Cast your mind back to 2022. There was only one subject dominating the news wires for electric guitar and hard rock, and that was the prospect of a blockbuster tribute tour to honour the late Eddie Van Halen.

The biggest question was over who would play guitar. Most Van Halen fans had their own preferences. Joe Satriani sure did. As a Van Halen fan, whose song Nineteen Eighty, from 2020 studio album Shapeshifting, was written in part as a tribute to Eddie Van Halen and the energy and innovation he brought to guitar as the ‘80s dawned.

The thing is, the guys in the band, namely frontman David Lee Roth and drummer Alex Van Halen, had their own preference, and theirs was for Satch.

Speaking to The Weekly Show With David J. Maloney, Satriani opens up about what must have been a surreal phone call, when Roth and Van Halen called enquiring about a tribute tour, and him feeling compelled to make a recommendation of his own, Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt.

“Well, it started really when Dave and Alex had called and they wanted to put together a band, and they were insisting that I was the guy to do it, and I kept saying, ‘I’m not the guy. Like, call Nuno.’ He can really do it, and there’s thousands of kids around the world who dedicated their life to sounding exactly like Ed.”

Satriani had consciously dedicated his life to developing a style that was not like Eddie Van Halen’s. This was presented as evidence that he would not be the one to play the tribute tour, but, of course, he was interested. Who wouldn’t be? And Satriani reveals that got way further than a phone call.

“I said, ‘I’ve always tried not to sound like Ed.’ I’m a huge fan, but like I’ve tried to respect that.’ But they were insistent,” says Satriani. “And we rehearsed, we came really close to doing our first show, but it all kind of started to fall apart.”

By then, Satriani was like the rest of us. Rumours would come and go. No tour would be announced. And it was not as though he had a blank calendar. He was busy. The months went by. Nothing. Then a phone call from another former Van Halen vocalist, his old pal and Chickenfoot bandmate, Sammy Hagar.

“When it seemed like what was going on in the family and the band members was getting really out of hand, Sam called,” says Satriani. “And he surprised me by saying, ‘Look, I know this, you've been going through this thing with those guys, and it’s insane and everything. How about if we did a retrospective tour – not an Eddie Van Halen tribute thing, but where we get to do Montrose, Hagar, Chickenfoot, my stuff… even some David Lee Roth-era Van Halen?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that could [work].’”

And so The Best Of All Worlds Tour was born. Fronted by Hagar, Satch would be accompanied by former Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony and Jason Bonham on drums. Hagar was as good as his word; the setlist took in songs from across his career. They even played Satriani’s signature song, Satch Boogie.

It might not have been the full-on Eddie Van Halen tribute tour that was in the works but Satriani did everything in his power to do EVH justice, even going as far as to partner with 3rd Power for a new guitar amp that landed on the Live Without A Net era tone-wise.

This, says Satch, was a transitional period for Eddie’s tone that served early and latter material alike.

What Dylana Scott at 3rd Power was quite incredible. Phil X was impressed. Satriani was looking for something that would make those Van Halen riffs shine. The difference between this custom tube amp and his signature Marshalls was stark.

The latter was configured to be a little darker, on account of Satriani playing most of his solo shows in higher registers, carrying the melody, the lead guitar being the focal point of the song. He needed more brightness for The Best Of All Worlds Tour.

“My solo rig probably has a little too much gain and is designed to make the high strings really fat sounding – because I play all the melodies,” he said, speaking to Australian Musician in 2024. “I play very little rhythm guitar all night long… I know in my heart, I want to hear that sound in my head.

“That mythical Eddie Van Halen sound that we all hear in our minds, and I want to be able to feel it. So I’ve been getting these clips from Dylana every week and that stuff that she’s building is really amazing.”

When Satriani was tracking Nineteen Eighty, he found that Van Halen secret sauce a lot easier. Of course, he wasn’t trying to emulate the tone exactly. This was a Satch track, a little nostalgic nod to his time in Squares, a fun time when he was making his bones as a recording artist.

