that solo. It always moves me.

Your fills in that tune come in at the same volume as Dave’s vocals.

I was riding the guitar on the mix because I knew where all the fills are. So every time there was a fill, I’d throw it up there.

A few seconds into the solo, you get a very different tone for a few notes.

Where it sort of sounds like an Indian from Venus?

You take the Floyd Rose tremolo bar, turn it around so the handle’s back over the fine tuner for the high E, and pull up on it. I bounce the bar on my hand. The most traditional way of playing the vibrato bar is to just push it down. I have my guitars rigged so that I can pull up on the bar so the strings go sharp. I do that by routing out the guitar.

You can raise the pitch when the bar is in standard position, but it’s cooler when you turn it around and bounce it. I don’t pull it all the way back, but just enough to make it go sharp about a half- or whole-step. If you do it real sharp and fast, it gives a cute little effect. If you push back or pull up far enough on the bar, the strings fret out. That’s how I got the little mouse sound.

What’s the first sound in the “Bump and Grind” solo?

You take a scruffy pick and scratch it across the high strings. That solo sounds like ponies on ice. And then there’s one sound where I pulled the B string off the fingerboard.

I also ran up to the microphone stand and went rrrr, rubbing my strings on it and hitting the volume control so the echo would produce that effect. Originally, that solo started off really different. There was a lot of hammering, but I wanted to stay away from that a little bit. The last part of “Big Trouble,” where it plays really fast, is all hammer stuff.

What can you say about “That’s Life”?

I recorded it with a big Ibanez jazz guitar, just bopping through the chords. You should see the arrangement that we did beforehand — it was completely balls-to-the-walls. I was really rocking it out, and that’s the way we’ve decided to do it onstage.

At 33 minutes, Eat ’Em and Smile is a fairly short album. Were other songs recorded?

A lot of songs. We had quite a few, but we wanted to print the album at a very hot level in the disc. When you do that, you have to keep it short because the louder you cut and the more bottom you have on the record, the deeper the grooves are.

What guitars did you use for the project?

I recorded about 80 percent of the album with my green Charvel [a Strat-style model, serial number 3733]. The others were the pink Jackson and a couple of Guilds. I used a Coral Electric Sitar on a couple things, but it never made it to vinyl. I also had a beautiful Guild 12-string and a Fender 12-string, and I may have used an Ibanez on a couple of tracks for background things.

How did you route your signal?

For my live setup, I went directly into the amps — either the Carvin X-100Bs or, for the dirty stuff, Marshalls that were modified by Lee Jackson or Jose Arredondo. On “Shy Boy” and “Tobacco Road,” the Jackson-modified amp is on the left and the Jose amp is on the right. A lot of the other stuff is just the Carvin amp going directly into a cabinet, and that’s it.

I split the amps in stereo with a Roland SDE-3000 delay and miked it from there, and maybe I went into a Boss overdrive or something. I used a little AMS digital reverb on a couple of things, and an Eventide SP-2016 signal processor that does everything — you can make your own effects. It’s got auto-panning, stereo panning, stereo chorusing, stereo flanging, big rooms, little rooms. It has this one patch called “dual robots.” It’s ridiculous, really amazing.

There are a couple of songs where the tone was put through maybe a pitch-bend or a little Harmonizer.

Do you sense competition with other rock guitarists?

Consciously, I don’t participate in competing with them. But subconsciously I can’t tell you whether I do or not. I would suspect that somewhere in there, Steve Vai is a very competitive person. I would very much not mind being in the greatest rock band of the day. Everybody is striving for something out there. But I really don’t feel like I’m competing with people, because everybody expresses themselves differently. There’s enough success to go around.

More than most players, you’ve managed to push far past your roots.

My influences are the same as anybody’s, in the sense that they are events. But when people play an instrument, it’s very personal because they are creating a complete reflection of their personality. What you create is what you are, and what you are is a product of your experiences in life. I don’t mean to say that if somebody is a sloppy player, they’re a sloppy person. It goes far beyond probably what you or I can analyze, but it’s there and it’s naked. If you’ve got your head on straight enough, you can see right into it. There’s no hiding who you are when you create music.

I could sit here and say I love Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. Sure, they inspired me, but what brought me to be turned on by that music? Attitude is a big part of the way you play. I practiced endlessly when I was young. I still do, but what I do now is the way I feel now. An event that happens tomorrow could completely change the way you approach everything. You could have the same equipment and know the same scales, exercises, and bends, but they’re going to sound completely different. You’re a different person.

So your personal relationships have more impact on your style than other musicians do?

Exactly. There was a point in my late teens where I thought it was really cool to be miserable and hate things and think that people were assholes, because then people gave me my space. And then I realized that it was just an act of my ego and that I was becoming a miserable person. The world started to take on an ugly glow.

I reached a point in life where, through the grace of God, I went into a dark night of the soul. I realized that many of the things I loved to do weren’t good for me, and I said I don’t need this. I can play you tapes that I made back then, and you wouldn’t believe the same cat was doing it. “Chronic Insomnia” [from Vai’s Flex-Able Leftovers] came out of that period, as well as darker things that I can’t even bring myself to listen to.

And that stuff wasn’t an accident — I could duplicate it for years. But I don’t want to go there anymore; there are other places I can go now. I was very lucky to have supportive people around me. My parents were the greatest. God bless them. Going on the road with Frank Zappa at such a young age was a bit traumatic, but I started appreciating other people’s efforts. I began to realize that you have to be compassionate to the way anybody expresses himself and try to home in on the beautiful things that a person tries to do. I became a happier person, and I was able to relate to people better.

What are the drawbacks of being a rock guitar hero?

Well, I never really saw myself that way, so it’s hard for me to comment. There are so many great players, I can’t consider myself a hero. I’m a reckless player. I’m sloppy sometimes, but I love playing. It’s very hard for me at times, and then sometimes it’s so easy, I just lose my mind.

The kids are going to listen to what I do, and if they like it, they’ll try to cop some of it. And then they’re going to realize that this is the starting point, and that they’ve got to take it a lot higher than this. So to stroke myself and say, “I’m a guitar hero” will be very embarrassing in the future when somebody comes along and does what I’m doing at a technically infinite level.

What do you think the future holds for rock guitar?

I can visualize what the next step could be, but I’m not sure I can explain it. It’s an approach where there’s no technical or physical limitations — except, of course, the impossible ones. This kid might be in kindergarten or whatever, but somebody’s going to come along who thinks of something like speed with a completely different attitude than what everybody thinks of it now.

Speed is just going to be a silly device to make a very serious point. I could even see myself doing it, but it would take total concentration for a long period of time to develop this new approach. This person will do things that nobody else is doing, whether it be with unequivocal speed, vibrato bar work, a new device that could be put on a guitar, or a new piece of outboard gear. It could be anything. But it will take imagination and a certain personality. And then, of course, everybody will jump on it.

What are your views on young players mimicking their favorite guitarists?

Jumping on something right away and copying it verbatim shows you where you’re standing. It’s an insecurity statement. I don’t want to freak anybody out, but it’s saying, “I can’t come up with things on my own. I’ve got to grab this.” This is not to say that it’s not beneficial to cop somebody else’s stuff. I’ve copped a lot of Hendrix; that’s how I got the basic foundation of my whole way of approaching chords.

But there’s a fine line between inspiration and loss of identity. That’s something kids should be really careful of. Ask yourself; you’ll always know. When you’re doing it, there’s a little voice that’s telling you whether it’s the right thing to do, or whether you’re doing too much of it. You’ve got to listen to that voice and believe it.

It’s always fun to do what somebody else is doing, and maybe even play it faster or with more vibrato, but still, you’re better than that because you’re your own person and you can be original.

What’s your ultimate goal?

My goal in life is to be internally happy. I love music, but there are other things. To sit here and say, “Well, my goal is to have my own studio, to make my own records” — that’s petty. I can make my own music on a cassette player if I want. One match, and the whole studio is gone. One axe, and my hand is off. One car accident, and I might never see you again.

I accept that these things are possible, but believe me, I have a great time in life. I very much appreciate being able to do what I like. You might laugh, but if I wasn’t a musician, I probably wouldn’t mind being a mailman. Look at it — you get to exercise. You get to walk in the rain and sun; you meet people. It’s your attitude that’s going to make you happy.

It’s awfully nice to know that you can make somebody else happy, too, but the only way that you can do that is to first make yourself happy.

When all is said and done, your sense of humor seems to be at the very heart of your playing.

Good. I don’t want people to think I’m too serious. All the musicians who are reading this have a sense of humor. Apply it to your music. That’s where all the diversity comes from.

With Sammy Hagar, Van Halen produced four multi-Platinum, chart-topping albums and a string of massive singles. But the Red Rocker says one key song was left out of the band’s catalogue after Alex Van Halen unfairly dismissed it.

Hagar’s arrival to replace David Lee Roth came after the band had already begun expanding its use of keyboards—most notably on “Jump,” which had been recorded and released during the Roth era on the album 1984. Once inside the group, Hagar says he continued to encourage Eddie Van Halen to explore that direction further, helping pave the way for more keyboard-driven material in the Hagar-fronted period.

While Eddie Van Halen remained the band’s primary songwriter — he once described himself as both the group’s spark plug and engine — Hagar was also contributing ideas of his own. The guitarist was energized by the creative dynamic Hagar brought into the fold, but his brother, drummer Alex Van Halen, proved a stumbling block when Hagar pitched his song “Eagles Fly.”

“I showed them that song, and Eddie’s going, ‘Wow, wow, wow,’” Hagar told Total Rock. “And Alex goes, ‘Yeah, yeah. It sounds like John Denver, it’s cool,’ and moved on.”

But the drummer’s assessment would come back to haunt him. In 1987, Hagar was working on what would become I Never Said Goodbye, his ninth solo album and first since joining Van Halen. The record saw Eddie Van Halen acting as co-producer alongside Hagar and David Thoener (AC/DC, David Bowie, Kiss), with Eddie contributing bass throughout the sessions. Together, the trio resurrected “Eagles Fly,” transforming it from a stripped-back acoustic idea into a polished, contemporary power ballad.

“When it came out, Alex heard it, and he goes, ‘Hey, why the fuck didn’t we put that on a Van Halen record?’” Hagar recalled. “I went, ‘Well, Al, if you don’t remember, I can remember you said it sounded like John Denver’ — because I was playing it on acoustic guitar.”

The song has since become a personal favorite of Hagar’s, and he has suggested its origins reflect the broader creative tensions within the band at the time.

“I had a vision,” he said, though he added, “it wasn’t a dream. I was wide awake, and I had a feeling I was in a special place. Eddie loved it.”

At the time, Hagar says Alex Van Halen was resistant to him bringing outside ideas into the band unless they fit a strict internal division of labor.

“He was about his brother writing the music, and me writing the lyrics and the vocals,” Hagar said.

