What inspired you to write this book? I thought I was uniquely qualified to show people on a deep level not only who he was as a person but who he was as an inventor and innovator of what one could argue [is] the most important modern instrument: the guitar. All of that needed to be in a book that wasn’t about the gossip but about him as a musician. I wasn’t so sure that story was going to be told. The Van Halen brothers came to America on a boat from the Netherlands. He comes as a young boy, doesn’t speak English well and gets regularly roughed up at school because he’s an outsider and an immigrant, so he secluded himself into his room and practiced his instrument. Music was one way to express himself, demonstrate his intelligence and show himself as something special. To him, he was first and foremost a guitarist and musician. He was super uncomfortable with dealing with crowds and people, and to loosen himself up he would drink and do coke. That caused a myriad of problems later on in his life. He really mastered the guitar but was also modifying guitars just to get exact sounds that he wanted. I think that is what separated him from his guitar-playing peers. Ed is arguably the most innovative guitarist since Jimi Hendrix and therefore one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. What made him great was that he saw the guitar literally from every angle and his determination to stop at nothing to create these sounds that he heard in his head. That meant not only mastering his instrument in terms of playing notes but also making the guitar do what he needed it to do in order to actually create the sounds that he was hearing. I can’t think of too many other guitar players that went to the lengths that he did in order to accomplish that. He did the guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” right? Yeah, that was a huge moment in pop culture. MTV was largely geared toward white rock ’n’ roll at the time; it started playing some hip-hop [and] Black music, but it was dominated by white rock music. Ed playing on “Beat It” helped that song cross over to MTV, and when MTV saw that their audiences would accept a Black artist, it sort of helped open the gates for other R&B artists and other Black musicians to get on MTV. It was a cultural moment. You were around them in the early days. How did you develop this relationship? I was the editor-in-chief of Guitar World for close to 25 years. Ed felt comfortable talking with me and my co-author, Chris Gill, because we could sort of speak his language. We could talk to him as an artist and as a human being, but also about the thing that he loved the most in depth—the guitar. Once Ed got comfortable with you, he was an open book. I mean, he didn’t like crowds, but he definitely didn’t mind talking one-on-one and having a real personal exchange. Guitar World, when he wanted to impart things to the world, he would often come to us first. And he was also pretty frank, pretty honest and didn’t really like to lie about things. Despite Van Halen’s massive success from their first world tour, they owed over a million dollars to the record label. What’s the story there? [Laughs] There’s any number of reasons why young bands get into that much debt initially; they are the warm-up band, they aren’t the headliner, so they’re making a lot less than the headliner makes yet have similar expenses, right? They’re still traveling down the road, they still have to eat, they still have to stay at hotels. The idea when you’re a young band is that you go into debt so you can gain the exposure, so that hopefully you can start making money to pay off your debt. It’s not unusual. I think in the case of Van Halen—and you have to look at it within the context of the times—rock ’n’ rollers were leading a wild life and often would do things that they thought rock ’n’ rollers should do—wreck hotel rooms, throw televisions out of windows, pull pranks, spend a lot of money on alcohol. They didn’t quite realize that at the end of the entire tour they would actually have to pay for all of that, and as the book explains, their original manager wasn’t paying too close attention or giving them much guidance. So at the end of it they owed a lot of money. They went back and forth with a lot of different frontmen, from David Lee Roth to Sammy Hagar to others and those two again. What’s your opinion on the switches? Well, the frontmen were important—and they affected the way that Ed played. Sammy Hagar had a much more traditional view of writing melodies and writing songs, and I think that made Ed play in a more conventional manner. David was more unorthodox when it came to writing lyrics and writing melodies, and it made Ed play in a much more creative and unusual fashion. I think that’s why we have this incredible switch between Van Halen with David Lee Roth and Van Halen with Sammy Hagar. Eddie had lifelong struggles with alcoholism and addiction, and you talk about how counseling and his family helped him get sober. With Ed, substance abuse was complicated and intertwined with his personal life. It wasn’t just a question of him being a wild rock ’n’ roll figure. As I mentioned earlier, he is drinking and doing drugs to help him with his social anxiety, but his dad was also an alcoholic. He would play gigs with his dad when he was a teen and his dad would give him alcohol, so it was something that was around him his entire life. When his problems started interfering with his music and personal life, he started seeking help and getting counseling. It was a lifelong battle. His last 20 to 30 years he was in and out of rehab, in and out of counseling. But he was always trying. And I think at the end it was the influence of his son, Wolfgang, and Ed’s desire to have him play [in] Van Halen that made him really straighten up. His second wife, Janie Van Halen, also played a big role; she was very, very tough with him. Ed always wanted the help, it was just that his relationship with drugs and alcohol were so deep-rooted. He had a very difficult time getting away from it. Eddie played onstage with his dad, then Wolfgang played onstage with his dad. Do you think there are similarities in how Eddie, his dad and son look at family? This all goes back to his childhood. [Eddie] said, “The four of us—my mom, dad, Alex, and I—were very tight-knit. When you come to a new country, you can’t speak the language and you have no money, you’d better be a team or else we wouldn’t have made it.” Next to his guitar, [family was] the most important thing to him. Having his son in his band was, in some ways, a lifelong dream. I try to show with the book that [these patterns] carry on throughout his entire life; one is about guitar and music and the other is about family. Also, to some degree, Van Halen itself was a surrogate family. That’s the way he viewed it. Early on, Van Halen covered songs from groups like ZZ Top. Eddie died last year and [ZZ Top bassist] Dusty Hill died this year. How do you feel about artists from that era aging? What’s the legacy that they left in music? We think about rock ’n’ roll never dying. We think about our favorite rock musicians as being ageless and timeless, so it’s shocking to find out that they’re more like the rest of us. But the legacy thing is super interesting. As much [as] Ed changed the guitar, it’s going to be these songs that stick with us. It’s been 30 to 40 years and we’re still listening to them. We’ll probably be listening to them 30 to 40 years from now. Ed has this other legacy, though. Before he died, he established a guitar company, and [EVH] will continue to make guitars that he invented. The general public will be a little less attuned to this, but as far as musicians go, we’ll be playing Edward Van Halen–inspired guitars for the next century. According to Ed, his biggest honor was when the Smithsonian asked him for one of his guitars [the Frankenstrat] to include in their collection. I think that says a lot about the legacy of Edward Van Halen and his importance as an artist. Not only was music important, but his invention, this new guitar that he created, was actually put in this great American collection. What are some of your favorite pieces of music journalism you’ve read over the years? Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta [Penguin Books, $18] by Robert Palmer had a lot of impact on me. I think there’s a way to write about music and its cultural impact, as well as the people involved with it, to make it exciting and fun and engaging. Robert’s Deep Blues was an important part of that idea for me. Are you reading anything interesting right now? A couple of writers that I know [Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock] put out Nöthin’ but a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the ’80s Hard Rock Explosion [St. Martin’s Press, $30]. It’s genuinely riotously entertaining. On the opposite end of the spectrum, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century [Picador, $25] is about the history of 20th-century classical music. [Alex Ross] takes this complex idea and makes you curious and excited about going to listen to challenging music. It’s really something. Next, Elton John, Prince, Rolling Stones and More! 10 Books From Musical Greats