“I needed to somehow express in a song the enthusiasm I had at the beginning of the Squares period, which really was the end of ’79, the beginning of 1980, and it was still a more swing-y, happy guitar moment, and not so shreddy like 1985 or ’88,” he said, speaking to MusicRadar in 2020. “It hadn’t gotten all dark and over the top. It was still Eddie Van Halen and Mark Knopfler. It was still Brian May and AC/DC and it was fun.”

Nineteen Eighty might have been what Squares would have sounded like if Satriani got all his own way, maybe a little less new wave, more rock, maybe Van Halen’s influence in there, too. Anyways, there just so happened to be a guitar effects pedal sitting right in front of him that was inextricably linked to Van Halen, Atomic Punk, Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love, Eruption… any number of classics.

“I was literally in my home studio and there on the floor was an Eddie Van Halen MXR Phase 90, with the special Eddie paint job on it,” said Satriani. “And I said, ‘I have to use this!’ I can’t tell you how happy I was that Eddie came on the scene and just lifted up guitar playing again, and he had that Friday night tone, that Friday night attitude. It was devastatingly perfect; his timing was just so perfect, and he wrote such good songs.”

• “I’m watching this sort of genius develop right in front of me, and he seems he has no physical barriers”: Joe Satriani on what it was like to teach a teenage Steve Vai

BEST OF 2025: Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that topped MusicRadar's charts in 2025.

He was one of the greatest guitar players the world has ever seen, but when Eddie Van Halen offered his services to Kiss in the early ’80s he was told: “Thanks, but no thanks!”

Speaking to MusicRadar, Kiss bassist/vocalist Gene Simmons explains why EVH made his offer – and why that offer was rejected.

“It happened in 1982,” Simmons recalls. “It was when Kiss was doing a record called Creatures Of The Night.”

This was the first album Kiss made following the departure of the band’s original lead guitarist Ace Frehley.

During the recording of Creatures Of The Night, a variety of lead guitar players were utilised – including Robben Ford, Steve Farris (later of Mr. Mister) and the man who eventually joined Kiss as an official member, Vinnie Vincent.

Ace Frehley appeared on the album's cover and in the video for the anthem I Love It Loud – but that track was one of three on the album co-written by Vincent.

The Van Halen album released in 1982 was Diver Down – created amid rising tension between Eddie and the group’s singer David Lee Roth.

Gene Simmons had played an important part in Van Halen’s early career, producing the demo recordings that eventually led to the band’s deal with Warner Brothers.

And in the summer of 1982, as Kiss were cutting tracks for Creatures Of The Night in Los Angeles, Eddie Van Halen reached out to Simmons, complaining about David Lee Roth.

Simmons recalls: “Eddie told me, ‘Roth is driving me nuts. I can't take it. I gotta leave. I know you're looking for a lead guitar player. Do you want me in the band?’

“Where Eddie lived, it wasn’t far away. So he got into his Jeep and came to the studio. Him driving that Jeep was the scariest thing in the world – it had no doors and he’d drive at 100 miles an hour. It was insane.

“So he came down and we had lunch across the street, and then he came into the studio and heard some of the tracks and was like, ‘Oh, I really like that!’”

When Eddie asked if they could discuss him joining Kiss, Simmons explained why this would never work – and why Eddie should focus on keeping his own band together.

“I said, ‘Eddie, a band is worse than a marriage. You're going to have ups and downs and stuff. But with Van Halen, everything begins and ends with you – it’s all about the guitar. And likewise for AC/DC or Led Zeppelin with Jimmy Page – those riffs, that's the backbone of what it is. That’s the sound. It's a point of view which is not necessarily the point of view of Kiss.’”

Simmons now clarifies: “There wouldn't be room for Eddie in Kiss. It would be like putting Jeff Beck or Hendrix in AC/DC.