The dispute over “Eagles Fly” has since become one of several lingering “what-if” moments from the Hagar era — particularly given the commercial dominance of the band’s first album with him on vocals, 5150.

In hindsight, Hagar’s frustration appears less about a single rejected song and more about how songwriting authority was distributed within the band at the time — an internal balance that often sat uneasily alongside its commercial peak.

Elsewhere, Hagar has continued to revisit his Van Halen years in interviews, while guitarist Joe Satriani has also reflected on Eddie Van Halen’s playing and influence, highlighting aspects of his technique that he found particularly singular and difficult to replicate.

Van Halen had a rule: No one in the band played on anyone else’s records.

So how did Eddie Van Halen end up delivering one of the most famous guest electric guitar solos of all time on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”?

According to the guitarist, everyone else in the band was out of town, and he figured no one would mind — or even notice — if he made one exception. Speaking years later, Van Halen explained why he broke the band’s longstanding policy against outside sessions, why he never accepted payment for the performance, how he rearranged part of the song before recording his iconic solo and why those last-minute changes left Steve Lukather and the Thriller team scrambling behind the scenes.

Released in 1982, “Beat It” became one of the biggest singles of the decade and helped propel Michael Jackson’s Thriller to historic success. Producer Quincy Jones enlisted Toto guitarist Steve Lukather — who tracked the song’s now-iconic opening riff and much of the album — before calling on Van Halen, then rock’s biggest guitar hero, to record the solo.

Speaking on Piers Morgan Live alongside LL Cool J, Van Halen was asked why he hadn’t been paid for the session.

“Well, I didn’t ask for anything,” he replied.

“It was about 20 minutes out of my life,” he said. “Quincy had called me up and asked me if I wanted to do it, and the honest-to-God truth, it was the band’s policy that we didn’t do things outside of the band at the time.”

Even so, he figured he could quietly make an exception.

“Everybody’s out of town, so I had no one to ask,” he said laughing. “I figured, who’s going to know if I play on this black kid’s record?”

He was joking, of course. “Beat It” became a worldwide smash, with estimated sales exceeding 10 million copies, and Van Halen’s unmistakable solo became one of its defining moments. Alex Van Halen has since suggested the appearance only heightened tensions within the band, calling it one of the factors that contributed to David Lee Roth’s departure and eventual solo career with Steve Vai.

Despite describing the session as little more than 20 minutes of work, Eddie said he did far more than simply improvise a solo.

“The funniest thing of all was I actually rearranged the song,” he explained. “The section they wanted me to solo over had no chord changes underneath it, so I had to rearrange the song. And then Michael came in, and I said, ‘Oh, I hope you don’t mind, I changed your song,’ and he listened and went, ‘No, I really like that high, fast stuff you do!’”

According to Lukather, those last-minute changes created a major headache behind the scenes.

Speaking on the Roundtable with Drew podcast, he recalled that Van Halen’s decision to move the solo required engineers to physically edit the two-inch master tape, damaging the SMPTE time code that kept the various recordings synchronized.

“We had to make the song backward,” he said. “Quincy had cut another version with Michael’s vocals quintupled; they really worked hard on that vocal. Then they sent the tape up to Ed’s house to Donn [Landee, his engineer], and they cut the two-inch tape, which fucked the SMPTE code, which means they couldn’t sync up the master.

“So they had a two-inch tape with Michael’s pristine vocals, and then Ed decided he wanted the solo [somewhere else], so he put it together and sent it back to him, and it wouldn’t sync back up.”

Lukather said reconstructing the master became an exhausting process. Along the way, his own quadruple-tracked rhythm guitars — “I had to make this right for Eddie,” he quipped — were reduced to a double-track, while a Marshall stack was swapped for a Fender Deluxe to give the track a warmer sound better suited to Jackson’s R&B audience.

When Van Halen reflected on Jackson during his Piers Morgan Live appearance — recorded four years after the singer’s death — he also pushed back against the allegations that had surrounded the pop icon.

“He was a sweet guy, is all I know,” he said. “He got accused of a lot of things, [but] I think he wanted to remain a kid himself.”

Lukather, meanwhile, remains part of the conversation surrounding Eddie Van Halen's musical legacy. Although he has insisted he won't play on what is expected to become the final Van Halen album, he has been working with Alex Van Halen as the drummer continues developing the project. Steve Vai has also praised the quality of Eddie's unreleased material, further fueling anticipation for the long-rumored release.

Most fans know Joe Satriani as the guitarist David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen approached for the post–Eddie Van Halen tribute tour that never got off the ground.

But according to Satriani, Roth first tried to recruit him decades earlier — for a band that would play Van Halen songs while Eddie was still alive and active.

Speaking to Thinking About Guitar, Satriani recalled receiving a call from Roth in the mid-’90s.

“In the mid ’90s, David Lee Roth called me; he wanted to put together a band to do Van Halen songs,” the guitarist says. “He went on and on about how we were the only guys who could really do it right, and he had all these crazy plans.”

It’s unclear exactly when the conversation took place. Roth briefly reunited with Van Halen in 1996 before the band moved on with Gary Cherone, whose stint as frontman led to the release of Van Halen III in 1998.

Whatever the timing, Satriani says he immediately questioned the premise.

“I said, ‘But Dave, Ed’s still alive! He’s still making amazing records. He’s still on tour. What guitar player would ever try to imitate him while he’s still working? It makes no sense.’

“‘Of course, I said, ‘Look, I’m not the guy.’”

For Satriani, stepping into Eddie Van Halen’s role while the guitarist was still recording and performing was unthinkable. As a lifelong admirer of Eddie’s electric guitar work, he had no interest in trying to recreate it while its creator was still actively pushing the instrument forward.

The idea resurfaced years later under very different circumstances.

Following Eddie Van Halen’s death on October 6, 2020, Satriani was contacted by Roth and Alex Van Halen about participating in a tribute project honoring the late guitarist. Reports later emerged that former Metallica bass guitarist Jason Newsted had also been approached, though the project ultimately stalled. Alex Van Halen would later place the blame on Roth.

“When he and Alex called me after Ed had passed away, it made a little bit more sense,” Satriani says. “Even though I tried to convince them I was not the person who could do it justice.”

Rather than take the role himself, Satriani suggested two guitarists he felt would be better suited to the challenge: his former student Steve Vai and Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt. In the end, the project never materialized.

Satriani would eventually find himself playing Van Halen music onstage, albeit in a different setting. In 2024, he joined Sammy Hagar’s Best of All Worlds tour, performing material spanning Hagar’s tenure with the band and the broader Van Halen catalog. While Hagar says Satch isn’t the best man for the job, he credits him with bringing “his own thing to the music.”

The tour was widely praised by fans and critics alike, but Satriani’s latest recollection reveals that his connection to Van Halen’s legacy almost began nearly 30 years earlier — thanks to an unexpected phone call from Roth and a proposal he simply couldn’t get behind.

There’s no doubt Eddie Van Halen was one of the most influential guitarists of his generation. Although he has his detractors, Van Halen’s playing helped ignite an electric guitar revolution built on virtuosity that came to dominate the 1980s.

But Van Halen believed many of the guitarists who followed in his wake misunderstood what he was actually doing. Speaking with Dweezil Zappa for a 1995 Guitar Player interview, he argued that an emphasis on speed and flash missed the point of his playing, which — at its core — was about feel, not technical display.

“I’ve influenced a batch of people in a certain period of time, and I think those people missed my point,” he said. “They took what they learned from me and made it very sterile and too calculated, too typewriter-perfect. I won’t name any names.

“People got sick of that type of flash guitar playing, whereas I never considered what I did flash. It was natural to me. I still play the same.”

Van Halen acknowledged that he, too, was shaped by earlier players, most notably Eric Clapton. But even as he absorbed those influences, he insisted his own playing quickly moved in a direction rooted less in imitation than in instinct.

“Eric Clapton was my god and everybody else’s,” he said. “I said that once in an interview: ‘That’s the guy I grew up on, but I don’t play anything like him.’ And it came back to haunt me. They took it like I was being an uppity prick about it. I didn’t mean that at all. I just meant that if you listen to Clapton and listen to me, it’s two completely different styles, even though he’s the guy I grew up on.“

Nevertheless, Van Halen took one rule from Clapton: a solo should tell a story.

“The shit he does… he spoke when he played,” he said of Clapton. “After having grown up on that, I thought that every time I solo I should make it like that too.”

By the end of the 1980s and into the early ’90s, guitar music began shifting away from the excesses of shred toward a more stripped-down aesthetic associated with grunge and alternative rock. Van Halen viewed that change not as a rejection of his era but as part of a recurring cycle in popular music.

Nevertheless, he found the results uninspiring.

“Nowadays it’s almost like solos are interchangeable. You can put a disc on and listen to a solo on one song and you might as well put it in any song because they don’t mean anything. It’s basically just beating off, and there’s no point to it.

“I think the reason why people play the way they do now is because it all broke down. Where could guitar have gone from where people in the ’80s took it? It was so flash it got ridiculous. So shit — the natural thing is to break it down to the lowest common denominator and start over.”

Ed wasn’t dismissive of newer players as a group, however. Even artists who stood outside technical orthodoxy, like Kurt Cobain, could still be making meaningful musical statements.

“He was still speaking,” Van Halen said of the Nirvana guitarist — a point that Joe Satriani recently made. “He was still expressing himself through one string or one note or whatever. But some people’s lack of technique doesn’t work.”

Ultimately, Van Halen saw the ebb and flow of guitar styles as cyclical rather than permanent — an ongoing reset between extremes of complexity and simplicity.

“The natural thing is to break it down to the lowest common denominator and start over,” he said. “And it’s just gonna build right back up. It’s almost like every ten years it happens. This is phase two of disco and punk. We survived the first one, and we’re going to survive this one too.”

The old adage goes that you should never meet your heroes; it’s sure to bring only disappointment.

But the friendship between Eddie Van Halen and Eric Clapton reveals another useful proverb about heroes: Never piss them off; they might tell you what they really think of you.

Although he’s an icon to millions of guitarists today, Eddie Van Halen was relatively unknown when Jas Obrecht interviewed him for Guitar Player’s November 1978 issue. Van Halen, the self-titled debut album from his band, had come out the previous February, but no one had interviewed the guitarist before Obrecht, who delivered essential insights into Eddie’s background, techniques and musical influences.

Among the first things the public ever learned about Eddie Van Halen was the key influence behind his furiously fast, technically precise but melodic electric guitar work.

“I’d say the main one, believe it or not, was Eric Clapton. I mean, I know I don’t sound like him.”

It was a surprising revelation, given that his style was much more raw and aggressive, as well as technical — “more like Hendrix or Blackmore,” Obrecht suggested.

“Yeah, I know,” Eddie replied. “I don’t know why, because Hendrix I like, but I was never into him like I was Clapton.

“And Clapton, man, I know every fuckin’ solo he ever played, note for note, still to this day.

