In the video for the title track and lead single from Mammoth’s third full-length The End, a perfectly innocent dive bar performance descends into chaotic scenes reminiscent of video nasties like Thriller and From Dusk Till Dawn.
At the very beginning, actor Danny Trejo tells Wolfgang Van Halen and his band to keep things quiet and civil, warning them against using distortion and even going as far as to warn them: “No frickin’ solos!”
Naturally, the first thing Wolfgang does when taking the stage is rip into a frenzied open tapping lick on his high E string based around the 10th and 12th frets, while switching up the right hand hammer-ons between the 16th, 17th, 19th, 15th and 14th frets.
Not many musicians would dare to kick off their new album's lead single with a guitar solo. But then again, Wolfgang Van Halen isn’t exactly your ordinary musician…
“Starting a song like that can be a bit of a challenge,” he tells MusicRadar while sat in Fender’s London showroom, just before grabbing his signature EVH SA-126 Special in Stealth Black to show us exactly how he plays it.
“I had this tapping idea early on but felt like it was too much,” he explains. “I think I wrote it in 2014 or something, and it was just sat on my phone or on my computer just waiting. It wasn’t quite right until now.”
He goes on to explain how the pre-production for this latest album was different to how he’s worked in the past.
“Usually I’ve done the demos on my laptop, which can be a bit creatively stifling. You can get lost in the sauce trying to program the drums properly and kinda lose that itch,” he admits.
For album number three, however, the studio was set up nice and early with trusty engineer Jef Moll on hand to help these spontaneous ideas come out naturally and organically.
Says Wolfgang: “I would tell Jef to keep the loops running, which meant I could play guitar for a minute and then run out to play drums, before coming back to track some bass.
“It was this immediate feedback response to the idea which allowed me to take more chances. I think the confidence from it being my third album and the pre-production process really helped.”
As well as the title track, Wolfgang namechecks songs like One Of A Kind and I Really Wanna as products of this free-flowing creative environment.
He smiles: “Some of these songs probably couldn’t have existed on a prior album because it was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got this random 40-second tapping intro, can we turn that into a song?’
“I had these intro ideas and then wondered what if it all suddenly explodes and they became these totally different songs.
“The process helped it all come together differently this time round, which was great for creative growth.”
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