“Hendrix would suck up all the oxygen. He needed just one bass player and a drummer so he’d got that room without a rhythm guitar player there.

“Eddie was like Hendrix in that sense. He needed a lot of room. With Van Halen it was a lot of room for the guitar player to take up, and there just wasn’t that room unless we wanted to gut what Kiss was all about. And Eddie would have taken over.”

Simmons reflects: “Morally, I think I did the right thing, which is telling Eddie, ‘You've got to stick it out. No matter what the problems are in the band, you’ve got to hang in there.'

“It's never easy. You take a look at Jagger and Richards, who had their ups and downs, or Lennon and McCartney, who were childhood friends.

“But you don’t let the band break up, even if it means switching lead singers. And in the end, that’s exactly what Eddie did.”

After Diver Down, Van Halen made one more album in the '80s with David Lee Roth – their smash hit 1984, featuring classic tracks such as Jump, Hot For Teacher and Panama.

It was in 1985 that Roth exited Van Halen and was replaced by Sammy Hagar.

“I love Roth,” Simmons says. “And that's still my favourite era of Van Halen.

“But you can get another lead singer, and when Hagar joined, it may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but they became a bigger band.

“Likewise, when AC/DC sadly lost Bon Scott, they became one of the biggest bands in the world.

“So that rule: ‘You can't lose the lead singer’. Actually, you can!”

EVH Gear has turned its fire-breathing 5150III 6L6 guitar amp into an all-digital 50-watt modelling 1x12 combo that weighs 16kg lighter than its tube-driven sibling.

This is what EVH Gear calls the 5150III Hypersonic 6L6 1x12, and the Fender-owned brand will be hoping the Hypersonic’s super-lightweight digital versions of the O.G. tube amps will be a similar success to the Big F’s Tone Master series, which digitalised some of the most classic Fender amps in the catalogue.

EVH Gear promises the same dynamic range, the same chewy, hot gain, and the same saturation of the original 5150III 6L6. Tone-wise, they are “virtually indistinguishable”.

But there are some differences to the control setup. As before, we have the three channel format – Clean, Crunch and Lead – but the Hypersonic has concentric EQ controls for Clean and Crunch.

Each channel also has its own noise gate and trim control, which could be very helpful when running with super-high gain, high volume. And there is a heap of tone-shaping power, including global Resonance and Presence controls to respectively fine-tune the amplifier’s low-end and high-end response, plus reverb.

Perhaps we should have seen these coming when EVH Gear debuted the 1,000-watt Hypersonic FR-12 FRFR speaker in July for players using amp modellers. It was a sign of its digital transformation.

Here, the DSP architecture of the Hypersonic model allows EVH Gear to present players with six different power modes, one at full power, five attenuated and a mute switch for use on a silent stage or when using to record direct.

It has a balanced XLR output, plus onboard IRs, MIDI and USB-C inputs on the back of the amp. EVH Gear has also updated the five-button footswitch, making the reverb and effects loop switchable.

But if you were to look at it from a distance, it’s only the Hypersonic badge on the grille cloth that would let you tell the difference between the original tube and the new digital modelling amp.

We still have the chicken head knobs on the top-mounted control panel, the same closed-back design with a cabinet constructed of 11-ply 15mm ply, inside which you’ll find the same Celestion EVH G12H 30W Anniversary Series 12” speaker as found on the tube equivalent.

EVH Gear described that tube amp as “arena-sized sound” in a 1x12, as “a culmination of Eddie’s career-long chase for the holy grail of tone”...

Well, if the Hypersonic 5150III 6L6 sounds just the same, then that holy grail just got a lot easier to carry up the stairs, because this weighs just over 39lbs (17.75kg to be exact) – and it is available now, priced £1549/$1,699.

For more details, head over to EVH Gear.