“I used to sit down and learn that stuff note for note [off the record] The live stuff, like ’Spoonful,’ ‘I’m So Glad’ live — all that stuff.”

As Van Halen’s fame grew, Eddie and Clapton eventually crossed paths, hung out and formed a friendly relationship. Although there seemed to be not a drop of blues in Eddie’s highly technical shred guitar work, Clapton — who by this point was deeply wedded to the blues and Fender Stratocasters — suggested there was something innate about the younger guitarist’s sensibilities.

"If Eddie Van Halen likes the way I play, then assumedly, he must like what I liked,” he told Guitar Player in our July 1985 issue. “But if he can recognize all of that and still do what he does, then we have to accept that he's on to something that we're not really clear about. Because he couldn't be doing what he does and recognize Robert Johnson without there being something valid going on.”

It was high praise — an affirmation from an older, established guitar hero that Eddie’s transformational shred guitar work was rooted in the same bedrock from which Clapton’s own muscular and fluidly melodic blues-rock style came.

“He is very fast, and to my ears, a lot of the time he kind of goes over the top,” Clapton continued. “But that's because I'm a more simple player. Maybe I would play like that if I had the technique.

“I’ve heard that he slowed down records of mine to learn the solos. That's dedication! I don't know quite how to respond to that.”

Clapton’s comments might seem like a whole-hearted endorsement of Van Halen and his devotion to the blues. But below the surface, Clapton was harboring profound doubts about Eddie’s understanding of the genre. Roughly two years earlier, he’d been incensed after hearing a tribute song on Brian May’s 1983 Star Fleet Project mini-album. Titled “Blues Breaker,” the nearly 13-minute track featured May and Van Halen going to town on a medium-tempo blues workout that was tagged “Dedicated to EC”

Clapton wasn’t at all pleased by what he heard. While he’d held his tongue when speaking with Guitar Player in 1985, he vented his feelings when interviewed by Musician magazine shorty after, in 1986.

“It was so horrible, and they dedicated it to me,” he said. “They sent me a copy, and I put it on expecting something, and, you know, I was almost insulted that they should send this to me because they both… they can't play! They took turns to play solos and just went head at it with everything they knew. And there was no dynamics, no build up, no sensitivity. I was very disappointed.

“The thing is,” he added, “if [Van Halen] wants to play blues, he has to look at it as a style. It's got rules. It's like Japanese Kabuki theater or something. It's got certain things which you do and other things which you don't do.”

More personal, however, were his comments about Eddie’s obsession with his music. Contrary to his earlier statements to Guitar Player, Clapton felt that, despite studying his work so closely, Eddie had somehow never grasped the essence of the music from which Clapton himself drew.

“Eddie Van Halen went over the top,” he said. “It's crazy for him to have learned that much from me. I mean, he could have just been aware of what I was doing and then said, ‘Oh yeah, well, that's a bit like Buddy Guy,’ or, ‘That's a bit like so, and so.’ Put it all in perspective. To get obsessive about one person…

“If he was that tuned into me and missed that point, then he missed the whole point.”

Harsh as Clapton’s comments were, what tends to get overlooked were his negative appraisals of his own youthful attitude toward blues stated elsewhere in the interview. He cited his ignorance of Sonny Boy Williamson’s blues back when Clapton was a member of the Yardbirds. Clapton says he thought every 12-bar blues was the same.

“But every 12-bar blues is different,” he told Musician. “Sonny Boy Williamson would have an intro on certain songs, and if you didn't know that, then he would be disgusted with you.

“And I know this from experience because he was disgusted with me, because that was my attitude.”

Taken within context, Clapton’s comments are a critique on what guitarists tend to get wrong about playing the blues, and they're spoken from the experience of someone who made the same mistakes. Clapton was playing the mentor trying to help his student avoid his errors.

But the full extent of his treatise was missed if you focused solely on his comments about “Blues Breaker.” Eddie did. He was hurt, but he still hoped to remain friends with Clapton. Some years after, at a party in New York City, Eddie attempted to patch things up. He was reportedly drunk. Clapton — newly sober — came off as dismissive. Eddie was furious. “Forget that teabag,” he said.

That ballsack.

Eddie was still hurt a few years later when he sat down for an interview conducted by Dweezil Zappa in Guitar Player's March 1995 issue. Nearly 20 years after he praised Clapton in our pages, Ed offered a new assessment of his hero.

“I grew up on Clapton, but — don't hate me, Eric! — it's like he doesn't do that anymore. Now when he solos, to me it's like he's pissing up a rope. Excuse my French.

“Listen to his early solos, all the Cream stuff like ‘Sunshine of Your Love.’” Here Eddie played a flurry of Clapton licks. “The shit he does… he spoke when he played.

“And, like, ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’ — the end of that solo was great. After having grown up on that, I thought that every time I solo I should make it like that too.”

Clapton might have agreed with some of that, including the part about pissing up a rope. At the end of his Musician interview, he offered a revealing self-critique.

“I always overplay,” he said. “Whenever I listen back to stuff, I'm always disappointed. I mean, I hate listening to cassettes of shows. I listen sometimes, and think I could have done three notes to those 10. Just halved it and made it more meaningful. But it's very difficult.”

“It’s very difficult” — Van Halen and Clapton might have built something from that small patch of common understanding. They never spoke again.

As the Kinks' rhythm and lead guitarist, Dave Davies inspired a generation of players with his innovative use of power chords and distortion.

Pete Townshend often cited the group as a major influence, and was motivated particularly by Davies’ aggressive rhythm playing and distorted tone. The Who guitarist admitted that “You Really Got Me” inspired him to write “I Can’t Explain” in a similar style. Meanwhile, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton all took note of Davies' use of distortion, which was far more aggressive than what anyone had been doing in rock.

But Davies’ influence wasn’t limited to guitarists of rock’s 1960s wave. Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi cited him as an early influence on the heavy, down-tuned riffs that defined Sabbath’s sound and acknowledged the importance of the Kinks in creating the blueprint for heavy guitar riffing. The Kinks even inspired Al Di Meola to write a jazz-fusion classic.

And then there’s Eddie Van Halen, who was a fan of the group’s straightforward but powerful approach to rock. Van Halen famously covered two songs by the Kinks: "You Really Got Me," which the California-based hard rockers released as their 1978 debut single, and "Where Have All the Good Times Gone,“ which appeared on their 1982 album, Diver Down.

To be clear, Davies appreciates that he and his brother Ray had an impact on rock and, particularly, rock guitarists.

“It’s always very flattering for people to copy you, but it’s only music, isn’t it? It is an important vehicle, but we shouldn’t take it too seriously,” Davies told Guitar Player in our March 1990 issue. “We’ve been copied more than a lot of people would care to admit. Ray’s music has impressed upon and influenced a lot of people in many different ways, but that’s good.

But, with that said, Davies wasn’t a fan of Van Halen’s take on the Kinks’ classic.

“When I first heard Van Halen’s version of ‘You Really Got Me,’ I laughed,” he said. “It just seemed so exaggerated. It really misses the point of the whole meaning of the song: four working-class guys, struggling to do something different. In the original record, you can sense that in its energy, the roughness. It’s very impure.

“The Van Halen thing; it’s very accomplished and flashy, but what does it mean?

“Whereas when the Stranglers did ‘All Day and All of the Night,’ I thought it was much more respectful, because they actually tried to get a similar snare drum sound and guitar sound, which I thought was strange. I can’t imagine anybody wanting to do that anyway.”

He laughed. “But at least it seemed more respectful to the original concept and feeling. Even the solo was like the original solo, which I thought was really nice and sweet.”

In the same interview, Davies also addressed claims that Jimmy Page had played the electric guitar solos on those early Kinks sides. Davies, who said he was all of 16 years old when he cut those solos in spring 1963, blamed Page's claim on a penchant for myth-building.

“You see, Jimmy Page was a friend of [producer] Shel Talmy’s, and was a session player who used to hang around and hope that he could get in on sessions,” he said. “And we locked him out.

“But he learned a lot, you know, like the many other people who wouldn’t admit borrowing from the Kinks. And I suppose when he became successful himself, all credit due to him, his ego was so inflated he probably thought he invented the bloody instrument anyway, being carried along on that crystal and glamour.

"It’s all an illusion, building your ego up, and eventually something’s going to pop it like a balloon and you’re back flat down on your ass again. Which is what happened, didn’t it?

“And I suppose it was a bit unfortunate of him; I thought he did me a great injustice by saying that. Besides, I can’t see anybody crazy enough to play a solo like the one on ‘You Really Got Me’ anyway.”

Sammy Hagar has spent decades sharing stages and studios with some of rock’s most celebrated musicians, including Ronnie Montrose and Joe Satriani. But when the conversation turns to Eddie Van Halen, he still struggles to find an equal.

As Hagar prepares to bring his Best of All Worlds tour back for a limited summer run — featuring Satriani, bass guitarist Michael Anthony and drummer Kenny Aronoff — the singer has been reflecting on his years with Van Halen and on the impact the guitarist continues to have on musicians years after his death in 2020.

For Hagar, Van Halen wasn’t simply a groundbreaking guitarist. He was a transformational figure whose influence extended far beyond the instrument itself.

“I can’t imagine where guitar players would be without Eddie,” Hagar says. “He just took a fuckin’ hard left, man, and we’re going to outer space. There were great guitar players before him: Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, David Gilmour, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix.

“I mean, Hendrix kind of did the same thing — he got that whammy bar in there and changed everything. But Eddie took the whammy bar and the hammer and the frickin’ tapping.

“But it wasn’t just the innovation of what he did; he was a great musician. He was a master. He was fuckin’ Beethoven — he was that unique. He belongs in that category.”

Hagar argues that Van Halen’s impact is often reduced to flashy technique when it should be measured by his broader contribution to modern music.

“People call him a rock god — he’s a music god, in my opinion,” he says. “When I bring keyboard players into the band now and they have to learn ‘Right Now’ and some of his keyboard parts, they’re holding their heads in their hands and saying, ‘Fuck! This guy played keyboards just as unique as he played guitar.’

“And on guitar, Joe [Satriani]’s going, ‘Wow, this chording!’”

In fact, Hagar believes Van Halen’s influence helped keep the guitar relevant at a time when electronic instruments were increasingly dominating popular music.

“So I can’t imagine where guitar players would be without Eddie,” he says. “I think they probably would’ve come and gone and we’d be listening to electronic music. I think Eddie saved guitar players — he saved us so we could continue and compete with those damn keyboards and electronic instruments and Pro Tools and all that crap.”

Hagar’s admiration isn’t limited to Van Halen’s playing. He says the guitarist fundamentally changed him as a songwriter and vocalist during their decade together.

“I just loved working with him,” Hagar says. “I don’t know how many songs we wrote together, but it made me a better musician. I expanded my lyrical abilities.”

He points to songs like “Love Walks In” and “Black and Blue” as examples of the unexpected places Van Halen’s music could take him creatively.

