It was 1996 and Billy Corgan was the toast of the alternative-rock universe. His band, Smashing Pumpkins, were riding high on the monster success of Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness. But before Corgan became a hero to millions of music fans, he had his own idol, a man whose albums and guitar licks he painstakingly dissected.
Indeed, it wasn’t enough for the then-teenaged Billy Corgan to simply play like Edward Van Halen; he wanted to be Eddie. He wasn’t alone. Corgan found fame and fortune by simply being himself, but when the opportunity arose to have a private sit-down with Van Halen, his response was along the lines of: “Where and when?” Corgan took the meeting seriously, peppering Van Halen with sharp, well-researched questions like only a seasoned journalist could.
Billy Corgan: At what age did you start playing guitar?
Eddie Van Halen: I started smoking, drinking and playing the guitar at age 12.
How did you get from playing your first open G chord to playing Eruption?
Practice. I used to sit on the edge of my bed with a six-pack of Schlitz Malt talls. My brother [Van Halen drummer Alex] would go out at 7pm to party and get laid, and when he’d come back at 3am, I’d still be sitting in the same place, playing guitar. I did that for years – I still do that.
What was it like to wake up and find you were suddenly everybody’s guitar hero?
It was weird. But I’ll tell you what was even weirder. Before our first record came out, this guy wrote an article about the band in one of the major Los Angeles newspapers. He singled me out as the important member. He just raved about my playing and didn’t really say much about Roth. And it freaked David out. He was the lead singer and frontman, and it really upset him that I was getting the attention. I felt bad and really didn’t know what to do.
It was like this journalist almost ruined the band and my life by praising my work. He actually hurt me by putting the spotlight on me. I was like, ‘Fuck you, just let me play.’ The tension it created in the band was unbelievable. I was like, ‘Holy shit, David! What did I do wrong? Did I play too good? I’ll play worse. Will that make you happy?’
Suddenly everyone was tapping and doing whammy-bar dives. What was that like?
I thought it was kind of funny. Because, with me, it was a form of expression – part of my style. When I used the stuff I invented, I was telling a story, while I felt that the people who were imitating me were telling a joke. I felt other players tended to use tapping and false harmonics as a trick, instead of incorporating them into their vocabulary.
On your debut album, Van Halen [1978], your guitar solo, Eruption, was the second track. Wasn’t it kind of a bold move to place this crazy guitar instrumental so close to the beginning of the record?
Eruption wasn’t even supposed to be on the album. I showed up at the recording studio early one day and started to warm up. I had a gig that weekend and I wanted to practice my solo guitar spot. Our producer, Ted Templeman, happened to walk by and he asked, ‘What’s that? Let’s put it on tape!’ So I took one pass at it, and they put it on the record. I didn’t even play it right. There’s a mistake at the top end of it. To this day, whenever I hear it I always think, man, I could’ve played it better.
Fair Warning is a really mean, dark album. That was unusual. Up until that time you were more of a party band.
It was kind of a dark period in my life. I was getting married, which flipped Roth out to the bone. I actually overheard him say, ‘That fucking little prick, not only is he winning all the guitar awards, but he’s also the first to marry a movie star.’ So that’s what I was up against. A guy that wanted everything that was going my way. The funny thing was, I really didn’t want the attention, and it came to me anyway. I didn’t want the press – it was like, ‘Leave me alone.’
I read in Van Halen II’s liner notes that you guys once parachuted into a stadium show [laughs]. What was that all about?
That was one of Roth’s big ideas. I’m not even sure why, but he said, “Let’s parachute into the stadium.” Of course we couldn’t do it ourselves, so we hired four professional skydivers to jump out of an airplane right before our set. The idea was that we would wear identical gear and run on stage and pretend it was us that jumped out of the plane.
So there we were, wearing these crazy, heavy outfits, sweating our balls off, waiting for the skydivers to come down so we could jump on stage. It was so silly, and it almost turned into a complete catastrophe, because while we were trying to get out of the gear, Al severely twisted his ankle and had to play the show with practically a broken foot.
But it sure made things interesting in an incredibly dull period of music.
Hey, we were young and crazy. We were trying to do all the things that Led Zeppelin did – throw televisions out the window, and so on. We used to drive people crazy. For example, very early on, we were on a tour supporting Journey. They would never give us sound checks and treated us like shit in general, so we liked to fuck with them any way we could. So while they were on stage we would sneak in and destroy their rooms – we’d use fire hoses and extinguishers, whatever we could get our hands on.
What really drove them crazy was that at the beginning of the tour no one knew who we were. The audience would say, ‘What the fuck is this?’ But by 30 dates into the tour, we were the ones selling the tickets. In fact, halfway through the tour we wanted to bail, and despite all the shitty stuff we did to them, they begged us to stay on. Needless to say, we didn’t [laughs].
One of the things that struck me is your fearlessness – you’ve never been afraid to go where you’ve wanted to go. You’ve played blues, you’ve played crazy music, you’ve played synthesiser music…
I think my desire to do my own thing came from my dad. He was a real soulful guy. He played sax and clarinet like a motherfucker. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic who died when he was 66. But he lived a full life. My mom, on the other hand, is 80, but she doesn’t live. So I’m trying to find a balance between them. I don’t want to be like my mom and live to be 80, and not live. And I don’t want to die at 66 like my dad.
This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 104, published in April 2007. Eddie Van Halen died in 2020. He was 65.