Rock legend Sammy Hagar has enjoyed a long and hugely successful career – but his last tour as frontman for Van Halen in 2004 ranks as one of the biggest disappointments of his professional life.

Hagar recently announced a UK tour for summer 2026 on which he will be joined by guitarist Joe Satriani, drummer Kenny Aronoff and another former member of Van Halen, bassist Michael Anthony.

With this band behind him, Hagar’s shows in 2025 have been packed with classic Van Halen songs – including Why Can’t This Be Love, Right Now, Poundcake, Top Of The World, Love Walks In and 5150.

These performances have also included a couple of Van Halen songs from the era when David Lee Roth fronted the band – Panama and Runnin’ With The Devil.

But Hagar has admitted that his final tour as a member of Van Halen was a grim experience.

In the singer’s 2011 autobiography Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock, he claimed that on the band’s 2004 US tour guitarist Eddie Van Halen was something akin to a functioning alcoholic.

And in a 2013 interview with Classic Rock, Hagar doubled down on those comments.

“Eddie definitely wasn’t functioning very well during the Van Halen reunion tour in 2004,” Hagar said. “It was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in my life. It was horrible to know a person that was in that kind of shape.”

Hagar maintained that his autobiography painted a true picture of Eddie and his brother Alex Van Halen.

“I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true,” he said. “Also, I think they know that I was being kind to Eddie in my book, believe it or not. There’s some worse shit than that.”

Hagar talked about his sadness over his split from the band.

“Not keeping Van Halen together – that was a failure to me,” he said. "It would have been great for us all to have kept going and stayed in the art while we were so creative.

“I think in my headspace today I probably could have made that happen, but at the time I was just as big an asshole as they were. I was kind of horny to make a solo album, and those guys are so insecure that it freaked them out and they threw me out.

“If we had at least split up on good terms it would have been okay. But to lose friends, that’s a failure.”

Hagar also told Classic Rock about his long-running beef with David Lee Roth.

“He’s from another planet,” Hagar said of Roth. “The only thing he and I have in common is that we were both lead singers in Van Halen. That is it. You can stop right there and don’t even try to put us into any kind of a nutshell.”

Despite the animosity between them, Hagar and Roth toured together in 2002, but as Hagar recalled of that experience: “I thought that tour would be really cool, and it wasn’t. He [Roth] was so pompous and demanding.

“He’s a strange guy. He’s so ‘pretend rock star’ and so protective of his image. When you see it day after day it’s really kind of disheartening.

“When you see this guy for real, it’s like he’s living two different lives. He’s projecting one thing and he’s something else, man. It was just weird to me.

“Who is he? What is he? He must be really miserable because he can’t be himself.

“I’m not that kind of guy,” Hagar concluded. “I’m for real.”

It might be one of the most famous recording facilities in the world but no one gets to record at 5150 Studios, Los Angeles, unless your surname is Van Halen, and yet, somehow, Alter Bridge did just that.

Their forthcoming self-titled studio album, scheduled for a 9 January 2026 release through Napalm, was tracked there under the watchful eye of producer Michael ‘Elvis’ Baskette, with the band finishing the record off at Baskette’s studio in Florida.

Frontman/guitarist Myles Kennedy and guitarist Mark Tremonti can barely contain themselves at the thought of it, recording in the same studio that the late Eddie Van Halen built from the ground up, where all Van Halen albums from 1984 onwards were recorded, This, says Kennedy, is a “sacred space”, so when they got an invite from longtime friend Wolfgang Van Halen to work there, there was only going to be one answer.

“Y’know, look, [laughs] being able to go into a sacred space like that and start the process was a dream come true,” he says. “I think Mark and I can both testify to that.”

“We planned to do preproduction there,” explains Tremonti. “It was an opportunity that came up. Wolfgang was nice enough to invite us there – because Wolfie is pretty much a brother of ours now. We’ve had such a long relationship. We love hanging out. We’d go to 5150, he’d come hang out with us, we’d go out have dinner with him, and he’d let us into his sacred studio.”