“Like when he was playing ‘Love Walks In’ on piano — stuff came out of my mouth I would never have sung,” Hagar says. “The way his playing inspired a lyric and the words that fit melodically, rhythmically within the song, just writing with him was crazy.

“I remember when we wrote ‘Black and Blue’ — it’s the most syncopated lyric/guitar thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I would never write a song like that without Eddie.”

According to Hagar, Van Halen’s writing only became more adventurous as the years went on.

While many fans still point to the band’s earliest recordings as the guitarist’s creative peak, Hagar believes some of his most sophisticated work arrived later.

“So many people think the early stuff was his best stuff,” he says. “Well, no, that was just the first time you heard him. It was so fresh and new when you heard ‘Eruption’ or ‘Spanish Fly’ or these intros on these songs.

“Was that the best stuff? It was his simplest stuff.”

Hagar points to “Can’t Stop Loving You,” from 1995’s Balance, as one example of the complexity Van Halen was exploring during the band’s later years.

“When we play that song now, Joe looks at me and goes, ‘Wow, what a piece of music! Every single bar is different. It just keeps changing.’ And this is Joe Satriani. This isn’t some kid that’s just learning how to play guitar.”

The increasingly intricate music sometimes left Hagar wondering whether his bandmate was deliberately trying to challenge him.

“I was always joking that in the later years, Ed was trying to fuck me up,” he says with a laugh. “The way he started writing music. It was like he was saying, ‘Sing to this, asshole.’

“Like he was just trying to stretch me out until either I did it or I said, ‘I quit. I can’t do that. Make that an instrumental.’ But I did it.”

More than three decades after joining Van Halen, Hagar remains convinced that the experience represented the artistic high-water mark of his career.

“It was an honor being able to play with Eddie,” he says. “It made me a better musician. It made me a better writer. It made me a better singer, without a doubt. I did my best vocals ever with Van Halen.

“The peak of my life and my career pinnacle? Van Halen, without a doubt. Do I think I’m ever gonna be bigger than that again? Fuck no! I might be richer, but I ain’t gonna be more famous.”

Few guitarists have shaped rock music more profoundly than Eddie Van Halen. But according to Jesus and Mary Chain co-founder William Reid, that influence came with a downside.

“I can’t stand Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing,” Reid says. “I think he ruined rock guitar all through the ’80s and ’90s because so many people copied him.”

Reid made the remarks during a recent interview with Stereogum alongside his brother and bandmate, Jim Reid. The conversation began with a discussion about simplicity, creativity and the virtues of working within limitations, but eventually turned to the late Van Halen guitarist and the impact he had on generations of electric guitar players.

“Not having a lot of equipment forces you to be more inventive,” Jim Reid says. “I can play guitar, but only just. It’s kinda deliberate. I play guitar to the level I need to.

“Sometimes knowing too much about making music gets in the way, and it ends up back to Eddie Van Halen again.”

William Reid was even less charitable.

“I think guitar players should never learn scales,” he says before describing Van Halen as one of “the worst guitar players in the world.”

“I can’t stand Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing. I think he ruined rock guitar all through the ’80s and ’90s because so many people copied him. And I just couldn’t get any of that playing as fast as you fucking can and cramming as many notes in one second as you could.”

It’s a remarkable criticism of a guitarist whose influence remains virtually unmatched in rock. Following the release of Van Halen in 1978 and the groundbreaking instrumental “Eruption,” Van Halen inspired countless players to rethink what could be done on the instrument, ushering in an era of technical innovation that dominated guitar culture throughout the 1980s.

Yet Reid’s criticism isn’t really aimed at Van Halen’s abilities as a player. Rather, it’s directed at the wave of imitators who followed in his wake and embraced speed and technical prowess as ends in themselves.

As an example of the kind of musician he admires, Reid pointed to Joy Division and New Order bassist Peter Hook.

“I listen to Peter Hook’s bass riffs,” he says, “and I think that’s a thousand times better than anything Eddie Van Halen could ever conjure up.”

The comparison underscores a divide that has existed in rock music for decades. On one side are players who push the technical boundaries of the instrument. On the other are musicians who place a higher value on mood, melody and memorable parts than sheer virtuosity.

The Jesus and Mary Chain have long belonged to the latter camp. Formed in Scotland in 1983, the band became one of alternative rock’s most influential acts, helping lay the groundwork for the shoegaze movement with its blend of pop melodies, feedback and noise.

Whether fans agree with Reid or not, his comments are a reminder that one of rock’s oldest arguments remains unresolved: Is great guitar playing about technical achievement, or about creating something unforgettable with the fewest possible notes?

Steve Lukather is always a blast to chat with. And as the man who has held down Toto’s proverbial fort — along with thousands of iconic sessions — dialed in with Guitar Player to catch up, he was in rare form.

“What do you wanna know?” Luke asks, laughing. “I don’t know, man. What can I possibly tell you right now?”

Lukather, of course, knows that the world is wondering about the project he’s working on with Alex Van Halen. Rumors have ranged from Luke taking his old pal Eddie Van Halen’s place to the duo writing new music.

The facts, most of which Luke isn’t allowed to talk about, reveal that none of the above are true. What this project really comes down to is a brother and a close friend working together to pay their respects to an electric guitar legend via music.

With that said, Luke is not playing guitar on a new Van Halen album. In fact, this isn’t a Van Halen album at all, and as of now, Luke isn’t playing a lick of guitar but co-producing.

“I’m telling you, this is not throwaway shit,” Lukather says of the tracks Eddie Van Halen left behind. “When I heard them, I said to Al, ‘How fucking come you didn’t use these?’ And the answer was because nobody could write to it. So if you think this is a bunch of throwaway crap that we’re trying to Mickey Mouse together to suck the dollar out of poor, unsuspecting Van Halen fans, it’s not.”

Lukather admits that he doesn’t know what the project will be called. “Those are Alex Van Halen questions,” he says. “I’m just here to be his sidekick, and somebody that he’s gotten very close with since Ed’s death.”

Though Lukather’s relationship with the Van Halens goes back further than that. “We’ve always been pals,” Lukather says. “It’s like Al’s missing a piece of himself. That’s how I feel. He looks at me as somebody he trusts, and who was close with Ed.”

For Lukather, the reward comes via the process. “I don’t have ulterior motives,” he says. “This is not about money. This is about love of the guys and trying to help. I’m not gonna be involved in an obvious way. So, I wish people would get the fuck off my back!” he says with a laugh.

And even if Lukather was asked to play guitar, which he isn’t, he doesn’t feel he’s the person for the job. “I’m not qualified,” he says. “Call Dweezil — he plays that shit. Call Nuno! I can name 10 guys, like Vai or Satch. I’m nowhere near qualified to start dabbling in the Van Halen world.”

What did you think about the initial rumors that you were taking over as guitarist of Van Halen?

Well, first off, that’s the most ridiculous and humorous thing I’ve ever heard. I am no more qualified to try and play like Ed Van Halen than I am to be the first man to tug my dick on the planet. [laughs] I don’t know how anybody could think that would even be a reality. Honestly, it’s laughable. I don’t play… I couldn’t… I don’t play like Ed. It’s crazy.

How far back do you and Alex go?

We’ve been friends for 45 years. I mean, I was close friends with the Van Halens, but I really love all the guys. The only guy I don’t know is David Lee Roth. I met him once or twice, but very briefly. I’ve just always been a fan since the beginning, you know? What can I say?

What are you and Alex actually working on?

Well, being a fan isn’t what it’s about. Alex needs some help. He came to me and said, “Look, I need some help with this.” I went, “How can I help?” But there’s no need for another guitar player.

Meaning you’re not playing guitar on this?

First off, Eddie played some of the most amazing shit I’ve ever heard. And it’s not pieces on the floor that have to be snapped back together and try to Mickey Mouse something together that might be sellable. These are fucking finished tracks with Ed and Al, and Ed’s playing bass on a lot of it. That’s all I can say right now because it’s a much bigger picture, and it’s Alex’s story to tell.

You can’t reveal the nature of the music, but can you expand on your role?

I am there 100 percent to be his co-producer and help him through the technical aspects. I’m not gonna play. There’s not gonna be any Lukather or Toto fingerprints on a Van Halen thing. I can fucking promise you that. I’m there to be Al’s wingman, and go, “How can I help you do this?” I’m there to go, “Want me to help you do some vocals? How do we do these mixes?” It’s about making sure that there’s quality control from somebody he trusts.

Does being a friend and a contemporary make you the right person for the job?

I can listen to stuff, and go, “I know Ed wouldn’t like that.” I can say, “I think Ed would dig that,” you know? I’m just being that third ear.

Is Wolfgang involved?

I’m hoping that Al is gonna ask Wolf to be involved on some level. I haven’t talked to Wolf in a long time. It’s sad, actually. I’d like to, you know? We sort of just got busy, and we haven’t. But I think what he’s doing is wonderful. I think he’s an incredible musician. I think if anybody is gonna play anything that’s needed, he would be qualified to do so. But there really isn’t a need for other players to come in at this point.

Surely, listening to this stuff has to be a reminder of Ed’s greatness.

We all did the tapping thing when it first came out because it was an amazing trick to learn. And after a while, guys like Satch and Steve Vai did it their own way because all the guys were doing a very derivative and obviously Van Halen thing. It just got a little tired.

But that’s not what Ed was trying to do—Ed was trying to fill out a three-piece band. The intricacy between his lead and rhythm playing at the same time was pretty peerless, man. There’s not a lot of guys who could make the racket that Eddie Van Halen did, man. It changed the world.

You won’t be disappointed in the playing; I can tell you that. Ask Steve Vai. I think somebody asked him, and Steve may have heard a few things that I’ve heard. I think he said something in the press about it. But with Ed, man, I felt the same way you did when you heard him. It was jaw-dropping, and it still is.

For all the mythology surrounding Van Halen’s rise, David Lee Roth says the band’s earliest songs were born in a space barely big enough for two people.

Speaking during a recent solo appearance at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, Pennsylvania, the singer became visibly emotional as he recalled the tiny room where he and Eddie Van Halen first learned how to write songs together — a place so cramped, he said, that “our knees would touch.”

The memory resonated with Roth because it reminded him of his own upbringing.

“My dad was just starting in school on the GI Bill when I happened,” Roth told the audience. “Back in 1954, the Fender Stratocaster was released, and so was I.”

For much of his childhood, Roth said, his family lived in student housing that was “about the size of the drum riser here.” His own corner of the apartment was little more than a washer-and-dryer space outfitted with cinder blocks and a foam cushion.

Years later, he encountered something remarkably similar when he first visited Eddie’s home.

“When I first walked into Ed’s, it wasn’t even a room,” Roth recalled. “It was identical to the way I grew up.”

According to Roth, you had to walk through the space to get from the backyard to the kitchen. Officially it was Eddie’s room, but in reality it was little more than a small alcove.

