![]() ![]() It’s kind of the zone where you’re not thinking, where you’re just open to anything and I just believe that when you play long enough you’re able to execute with your fingers, whatever god gives you, and god’s not gonna give you nothing if you don’t practice or play. ![]() When I used to drink it would get me there quicker. I believe also if people knew how much time I spent doing what I do, I spend hours on end playing and I can never sit down and say okay, “I’m gonna write a song now.” It takes me a good hour to loosen up my fingers and I always just leave the DAT tape rolling or something, or a cassette, anything, and after two and a half, three hours, you kind of get into a zone that I’m kind of relearning because I’m not drinking anymore. ![]() Van Halen: I’m blessed that the man upstairs, whatever power that is, I believe in god, there has to be, it would be pretty ignorant or whatever to believe that we’re the only thing, that we were responsible for everything. Listen to "I’m So Glad" on Goodbye Cream, if that doesn’t blow your f**king mind I don’t know what willīaltin: If I understand correctly you’re saying you’re just a vehicle for all these ideas. And I love the live jam stuff, the improvisation, cause it was nothing like the record, and that is why I loved Cream, cause Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce pushed Eric Clapton, I almost feel bad for Eric because half the time he probably didn’t know the one was because these guys were jazz players playing Marshall amps and loud as s**t. And the only thing I really liked about them was their live stuff cause they played two verses, then go off and jam for 20 minutes, come back and do a chorus and end. The only band I was really over into was Cream. It’s personal preference, that’s all music is. I got outvoted and I wrote the damn song, it ended up on the record, I didn’t like the song, everyone else did. Sometimes I’ll write something, for instance a song called "Top Of The World," everyone else liked it, I didn’t. Van Halen: I love Tori Amos, not everything she does, I love Peter Gabriel, not everything he does, I don’t even like everything I do. So I basically wrote my own book and nobody ever told me how to approach things.īaltin: Who are those artists that blow you away? When I started playing guitar I didn’t have a clue except how to lay it there. I was forced to play what the teacher and my parents wanted me to play, so it wasn’t fun. I stopped playing piano for one reason, and that is I was forced to do it and I wasn’t allowed to play and do what I wanted on it. And when I’d win these contests I had to see what I was playing, so I was just blessed with good ears. I can get away with whatever, I would prefer to see what I’m doing and I always have to look at my fingers when I’m playing piano. They’re going, “How come you’re not looking at the sheet music?” The thing is, just like the guitar, I need to see what I’m doing. I fooled everyone cause they always tripped. And it was three years in a row, but nobody ever knew that I couldn’t read, not my teacher. Then 25, top 10, then top five and I won first prize. Let’s just go home.” And it came down to 500 out of 5,000 or 2,000 kids, then down to a hundred, and I was in there. And the first year I’m like, “Dad, mom, I didn’t play very good. I actually won three years in a row at Long Beach City College, which had this contest thing they would put you in, it was a piano recital, they would put you in a room with three judges and you had a choice of one of three pieces of music to play. And when we moved to America it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it, so was my brother. And I can’t even read music, I never took guitar lessons, I took piano lessons, classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. So ideas are given, I’m not responsible, just like I’m not a rock star, I make music for a living, that is what I do. Sometimes musical ideas I’m going around with a melody in my head and I try to play it on guitar and it’s just like, “How am I gonna do this?” But I hear it in my head. Steve Baltin: Did you always feel a special kinship with music?Įddie Van Halen: Every idea that the man upstairs gives me I have the pain in the ass job of, “Okay, god, what are you gonna lay on me next?” Because he lays stuff on me, then I gotta figure out how to make it work, which is not easy. But he was, during this one conversation, also one of the most humble people you can speak to. A legend, a guitar god, a virtuoso, a hero, Eddie Van Halen was all of those. What is a rock star anyway?" - he embodied the mythology of rock stardom for a generation. I make music for a living, I wouldn’t know how to act like a rock star. ![]() While Van Halen didn't see himself as a rock star, as he said to me at the time - "I’m not a rock star, I’m just a musician. ![]()
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