Alter Bridge and Van Halen go way back. Back in his Creed days, Tremonti supported Van Halen, with Eddie Van Halen famously gifting him one of his Wolfgang signature guitars. Wolfgang, the musician, played bass guitar on Tremonti’s solo project, and his band, Mammoth WVH, have spent months on the road with Alter Bridge, with both bands sharing management.

The enormity of Alter Bridge tracking an album in the facility that Eddie Van Halen built is not lost on manager, Tim Tournier, who knocks on wood that it might happen again.

Both Kennedy and Tremonti had been to 5150 before. This was Kennedy’s second visit. “It’s much different knowing you’re going to work there,” he says.

Tremonti already had some pretty good memories of 5150.

“I saw Van Halen play there, which was pretty nuts,” he says. “Wolfie was nice enough to call me when I was in LA and say, ‘Hey! You wanna come see Van Halen practise tomorrow morning?’ So he drove me to 5150. It was awesome.”

This would have been late 2011 or early 2012, when Van Halen were tracking their final studio album, A Different Kind Of Truth.

“They played the whole record,” adds Tremonti. “Roth wasn’t there. It was just Alex and Eddie [and Wolfgang]. But they played the whole new record.”

With Kennedy and Tremonti in the inner sanctum, ground zero for the Brown Sound, where some of the most iconic guitar parts and tones were put together, it begs the question whether they got to play Frankenstein.

“No, no!” laughs Tremonti. “We didn’t want to push it! ‘Can we play this on the record!?’ No, we respected the space. It wasn’t something that we deserve!”

“No, we’re not worthy!” says Kennedy. “It was literally, the minute we walked in the door, it was very Wayne’s World. ‘We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!’”

But when you press play on this new Alter Bridge record, you can be sure that 5150 – and Eddie Van Halen’s designs – left an imprint on its sound. Kennedy says the eponymous EVH Gear 5150 III 50-watt tube amp head was the secret sauce in the album’s reference quality rhythm guitar tone. Kennedy’s signature PRS signature model sounded all kinds of godly when played through the head.

“I don’t know if it was a prototype but it was a 5150 III, 50-watt version, which I just really grew fond of,” says Kennedy. “That amp turned out to be a pretty big part of the sound of this record. From the starting riff of Silent Divide, you can really hear the characteristic of that amp blended with my [Diezel] VH4.”

Looking at the pictures from the studio floor, there were other amps in the mix, too. Kennedy mentions his VH4, but there’s Tremonti’s 100-watt signature head from PRS, the MT-100, feating into a slanted Marshall 4X12 cabinet.

The EVH III in white vinyl pulls focus, but we can’t help noticing a more modest amp in white vinyl, the Positive Grid Spark Mini, that looks like it is being used by bassist Brian Marshall. What's that doing? Who knows. But it was the 5150 that was taking the starring role here, and Tremonti said it even made him rethink what he was looking for from an amp.

“As far as the amps go, that 5150 III, it made me reassess 50-watt amps. I was never a big 50-watt amp kinda guy, and I have the 5150 100-watt version and the 50-watt version, but there was something special about that 50-watt version,” he says. “I’ve just recently bought a 50-watt Dumble. It’s my first 50-watt Dumble, and versus the 100-watt, it’s got a different thing.

“It’s an Overdrive Special. It was very early. It’s serial number 49, so it’s very early. The first Dumbles didn’t have two master controls so you couldn’t get two live tones out of it, meaning you couldn’t set one channel at a different volume.

“But those 50-watt versions? There’s something about that 5150 III, the 6L6 that we used.”

Kennedy’s the same. He preferred 100-watters, too.

“Well I thought that the 50-watt wouldn’t carry the weight of the 100, it wouldn’t stand side by side in an arena or something, but it does, it does carry the weight, and it just has more bite,” he says “There is something in the upper mids that’s very unique about that amp, that really seem to work in the chain.”