“The beginnings of every song we sing to you tonight, I started with Ed,” Roth said.

Eddie would sit there with an electric guitar that he couldn’t plug into an amplifier because his mother wouldn’t allow it.

“So I would have to listen to the electric guitar without an amp,” Roth remembered. “And it’d be so close that our knees would touch.”

For hours at a time, the pair would hunch over a small cassette recorder documenting riffs and ideas.

“Those first couple of years, God, how many hours did I spend leaning over like this?” Roth said. “Tape recorded on a Sony little thing with the push buttons and the cassette player. Take it home, write the lyrics and bring it back and go, ‘I think it’s a song about ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’ or something. What do you got next?’”

The future rock stars were hardly living large. Roth joked that when one of them suggested having a cigarette, it usually meant sharing a single one.

“‘Hey, you wanna have a cigarette?’ He’d go, ‘Yeah,’” Roth recalled. “And that’s what we would have. The two of us, one cigarette.”

That arrangement often led to arguments.

“‘Don’t fuckin’ hotbox it. You’re lipping it.’ ‘No, fuck you, too.’ ‘Oh, fuck you twice.’”

The singer laughed as he remembered the constant friction.

“There was friction early, and we loved it.”

What struck Roth, however, was how completely that dynamic survived success.

Roughly 30 years later, he and Eddie reunited to write the two new songs that appeared on Van Halen’s 1996 Best Of Volume I collection: “Can’t Get This Stuff No More” and “Me Wise Magic.”

By then, Roth said, both men were living in what he jokingly called “tombs with a view,” and Eddie had built a multimillion-dollar recording studio packed with state-of-the-art equipment.

Yet when it came time to write, the guitarist instinctively recreated the conditions that had sparked their earliest collaborations.

Roth remembered sitting in the middle of the enormous studio reading a paperback while waiting for Eddie to arrive.

“When he came in, he put a cigarette in his mouth, came over, brought a chair right in front of me, and sat down in it and scooted forward till our knees touched,” Roth said.

“That’s how I wrote the last two songs. Full circle.”

When Van Halen reunited with original frontman David Lee Roth in 2006, the long-awaited comeback came with an unexpected twist: bassist Michael Anthony — a member of the band since its earliest days — was nowhere in the lineup.

In his place was a new addition to the Van Halen family: Wolfgang Van Halen, the teenage son of guitarist Eddie Van Halen. The move sparked immediate backlash from some fans, many of whom viewed it as nepotism. But according to drummer Alex Van Halen, Anthony wasn’t pushed out — he simply stopped responding.

Speaking recently to the Brazilian outlet KazaGastão, Alex said the band did reach out to its longtime bass guitarist before moving forward.

“People think there were family influences in how he [Wolfgang] became part of the band, which is simply not true,” he said. “Ed and I, as usual, were in the studio alone, because nobody else tolerated it. They’d rather be at the beach.

“We did call Mike, because we owed him that. We did call him, and he just didn’t answer. I’m not mad at Mike, but we had the same manager. Come on — you’ve gotta work for this.”

According to Alex, Wolfgang’s arrival came about naturally while he and Eddie were working in the studio.

“Nobody showed up,” he recalled. “One day Ed and I were playing, and this bass comes in. It had a nice feel to it. Behind the curtain it was Wolf.”

Wolfgang would go on to play bass on the band’s final studio album, A Different Kind of Truth, released in 2012. He later said his presence also helped bring the group back to the stage, noting that playing with his son was “one of [Eddie’s] favorite things.”

Since his father’s death in 2020, however, Wolfgang has largely avoided leaning on the Van Halen legacy. Apart from appearances such as the Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concert, he has focused on his own project, Mammoth WVH.

Alex says that independence has been intentional.

“He’s very careful that he doesn’t want to be Ed Jr,” the drummer said. “He was in a very tough spot. He could have just continued with the Van Halen stuff, but he decided he was his own man.”

Wolfgang himself has stressed that his musical approach differs from his father’s. Speaking in 2024, he said, “I approach guitar playing more as a producer and more as a drummer than a guitar player. Rhythm is always the first thing for me, and melody is the second. It’s more about songwriting when it comes to Mammoth. Not every song needs a solo.”

Meanwhile, Alex has been working on unreleased Van Halen material recorded with Eddie before his death. The project, reportedly being developed with guitarist Steve Lukather, is intended as a follow-up to A Different Kind of Truth. It’s not yet clear whether Wolfgang will take part or who will provide vocals, though guitarist Steve Vai — who has heard some of the archive recordings — has suggested the music is promising.

Steve Vai once found himself sitting in Eddie Van Halen’s home studio, surrounded by shelves of tapes the guitarist had recorded on his own — a private archive that may soon be heard by the public.

The material, Vai recalls, was extraordinary.

“I was up at Edward’s house once, in his studio,” Vai tells us via Zoom. “He invited me. He had a room filled with tapes, and he was pulling them out and we were listening. He would just sit and record and play.

“And I’m listening to this stuff and, I’ll tell you, nobody plays like they do when they’re sitting in their room alone. It was a whole library of tapes, and it was such great stuff.”

The experience prompted Vai to ask Van Halen a question he’d long wondered about.

“I said, ‘Why don’t you make a solo record?’” Vai recalls. “But he always felt that Van Halen was his solo records.”

Now Vai is among those eager to hear what may emerge from Van Halen’s vaults, which his brother Alex Van Halen is currently reviewing with help from Steve Lukather.

“So I’m sure there’s a lot there to play with, and it’ll be great,” Vai says. “And I’m really glad Alex is working with Luke. More than anybody I knew through the years, Luke and Edward were like this.” Vai crosses his fingers. “So that’s the best guy to help with this.”

Alex Van Halen has acknowledged that he and Lukather are going through recordings his brother left behind after his death in 2020 at age 65. No details have been shared about what may be released or when.

Vai, of course, has plenty on his plate to keep him occupied until the Van Halen material becomes available for public consumption. He’s currently on the road with the SatchVai Band, his new endeavor with longtime friend — and former guitar teacher — Joe Satriani. They’ve released three songs so far and have completed a full album, though no release date has been announced. The tour wraps May 30 in Virginia.

Five weeks later, Vai will be in Europe with Beat, the all-star quartet featuring co-guitarist Adrian Belew, bass guitarist Tony Levin and drummer Danny Carey of Tool, performing music from the early-’80s era of King Crimson.

The group launched in 2024, and Vai says its popularity has surpassed all expectations.

“I took the gig because I loved the music, and I’m just attracted to virtually impossible challenges — and Robert Fripp guitar parts, that’s a virtually impossible challenge,” says Vai, who has received both Fripp’s blessing and valuable input along the way.

“The big surprise I discovered when we got out there was this: It’s not the musicians who are the attraction, although there’s some of that. It’s the music. It’s the way the music is supported by those fans. They are fiercely supportive. The music was the boss, and that music is beloved. So the turnout was a surprise and a delight.”

Vai and company have already taken Beat around North America, South America and Japan. The upcoming European run will wrap July 27. A Beat Live album from the tour’s early legs was released in September.

“We’re hoping some more Beat stuff will happen after that,” Vai says — which, of course, raises the prospect of the band creating music of its own, an idea that leaves the guitarist somewhat ambivalent.

“Well, that’s an interesting question that comes up,” Vai acknowledges. “It comes up in my mind and everybody’s. And of course it can happen. We could sit and start writing things.

“But I’m not quite sure how I feel about that, because in Beat I feel like a dutiful soldier. That’s my role. I’m here to do my best to deliver Robert Fripp’s notes to the fans who love this music. Of course there are some of my notes in there, but they’re not my songs, and they’re not my musical DNA.

“So I’m trying to figure out: If I start writing for this, how does that square with King Crimson music — and then what is Beat? I don’t know yet, but it’s something to think about, and maybe there’s an answer in there someplace.”

Vai adds that after focusing on SatchVai and Beat, he’ll be eager to return to his own work. On his docket are an acoustic-and-vocal album and, he says, “three or four” albums drawn from sessions with the Metropole Orchestra in the Netherlands and the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra in Finland. He also has a piece to compose that will be performed during the summer of 2027 in The Hague, and he’ll host a Creamsicle Sunset cruise on the Rhine River around the same time.

Valerie Bertinelli still remembers the moment she first noticed the man she would eventually marry — long before she knew anything about his music.

“I look at it, and I’m like, ‘That guitar player’s really fucking cute,’” she recalled of seeing Eddie Van Halen before attending a 1980 concert in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Speaking on Ted Danson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast (via People), Bertinelli said she had never even heard of Van Halen at the time.

“I was into Elton John and Linda Ronstadt,” she said.

Her brother had tried to prepare her by giving her an eight-track tape of the band before the show — but it didn’t take.

By then, Van Halen had already released three albums and was becoming one of the biggest rock acts in the world, while Eddie was changing the game for electric guitarists. Bertinelli, meanwhile, was already a household name thanks to the hit TV sitcom One Day at a Time, which she joined in 1975 at age 15.

Still, nothing prepared her for meeting guitarist Eddie Van Halen backstage.

“He was the epitome of shy,” she said.

But onstage, the dynamic shifted quickly.

“I was invited to sit on the side of the stage, and Ed kept winking at me and making eyes at me,” she recalled. “He would go over and change his guitars, and we ended up going back to their hotel that night.”

What followed was an immediate, intense connection.

“I was crushing on this guy big time,” she said. “I was 20. He was 25. We went back to the hotel. We talked. We hung out by the outdoor pool.”

When the band left town, he promised to call her.

“He didn’t call for three days,” she said. “And I was getting really anxious.”

When he finally did, she didn’t hesitate.

“I said, ‘Why don’t you move in with me?’ And he moved in with me. And eight months later we were married.”

Their son, Wolfgang, would be born 10 years later. But by then, Bertinelli says, the relationship had already been shaped by a much darker undercurrent.

“We had amazing, good times and really tragic, scary, hard times because we were both drinking, using drugs in the ’80s,” she said. “And then I stopped, and he didn’t.”

Despite therapy and efforts to stabilize their lives, the marriage eventually unraveled.

“We loved each other dearly, but at a certain point, after Wolfie got to a certain age, I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”

She also reflected on Van Halen’s long struggle with addiction and smoking — habits that would later contribute to his declining health.

“He used a lot of different tools that were soothing but harmful to his body,” she said. “A lot of us use different tools in our toolbox for trauma that numb feelings we don’t want to feel.”

In 2000, Eddie underwent surgery that removed part of his tongue as part of cancer treatment.

“The doctor said, ‘You know this is because you smoke, right?’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Ed, God, you better stop smoking.’”

Eddie Van Halen died of throat cancer in October 2020.

But his influence — and the music he helped create — continues to resonate. His brother Alex is currently working on a new Van Halen project using recordings made before his death.

He’s worth an estimated $245 million — but Sting says his children shouldn’t expect to inherit it.