Is that unique certain something in the upper mids an Eddie Van Halen quality? That kind of aerobic drive and harmonic response? “Oh yeah,” says Kennedy, and he advises guitarists to concentrate their efforts on nailing these battleground frequencies when dialling in a tone. Get them right and the rest will fall into place.

“That’s where we sit as guitarists,” he says. “It’s funny, guitar players are like, ‘Oh, the bottom end!?’ Well, once you put it in context, in the mix, a lot of that is getting drowned out by the kick drum and the bass guitar anyway. Upper mids are where you’re going to sit so you want them to be [right]. Wherever those upper frequencies are, you want them to cut, and also you want the right type of cut.”

Alter Bridge’s self-titled eighth studio album available to pre-order and is out on 9 January 2026 through Napalm Records.

A 1982 Kramer owned and stage-played by the late, great Eddie Van Halen is heading to auction, with the red-black-and-white custom-build expected to become the world’s next seven-figure electric guitar.

How much are we talking? Sotheby’s, who is hosting the auction in October this year, estimates that it will fetch between $2 million and $3 million. Though these estimates can be conservative, particularly in today’s market.

This was a transitional Kramer (Serial #B1297), a precursor to the 5150. And you can see where the direction of travel was going as far as the aesthetic goes.

There’s the six-in-line banana headstock, with weathered gold hardware. On the back there’s gold text in a Gothic typeface that reads “#1 Edward Van Halen Model”.

The maple fingerboard has seen a lot of action, with the documentation presenting it as one of EVH’s touring guitars between ’82 and ’83 during the band’s tour of the US and South America. And the colour scheme is cribbed from the O.G. Frankenstrat.

Eddie Van Halen gave this to his guitar tech, Rudy Leiren, back in the day, with the message, “Rude – Its Been a Great Ten Years – Lets Do Another Ten. Eddie Van Halen”, but the certificate of authenticity comes from another of the guitar’s high-profile owners, Mick Mars, who played it extensively with Mötley Crüe.

Indeed, with Van Halen moving onto the 5150, Mars would be responsible for some of that wear. He used this Kramer to track the Crüe’s 1989 studio album, Dr Feelgood.

Which is interesting, because if you think of the recording of Dr Feelgood, produced by an ascendent Bob Rock, then you could credibly claim that this guitar can be heard on Aerosmith’s Pump, which was being recorded in the same studio.

When Guitar World readers asked Mars for his memories of Dr Feelgood, he says he played so loud his guitar bled into the next door.

“Steven Tyler was doing vocals with producer Bruce Fairbairn next door,” said Mars. “And I remember them yelling at me, ‘You’ve gotta turn your stuff down, Mick! It’s leaking into our vocals.’ I didn’t turn down, though. I just told them, ‘Hey, that’s the way I play – loud’ [laughs] So yeah, I’m all over the record they were doing. Somewhere in the mix, you’ll hear me.”

Eddie Van Halen’s history with Kramer captures a febrile moment for electric guitar design. Just recently, Paul Reed Smith revealed how he ended up working on the 5150 guitar after receiving a phone call from Kramer co-founder Dennis Berardi.

Eddie Van Halen was coming into their shop in Neptune, New Jersey – could Smith come in and help?

What was going on was, Kramer at the time didn’t have a guitar maker, Eddie was coming. So they called me,” said Smith. “Dennis Berardi called me, and said, ‘Paul! Paul! I need your help. Eddie’s coming up. We need you to put a guitar together.’

“I came up and we assembled this Kramer guitar for him. I made the pickup for it. It was set up with pieces of aluminum in the back and he could set it like this [like a lap steel] and play it like a piano. But that guitar, eventually, those pieces of aluminum got removed and that was the 5150 guitar.”

Kramer’s relationship with Eddie Van Halen changed guitar history. And it all came from a chance meeting. Berardi had befriended Van Halen’s manager on a flight, and with the guitar looking for a stable vibrato system, Kramer’s Rockinger system had intrigued him. That kicked things off.

The Rockinger trem didn’t last. It was switched out for the Floyd Rose in 1983. But Eddie Van Halen was as good as his word. Kramer became the top-selling guitar brand in 1985.

For more details on the auction, head over to Sotheby's.

There are 1,001 theories about how to nail Eddie Van Halen’s electric guitar tone. There is no shortage of gear out there to help you get there. But even before you get to the problem of actually playing like him – impossible – there’s the question of which era of Van Halen guitar tone are you talking about?

If there is something that could be considered a silver bullet for Brown Sound adventure it’s from IK Multimedia, which has just completed its Brown Sound Anthology, available across three of limited edition Tonex One amp modeller and multi-effects mini pedals, and also as standalone Tonex plugin suites.

These sounds collect three different eras of Van Halen tone, and were designed in collaboration with ‘Brown Sound’ tone guru Jim Gaustad, and modelled using IK Multimedia’s proprietary AI Machine Modelling technology.

You won’t need a Variac. No need to open up the back of your tube amp and start some questionable DIY modding (never do that, please). The hard work has been done and rendered digitally

The limited edition Tonex One pedals come in three colours, white, yellow and red, each with 20 presets from all three collections in IK Multimedia’s Brown Sound Anthology, plus full access to its 79/80 Brown Sound collection, which is modelled on the sound heard on Van Halen I and II, plus another Brown Sound collection of your choice, and Tonex SE. That will set you back €249.

There is, however, a box set of these, super limited edition, with all three pedals, all three collections, plus Tonex Max. That’s priced €599. And with Tonex Max, you can model your own gear, access over 1,250 Premium Tone Models, and customise the Brown Sound collections.

The 79/80 Brown Sound collection is designed around a modelled 1968 Marshall Super Lead with the quasi-mythical #12301 mod. Inside the pack you’ll find “50 Tone Models shaped by period-correct gear, creative miking techniques, and voltage-controlled amp behaviour for unmatched feel and realism”.

Taking things darker, the Brown Sound 80/81 has more gain, less reverb, meaner. “Key changes included switching to a straight 1960B cabinet with G12-65 speakers, re-biasing the amp, and experimenting with lower Variac voltages (down to 68V) to add sag and harmonic complexity,” says IK Multimedia.

Finally, the 82/84 collection takes us into the golden era of box-office guitar tone. As with previous editions, it engages with the rumour and conjecture – as to the mods, the hardware, the studio outboard gear and Variac settings et cetera – to offer a comprehensive range of sounds across its 50 Tone Models.

“The anthology fully captures an artist's tonal journey as he changed rock guitar forever,” says IK Multimedia.

The Brown Sound Anthology is available to preorder, shipping from August. Each of the individual Brown Sound Tonex collections is available at an preorder special price of €79, regular price €99. For more details, head over to IK Multimedia.

In 1985, when Van Halen singer David Lee Roth quit the band, Eddie Van Halen was left facing the toughest challenge of his career.

Eddie was the most famous guitar player on the planet — the guy who had revolutionised the art of rock guitar in the late-'70s, and had got the call from Michael Jackson to play the solo on his mega-hit Beat It from Thriller, the biggest-selling album of all time.

But with Diamond Dave gone, Eddie had to replace the seemingly irreplaceable, and reinvent the band that had defined American hard rock in the early '80s.

For all Eddie’s brilliance as a guitarist, Roth had been his equal in Van Halen — a frontman whose good looks and larger-than-life persona were instrumental in elevating the band to superstar status.

In 1983, Van Halen had headlined the US Festival in San Bernadino, California before an audience of 375,000, and pocketed a reported $1 million in the process.

The following year, their single Jump topped the US chart, and its parent album, 1984, was well on its way to selling 10 million copies.