The former Police bass guitarist and frontman believes leaving large fortunes to kids can actually do more harm than good.

“I think the worst thing you can do to a kid is to say, ‘You don't have to work,’” Sting says in an interview with journalist Mark Phillips on CBS Sunday Morning. “That's a form of abuse that I hope I'm never guilty of.”

Sting, whose career with Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland helped make The Police one of the biggest bands of the 1980s, says he wants his six children to build their own lives and careers without relying on his wealth.

The band’s five studio albums have sold more than 75 million copies worldwide, helping the singer — born Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner — build a fortune estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars.

But he says financial independence matters more than inheritance.

“All of my kids have been blessed with this extraordinary work ethic, whether it's the DNA of it or whether I've said to them, ‘I’m paying for your education. You've got shoes on your feet. Go to work!’”

“I think there's a kindness there and a trust in them that they will make their own way,” Sting adds. “They're tough, my kids.”

When asked whether his children ever complain about his approach, he jokes: “No — not to my face, they don't.”

Sting first shared his stance publicly in a 2014 interview with The Daily Mail.

“I certainly don't want to leave them trust funds that are albatrosses round their necks,” he said. “They have to work. All my kids know that and they rarely ask me for anything, which I really respect and appreciate.”

“Obviously, if they were in trouble I would help them,” he added. “But I’ve never really had to do that. They have the work ethic that makes them want to succeed on their own merit.”

The 74-year-old musician has two children from his marriage to actress Frances Tomelty — Joe, 49, and Fuchsia, 44 — and four children with producer Trudie Styler: Mickey, 42; Jake, 40; Eliot, 35; and Giacomo, 30.

Sting isn’t the only rock star to embrace a hands-off philosophy with his children. Dave Grohl has similarly said his daughter Violet Grohl built her growing music career without help from him.

The exact value of Sting’s estate could also be affected by an ongoing royalties dispute involving Summers and Copeland. The two musicians have argued they are owed roughly $2 million for their role in shaping Sting’s songs in the studio.

Summers has been particularly outspoken about the group’s biggest hit, “Every Breath You Take.” He says the track was nearly removed from the band’s 1983 album Synchronicity before he devised the electric-guitar riff that became its defining hook.

One night in 1983, Eddie Van Halen got drunk in a beachfront Malibu rental and began experimenting on a pristine white Yamaha grand piano that wasn’t his. The instrument belonged to composer Marvin Hamlisch.

Armed with forks, knives, screwdrivers, and even batteries, he scraped the strings, played slide across them, and recorded the eerie noises. He also left lit cigarettes on the instrument, scorching its glossy white finish.

“So I wasted his fuckin' piano,” Eddie later admitted to Guitar Player. “There were cigarette burns all over it. They had to restring it.”

The incident might sound extreme, but for Eddie it was almost routine. The guitarist had a long history of tearing apart instruments in pursuit of new sounds.

His 1975 Ibanez Destroyer provides a famous example. After using the electric guitar on defining Van Halen hits like “Runnin' With the Devil” and “You Really Got Me,” Ed modified the guitar with a chainsaw, cutting a large V-shaped notch into the body below the bridge. The modification drastically altered the tone, and the guitar never sounded the same.

He even ruined pickups — including a Gibson “Patent Applied For” humbucker — while trying to pot them with wax to stop high-volume squealing.

But Hamlisch’s piano may have been Eddie’s most punishing act of destruction. Hamlisch was a famed composer and conductor who wrote for stage and screen, including the Barbra Streisand hit “The Way We Were,” from the film of the same name.

Because he was often away from his beachfront home in Malibu, Hamlisch made the property available for rental. That’s how Eddie and his wife, Valerie Bertinelli, came to live there during the spring and summer of 1983.

“Everything was white — white piano, white carpet,” Ed recalled in Guitar Player’s March 1995 issue. “We had to leave a huge deposit for cleaning the place.”

Ed likely blew that deposit — and maybe more — during a late-night experiment on Hamlisch’s Yamaha grand.

“I got drunk one night — actually more than one night — and I started dickin' around on this piano,” Ed said. “I don't know what possessed me to do this, but I went in the kitchen, grabbed forks and knives, and started scraping the strings and doing harmonics on the strings. I used screwdrivers and batteries, trying to play slide on the strings. I let a tape roll and recorded it all.”

Hamlisch may have been none the wiser: Eddie reportedly had the piano repaired without his knowledge.

Ed dubbed the recording “Strung Out,” a reference to both his state of mind and the piano’s condition. The tape sat in the vault until the recording of Van Halen’s Balance in 1995, when producer Bruce Fairbairn approached Ed looking for an intro for the track “Not Enough.”

“Bruce asked me if I could come up with some kind of intro for ‘Not Enough,’ the ballad, and I'm going, ‘Well, I've got some pretty twisted shit that you might like.’ He heard it and went, ‘This is great!’

“It sounds like a terrible B-flick horror soundtrack. It was all in fun.”

While staying at the house, Eddie also composed three instrumentals — including one featuring a guitar solo — for The Seduction of Gina, a movie of the week starring Bertinelli. The music was a true solo effort, with Ed playing both guitar and synthesizer.

The film’s director liked the music so much that he asked Eddie to score the entire movie. But Van Halen were busy at work on 1984 — the album that would launch them to global superstardom.

When Nuno Bettencourt met Eddie Van Halen in 1991, he quickly learned two things: his hero knew exactly who he was — and he’d read what Bettencourt had said about him in the press.

As Nuno tells SiriusXM, their encounter took place in Los Angeles shortly after Bettencourt’s band Extreme completed the recording of their breakthrough album, Pornograffitti.

“I was staying in town to produce a Dweezil Zappa album called Confessions, and on the way to the studio one day he said, ‘Hey, I’ve got to make a quick stop.’ It was at CenterStaging.”

Nuno went in with him to find Van Halen rehearsing. As soon as Eddie saw Nuno, he stopped the band.

“I was like, ‘Uh-oh, he’s gonna kick me out.’ And he came over and — other than Elton John — he’s the only guitarist or musician who’s ever kissed me on the lips.

“I thought I was special, but then I read that he did that to Kurt Cobain as well, and he did it to so-and-so, so he was a bit of a slut. He kissed everybody on the lips ‘hello.’”

Listening to Van Halen play that day, Nuno says, “I was thinking as a guitar player, ‘There it is. There’s that tone.’”

He adds that while recording Pornograffitti, he used Van Halen I and II as the reference point for his guitar sounds.

Standing there, Nuno imagined the opportunity before him.

“I was fantasizing, ‘Can you imagine everybody leaving the room and me just playing his rig, the guitar, finally sounding like Eddie Van Halen?’

“First thing he does when they take a break: ‘Come and play my rig!’ And I was like, ‘Uh-oh, did he just hear me? Did I just say that out loud?’

“And he’s like, ‘No, no, just play, man. I want to try this pedal out.’”

Eddie put his electric guitar on Nuno and crouched down to work on a pedal.

“He’s kneeling down in front of me, facing the other way, and he’s trying some pedal out. The first thing that goes through my head is something you never think about as a kid: What’s the first thing you play in front of Eddie Van Halen?

“I was panicking. And he turns around and says, ‘You gonna play?’”

Nuno launched into the guitar solo from the Pornograffitti single “Get the Funk Out.”

“I was just like, ‘I’m just gonna play something. I’m not gonna improvise and go down in flames in front of Eddie Van Halen!’

“And when I got to the part where I started doing the tapping, he turns around and stops me. I was like, ‘Uh-oh.’

“And he goes, ‘None of that silly stuff here!’”

As Nuno explains, he had recently told an interviewer, “I kind of feel silly when I tap because it’s so Eddie. Not that it was bad — embarrassing. You cannot be Eddie when you do that, right?

“So he stopped me. You think these guys who are icons don’t read magazines.”

Clearly, Eddie had.

Bettencourt adds that he was surprised when then-former Extreme singer Gary Cherone accepted the invitation to replace Sammy Hagar in 1996 and record Van Halen III. After all, the singer was not particularly enamored of the group’s music.

“The funny thing is Gary and I were still talking, and he came to me about doing it,” Nuno recalls. “Gary was not the biggest Van Halen fan. He was a Who guy, Zeppelin — you know, he loved Queen. Me and Pat [Badger, bass] were more obsessed with Van Halen.

“So it was kind of ironic that Gary ended up in Van Halen.”

Ritchie Blackmore recently grabbed headlines with a surprise livestream Q&A in which he shared a notably pessimistic view of guitar players.

What received considerably less attention were his thoughtful reflections on the late virtuoso Eddie Van Halen, whom he remembers as both extraordinarily gifted and strikingly modest.

“[He was] very humble, almost too humble,” Blackmore says. “He would often come backstage at our shows and go, ‘You don’t want to talk to me, because I’m nobody,’ and I could never understand why he would say that. He always used to underestimate himself. He basically reinvented the guitar with his hammer-on technique.”

Blackmore says he particularly admired Van Halen’s intuitive approach to the instrument. While he described Joe Satriani and Steve Morse — who joined Deep Purple following Blackmore’s 1993 departure — as “fantastic players,” he suggested that technical perfection does not necessarily equate to the highest level of musical expression.

“If you’re always playing the correct notes, there’s something wrong,” he says. “You’re not searching, you’re not reaching for anything.”

Van Halen, he adds, does not fall into that category.

Blackmore believes Eddie’s sensitive nature sometimes made it difficult for him to find common ground with the older guard of guitar greats, including himself and Eric Clapton. Van Halen was heavily inspired by Clapton and was hurt when he was rejected by him.

“Unfortunately for Eddie, he was too sensitive,” Blackmore says. “And of course the business brought him down. He started drinking because he needed to drink to socialize. He was very sensitive, and I can relate to that.”

Blackmore says much the same about Randy Rhoads, the late guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne. Although many pitted Rhoads against Van Halen for the title of world’s greatest guitar player, their rivalry was largely fictional. As Blackmore sees it, both guitarists were cut from the same cloth.

“He was almost like Eddie Van Halen; very similar attitude, very humble, which I always appreciate when I talk to people,” Blackmore says. “There’s no reason to be conceited about music.”

Blackmore has been in a particularly chatty mood lately. In addition to his online Q&A, the guitarist recently gave Guitar Player an extensive interview about his time in Rainbow to promote the new box set Rainbow — The Temple of the King 1975–1976, a nine-disc collection of recordings from his post–Deep Purple group.

During the conversation, he also reflected on his relationship with Jon Lord, describing the late keyboardist as “my best friend in the band.”

Touring rock stars have their share of strange travel stories. But few compare with the pair of security run-ins Eddie Van Halen had in 1995 when his band was on the road supporting their album Balance.

One incident was bizarre. The other was considerably more serious.

During one tour stop, security officials inspected one of Van Halen’s electric guitar cases and discovered a chainsaw inside.

When questioned, Ed explained that it was simply a tool of the trade. Van Halen’s stage production involved large wooden props and set pieces that occasionally needed to be cut or modified during load-in or teardown.

Although it may seem an odd way to transport the tool, the chainsaw fit perfectly inside the guitar case. For Ed, that kind of improvisation was second nature.

“I don't know anything about music,” he once joked. “I’m just a tinkerer.”

From Van Halen’s perspective, the chainsaw was no different from a screwdriver or soldering iron. For that matter, he once used a chainsaw to hack a large chunk out of his Ibanez Destroyer, creating the famously mutilated “Shark” guitar seen during the Women and Children First era.

Once security realized there was nothing more sinister involved, the situation ended without further trouble.

But another airport encounter didn’t go nearly as smoothly.

On April 7, 1995, Eddie was passing through security at the airport in Burbank, California, on his way to a show in Oakland. After placing his carry-on bag on the X-ray conveyor belt, he suddenly realized he’d left a loaded .25-caliber Beretta pistol inside the bag.

Van Halen had purchased the handgun as protection for himself and his family: his wife, Valerie Bertinelli, and their young son, Wolfgang Van Halen. Fans and stalkers would sometimes sit in vans outside his home for extended periods, prompting him to take precautions.

Because the band typically traveled by private jet, traditional airport security checks were rare — hence his oversight when flying commercial.

“I forgot to take it out of my bag on a commercial flight,” he said afterward. “It wasn't like I was trying to sneak it on the plane. I just totally spaced and forgot to take it out of my bag.”

He realized the problem almost immediately, but it was too late.

“It was already on the conveyor belt,” he explained. “If I would have caught it two seconds earlier, I could’ve just sent it home and not gotten in trouble for it.”

Airport police detained him for roughly half an hour and confiscated the weapon. Although the gun was legally registered and Van Halen cooperated fully with authorities, he was cited for possessing a firearm in the airport.

Van Halen ultimately pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor, paid a $1,000 fine and received one year of probation. The gun itself was ordered destroyed by the court.

Ironically, the trip that prompted the incident ended up being unnecessary. When his flight arrived in Oakland, he learned that singer Sammy Hagar had fallen ill, forcing the band to cancel three shows scheduled for that weekend.

“So I get arrested for the gun and didn't really even have to go,” Eddie later joked. “If Sammy had told me an hour earlier, I wouldn't have had to fly up there.”

The episode was mortifying for the guitarist, who would have preferred to keep the spotlight on his playing. Still, the story quickly spread through the rock world — and even drew a wisecrack from fellow guitar slinger Ted Nugent when he was interviewed by Guitar Player for the December 1995 issue.

When asked about Van Halen’s airport predicament, the famously outspoken Motor City Madman grinned broadly.

“That was embarrassing,” Nugent said. “You’d think a guy like Eddie would at least carry a .45.”

As a Sunset Strip contemporary of Eddie Van Halen, George Lynch witnessed the legend before the innovations — and insists the most fascinating version of Eddie came before the tapping, the whammy bar, and even Van Halen itself.

“To see it up close and personal as it was happening, in Mammoth and also early Van Halen, was mind-bending,” Lynch says. “It was insane. I'd just go to my studio or go home and get on my guitar for eight hours and go, ‘I gotta step up.’”

“I'd seen him when he was playing with a Les Paul through a [Fender] Bandmaster or Bassman… and he was still amazing. He didn't have the tapping. He didn't have the bar. And it's still insane. It wasn’t Van Halen like you think of him now. It was a different thing, ’cause he had more of the Clapton influence.”

It wasn’t the Eddie Van Halen the guitar world would come to know and be influenced by. No tapping, no dive bombs — just a blues-rooted electric guitar player with a heavy Eric Clapton influence.

“It was a little more meat-and-potatoes,” Lynch adds. “Not very many people have heard that. And that, to me, is even more interesting, from a guitar player's perspective.”

Lynch also points to a largely forgotten figure who may have pushed Eddie in those early days: Terry Kilgore, who was making his mark with Reddi Killowatt. Listen to a track like “Liquid Lady,” and strands of Eddie’s boisterous DNA are already apparent.

“They didn't have [a great frontman like] David Lee Roth, they didn't have the image, they didn't have the looks, they didn't have the songs,” Lynch says. “But they had Terry. And he was ‘fire.’”

“Terry was, I thought, maybe even better than Eddie. I think Eddie took some of the things Terry was doing.”

The two guitarists’ paths continued to cross as their careers took off.

“We used to hang out,” Lynch recalls. “When Valerie Bertinelli wasn’t around, we’d jam. We’d just sit in a hotel room and play guitar all night.”

Lynch also experienced Eddie’s generosity firsthand during the 1988 Monsters of Rock tour, when Dokken supported Van Halen on a massive 23-city North American stadium run. After Lynch began having trouble with his gear, Eddie stepped in without hesitation.

“And he was so sweet, ’cause he was like, ‘Hey, man, take anything you want of mine.’ So I did half that tour with his rig. That’s pretty insane, ’cause headliners usually don’t do stuff like that. They’re just like, ‘That’s your problem. Figure it out,’ which is fair. But he was very sweet: ‘Just take anything you want—heads, cabinets.’ I used his rig for, like, half that tour.”

“He gave my son a guitar lesson,” Lynch adds. “My kid was going to GIT, and he wanted to be a guitar player like his dad. I took him to meet Eddie at a show, and Eddie’s like, ‘You know what? You’re a guitar player? Let me show you…’ So they went back to the warmup room and he gave my son a little lesson. That was pretty cool. Who does that?”

Sammy Hagar says Eddie Van Halen exerted an exacting level of control over both his vocals and Michael Anthony’s bass parts during the recording of Balance (1995), creating an atmosphere so fraught that Hagar and producer Bruce Fairbairn decamped to Bryan Adams’ studio to complete key sessions.

The album would mark Hagar’s final full-length with the band, as tensions between the singer and both Eddie and Alex Van Halen escalated. For Anthony — who had appeared on every Van Halen release to that point — it was also the last record to feature his playing throughout; his role would be significantly reduced on 1998’s Van Halen III, and he was ultimately replaced by Eddie’s son, Wolfgang Van Halen, for A Different Kind of Truth, released in 2012.

In the years since, Hagar and Anthony have remained aligned, forming the Best of All Worlds band with Joe Satriani to celebrate Eddie’s legacy — even as the making of Balance stands as one of the most strained chapters in the band’s history.

“To go into the studio and not want to be there was tough,” Hagar said in a video posted to his YouTube channel to mark the album’s 30th anniversary. “Bruce Fairbairn felt the tension between Ed and me, and Mike and Ed.”

According to Hagar, the band’s painstaking schedule — reportedly eight-hour days over three months — only deepened the fractures, with Eddie scrutinizing performances to an extreme degree.

“Mike would put a bass part down, and Ed would go in there and listen to it, kind of under a microscope,” he said. “[It was] ‘Wait, go back, let me hear that again,’ and Bruce would go, ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’ He wanted to crucify me.”

Hagar adds that his own vocals were subject to similar oversight.

“Ed was disruptive when I was trying to do the vocals,” he continued. “He’d come in before I was done and start making comments. I’d be waiting to sing, and he’d be talking to Bruce, telling him, ‘I want Sam to do this. I want Sam to do that,’ and Bruce would be arguing with him, like, ‘Ed, get out of here.’

“It really pissed me off—I’m sitting in there waiting for Ed to stop complaining about something I hadn’t even heard yet.”

Compounding matters, the band had pivoted away from its trademark live immediacy toward a more controlled, precision-driven production — an approach Hagar concedes “didn’t have the Van Halen sound like the early stuff.” The demand for tighter, more exact takes only intensified the pressure, and even Fairbairn’s patience began to wear thin.

“Bruce said, ‘Fuck this. We’re going to Canada,’” Hagar recalled. “We went up to Bryan Adams’ house, where he had a vocal booth and a bunch of great microphones. It was fucking badass.”

Working beyond Eddie’s immediate oversight, Hagar completed vocals for “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You,” “Don’t Tell Me (What Love Can Do),” and “Take Me Back (Deja Vu)” with greater freedom. The results, he suggests, ultimately spoke for themselves.

“I remember Ed hearing ‘Don’t Tell Me (What Love Can Do),’” Hagar said. “He hadn’t heard me when I was going to sing that song yet. He and Al had come up to the studio. I’m sitting there with Bruce, and we played the track.

“I was fucking pouring my heart. I remember Ed looking at Al, thinking, ‘Yeah, this is pretty good—we can’t poke holes in this.’”

Years later, Hagar’s strained relationship with Alex Van Halen shows little sign of easing. The singer has likened the drummer to Roger Waters in a recent broadside, while Anthony has floated the idea of an instrumental final Van Halen release.

In related news, Van Halen’s former wife Valerie Bertinelli has opened up about her marriage to Eddie, saying, “I don’t remember too much between the drugs and the alcohol.”

Speaking in a new interview, actress Valerie Bertinelli has offered a bracingly honest evaluation of her life with Eddie Van Halen during the 26 years they were married.

The couple met backstage at a Van Halen concert in Shreveport, Louisiana, on August 22, 1980. Bertinelli, then 20 and in the midst of her long-running role on the hit sitcom One Day at a Time, had seen Van Halen’s face on an eight-track tape of his group’s music and was immediately interested in him. She described it as love at first sight.

Eddie, then 25 and widely celebrated as rock’s reigning electric guitar virtuoso, was as focused as ever on guitar and his career. Nevertheless, the couple began dating and, within a year, were married.

But Bertinelli says it was too much too soon.

“We grew up together. We got married far too young, but I don’t know how else we would have done it,” she says in a chat on The Bossticks podcast that aired March 19.

“Our lives were insane.”

Between her acting career and Van Halen’s devotion to guitar, his band, recording, and touring, life was chaotic.

“We waited 10 years to have Wolfie,” she says of their son, Wolfgang, who was born in 1991. “We went through a lot in those 10 years—basically the ‘80s, which I don’t remember too much of between the drugs and the alcohol.

“It was fun. You know what? I’m not gonna lie, it was a lot of fun… but I would never — I would not do it again.”

Although their relationship had its problems and eventually ended in divorce in 2007, Bertinelli says her feelings for Van Halen remained strong and grew in the years before his death in 2020, when he was fighting cancer.

“I love him dearly,” she says. “I just love the father of my son that I knew since I was 20. He would always be one of my dearest friends ’cause he was just — he was Ed. He was just a huge part of my life.”

Bertinelli said she realized that neither of them had ever dealt with their past traumas. That, in turn, made it easier for her to have sympathy for him.

“Near the end of his life, I could be much more compassionate,” she said, “because I understand now.”

Van Halen passed away on October 6, 2020, from a stroke following his battle with cancer. He continued to make music throughout his final years, some of which his brother, Alex, is currently working on for release as Van Halen’s final album.

Wolfgang, who played bass in Van Halen alongside his father from 2006 onward, fronts his own group, Mammoth. He’s shared that while he wants to cut his own path as a musician, he holds one lesson from his father dear to his heart.

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant helped give Canadian alt-rock outfit Our Lady Peace an early break. But 30 years on, frontman Raine Maida says a very different moment — one involving the Van Halen camp — proved just as pivotal to the band’s trajectory.

Now on the road marking their 30th anniversary, Our Lady Peace are revisiting nearly every chapter of their catalog. For Maida, the milestone has brought two formative experiences into sharp focus.

The first came when Plant heard the band on the radio and promptly invited them to open for him and Page at Chicago’s Rosemont Horizon (now Allstate Arena), along with a stop in Indianapolis. The exposure was transformative.

“Robert was extremely welcoming,” Maida told Ultimate Classic Rock, recalling crowds that were “so giving of their ears, their hearts and time” — a reception that quickly elevated the band’s profile.

Just months later, however, they found themselves in a far less hospitable environment: a summer 1995 amphitheater tour with Sammy Hagar–era Van Halen, in support of Balance, with Skid Row also on the bill.

“We were nervous,” Maida admits. “These were sold-out shows, and the fans — unlike with Page and Plant — really didn’t want to see us.”

Hagar, in particular, pushed the band to adopt a more overtly crowd-pleasing approach.

“He came up to me a couple of times and said, ‘This is supposed to be a party — you’ve got to get the crowd pumped up more,’” Maida recalls.

Maida held his ground. “I told him, respectfully, I get that — he’s an incredible singer — but I’m a very different performer. I’ve never seen myself as an entertainer in that way.”

Tensions escalated to the point where Maida was told a lineup change might be imminent.

“I thought, ‘That’s it — we’ve been kicked off the tour. What am I going to tell my mom?’”

But the decision wasn’t Hagar’s to make. Behind the scenes, guitarist Eddie Van Halen and drummer Alex Van Halen intervened.

“We got a knock on the door, and the tour manager said Eddie and Alex wanted to see me,” Maida says. “Alex and I had become friends — we both had back problems, so we bonded over that.

“I went in, and they told me, ‘Don’t listen to Sammy — he doesn’t have the power to do that. You’re not going anywhere.’ My head was spinning. It wasn’t a great vibe after that, but Eddie and Alex saved us.”

The tour continued as planned, a decision that, in hindsight, left a lasting impression on Maida, not just professionally but personally.

“Eddie showed you what it takes to be a master musician,” he says of the virtuoso electric guitarist. “He’d walk into catering with a guitar on, start soundcheck an hour and a half early. Forget 10,000 hours — we’re talking a million. He was the instrument. That was incredibly inspiring.”

The story has fresh resonance amid renewed activity in the Van Halen camp. Alex Van Halen is reportedly working with Steve Lukather on material drawn from archival demos recorded before Eddie’s death, with discussions ongoing about a possible vocalist. Paul Rodgers has declined involvement, while former bass guitarist Michael Anthony has suggested the recordings might be best left as instrumentals.

And in related news, Sammy Hagar has fired a new shot at Alex Van Halen by unfavorably comparing him to Roger Waters.

Sammy Hagar has fired fresh shots at his former Van Halen bandmate, comparing drummer Alex Van Halen to Roger Waters as their feud shows no sign of easing.

The former Montrose singer last fronted Van Halen in 2005, when their union came to an end after four albums. Founding bass guitarist Michael Anthony exited as well, with Eddie’s son, Wolfgang Van Halen, stepping in when the band reunited once again with David Lee Roth in 2007.

In recent years, Hagar and Anthony have formed the backbone of the Best of All Worlds band, Hagar’s Joe Satriani–powered tribute to Eddie Van Halen. The group even helped Hagar complete a track he claims he co-wrote with Eddie in a dream more than a year after the electric guitar virtuoso’s death.

Meanwhile, Alex Van Halen has floated the idea of assembling one final Van Halen album with help from Steve Lukather, a project neither Hagar nor Roth is expected to be part of. The lingering tension between Hagar and Van Halen surfaced again in the singer’s new interview with Classic Rock.

“I’m the biggest Pink Floyd fan,” Hagar says. “I see David Gilmour say, ‘I will never play with Roger Waters again,’ and I know what he means. I feel that way about Alex Van Halen. They’re negative people.”

The Gilmour–Waters feud famously reached its breaking point in the mid-’80s, culminating in lawsuits after 1987’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason became the first Pink Floyd album without Waters.

Hagar also argued that the Best of All Worlds lineup comes closer than anyone else to recreating the Van Halen experience.

“Because frickin’ Mike Anthony’s in the band, I feel good about playing a lot of Van Halen stuff, ’cause no one will ever hear it again,” he says. “That was the biggest part of my career — everybody’s career, for God’s sake. It was the biggest band in the world.”

Alex Van Halen recently revealed that during the 12-year stretch before the band regrouped with Roth for 2012’s A Different Kind of Truth, he and Eddie considered Ozzy Osbourne as a potential frontmen for a new project. In 2017, they began talking about collaborating with Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, though that fizzled when Cornell died a few months later.

Anthony, meanwhile, has suggested that if Alex Van Halen and Steve Lukather do move forward with a final Van Halen record, it should be instrumental if they truly want to honor Eddie Van Halen’s legacy.

Being in Eddie Van Halen’s orbit had both life- and sound-changing perks for Steve Stevens.

The Billy Idol guitarist met Van Halen in 1987, shortly after the touring cycle for Whiplash Smile ended and he went on leave from Idol for nearly two decades, working on other projects. Stevens had signed a solo deal with Warner Bros. Records, and A&R rep Ted Templeman invited him to play a NAMM Show gig with Van Halen, along with Tim Bogert on bass.

“It was right after [Van Halen’s] dad had passed away,” Stevens remembers, “and I didn’t know that Valerie [Bertinelli, Van Halen’s wife], was trying to get Ed to sober up a little bit. We were going to have a rehearsal at Ed’s house, so I go over in a limousine and brought a couple of bottles of Cristal. Valerie answered and looked at me and was like, ‘Oh, no…’ and took the bottles.

“We hung out and it was great. We had both become aficionados of the classic Marshall Plexis, although he knew a hell of a lot more about them than I did; he really knew all the inner workings and everything.

“And I didn’t play like him. Although I appreciated all the records and the Van Halen stuff, I was completely different stylistically, and also as a person. I grew up in Manhattan, and he was Pasadena. We complemented each other.”

Stevens and Van Halen spent more time together after Stevens played on Mötley Crüe frontman Vince Neil’s 1993 solo album, Exposed — another Templeman-brokered deal — and became part of Neil’s touring band.

“Ted asked me to do the Vince Neil record and said he was guaranteed as the opening act for Van Halen’s summer tour,” Stevens says. “That was really what enticed me to do it. What a great opportunity.

“Ed and I hung out a lot. I had produced a couple tracks for Steve Lukather, who was Eddie’s best friend at the time; Steve would come out on the road to hang out with Ed, and the three of us were trouble,” he says with a laugh.

“I had my old Marshalls out with me, which were not reliable, and my Charvel guitar by that time was falling apart. Ed said, ‘Why don’t you play through my rig at the next gig? If you like it I’ll arrange for Ernie Ball Music Man and Peavey Electronics to get you some stuff.’

“It was super generous, and I did like it and switched to using 5150s at that point; they had a bit more saturated sound. And I played the Music Man guitars as well. If it was good enough for Ed it was good enough for me. He kinda knew what he was doing, right?”

Stevens continued using the 5150 rig when he began playing with Idol again during the mid-2000s, though he used Friedman amplifiers on the road last year. The Music Man electric — which he also played on the 1994 soundtrack for the film Speed — does get the occasional airing, however.

“When I guest with Sammy Hagar I’ll bring that guitar out. I’ve done ‘Poundcake’ with Sammy; that’s the guitar you use for that song.”

In 1975, 16-year-old Lita Ford walked into an audition and walked out a Runaway.

Armed with five years of guitar playing and unshakable confidence, she tried out for the “all-girl” band being assembled by the late rock impresario Kim Fowley. At the audition, she ripped through Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” alongside drummer Sandy West and guitarist Joan Jett — all of them barely old enough to drive.

“I immediately joined,” Ford says. “Me and Joan and Sandy got along like that. We were the first three to join the band and the last three to stay together.”

It was a huge leap for the youngster, who had started out copying Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath riffs on a nylon-string guitar. Through a part-time job at a Los Angeles hospital she saved $450 to buy an electric — a Gibson SG similar to the ones she had seen in the hands of her heroes Tony lommi and Angus Young.

And now she was a star. Over the next four years, Ford developed into the Runaways’ lead-guitar firebrand, splashing fierce solos across cuts like “You Drive Me Wild” and “Dead End Justice.” As her technique expanded into Hendrix-inspired phrasing, so did her volatility.

“I was a real bitch,” she says bluntly of those early years. “I couldn’t keep my temper. If I didn’t get to play what I wanted, I’d fly off the handle — kick things, throw things.”

On one notorious night, she says, she broke the wrist of a concertgoer who tried to spray her with beer.

Ironically, just as her playing and self-image were finally aligning, the band imploded in 1979.

“I was finally getting my looks and attitude together. My hair was growing real long. I was getting skinny and felt great. My playing was coming out the way I wanted.

“And then the Runaways broke up.”

The collapse hit hard. Ford packed away her Marshall stacks, her SG and Explorers, and retired to L.A. She quit playing for a year.

“Everybody was yelling at me,” she says. “All my boyfriends who played guitar would call me and say, ‘Why don’t you come over and play with me now?’”

What finally jolted her back wasn’t criticism — it was a challenge from Eddie Van Halen.

“Edward Van Halen said to me, ‘What are you doing? Why don’t you play? You could be the best female rock and roll guitar player in the world, and you’re just sitting around.’”

That lit the fuse.

Four years after the Runaways’ breakup, Ford returned with 1983’s Out for Blood, a title that doubled as a mission statement.

“I just want to be the best female rock guitar player,” she declared at the time. “I want to be classified in the same area as an Eddie Van Halen, Michael Schenker or Ritchie Blackmore.”

She also had advice for aspiring players — especially women.

“People say, ‘Lita, I do a lot of drugs. What do you think?’ I go, ‘No! Take your frustrations out on your guitar — beat the shit out of it.’ Many women don’t play because they think it’ll take away from their femininity. But if you really want to be a guitar player, you have to sacrifice something. My nails are gone, but I don’t care.”

Nearly five decades later — after hits like her Ozzy Osbourne co-write “Close My Eyes Forever” — she’s still chasing that standard. Ford is currently touring the U.S., Canada and Europe in 2026 in support of a forthcoming concept album featuring collaborators including Gary Hoey, producer Max Norman and Jean Beauvoir.

The goal hasn’t changed either. She’s still making the guitar — and making sure people are listening.