When the news of Roth’s departure was announced — on 1 April, of all days — there were many, fans and media alike, who believed that the band was finished.

But by the summer, Van Halen had found a new singer in Sammy Hagar, a successful solo artist who had first come to prominence in Montrose, a band whose debut album, released in 1973, had a profound influence on Eddie, and was produced by Ted Templeman, who worked on every Van Halen album from 1978 to 1984.

Hagar proved a perfect fit for Van Halen. As a big hitter in his own right, he had more than enough self-assurance to replace Roth, and most importantly, as a singer, he had a better range and a more melodic sensibility.

As Eddie told Rolling Stone: “From the first second, Sammy could do anything I threw at him. It just opened up a whole new door.”

As a result, a new Van Halen was born on the album 5150, named after Eddie’s studio at his home in LA’s Coldwater Canyon (‘5150’ was the Californian law code for detention of mentally ill persons).

For Eddie, this album marked a major turning point.

Along with the new voice in Van Halen came a new approach to guitar — different tones, different gear.

Out was the pinpoint positioned mixing style of old and in came huge stereo-panned rhythm guitars courtesy of an Eventide H3000.

And while his trusty Frankenstein guitar and Marshall amps still saw studio action, Eddie was trying out a new six-string: the active EMG-loaded Steinberger GL-2T (in Stripe finish, naturally!), which would appear on the tracks Get Up and Summer Nights.

In the wake of Jump, the first Van Halen song for which Eddie, a classically trained pianist, played the main riff on synthesizer, the 5150 album featured even greater emphasis on keyboards.

And in the creation of what was a game-changing album for Van Halen, and for Eddie in particular, another famous guitarist played a pivotal role.

Englishman Mick Jones, the leader of multi-million selling rock act Foreigner, was enlisted as co-producer on 5150.

Jones had written all of Foreigner’s hit songs, from riff-driven anthems such as Urgent and Hot Blooded to power ballads including the worldwide number one I Want To Know What Love Is.

He had produced, or co-produced, all of the band’s albums. And he was a brilliant guitarist, as illustrated most powerfully in Juke Box Hero, one of the all-time great rock songs.

Long before he formed Foreigner, Jones had also toured in the late-'60s as the guitarist for French star Johnny Hallyday, with The Jimi Hendrix Experience as the opening act.

And what he heard in Eddie Van Halen was genius comparable not only to Hendrix but to Bach and Beethoven…

In the following interview — originally published in Total Guitar magazine — Mick Jones tells the story of his role in 5150.

Firstly, how did you get the job of co-producing Van Halen?

"It came through Sammy Hagar. He and I went back a long way, and we had maintained a friendship over the years. I’d also met Eddie socially several times, but it was Sammy who put my name forward, and then Eddie decided he’d like to work with me."

You were brought in because the band’s regular producer, Ted Templeman, had defected to work on David Lee Roth’s solo album Eat ’Em And Smile. But Templeman’s right-hand man, engineer Donn Landee, remained loyal to Van Halen.

"Yes, Donn had engineered all of their albums up to 5150, so I was the new boy. There was some concern from Donn, and that took a little bit of... Massaging, let’s say. But it all worked out, and by the end of the recording we were the best of friends. Donn is a great engineer and it was an honour to work with him."

How did you see your role as co-producer?

"At the time I was taking a break from Foreigner and I wanted to branch out a bit. So with Van Halen, it was a new challenge to see what I could pull out of them and see if I could change a few things here and there. Not to mess with their identity by any means, but just try to enhance the sound and the arrangements..."

What do you remember about your first day working with them?

"Sammy picked me up from the airport and he gave me a rundown of what to expect. It was a little scary! He said, ‘Mick, we’ve been through the wars – this goes a little bit higher and a little crazier. So buckle your seatbelt!’

"But when we arrived at Eddie’s place, all of the guys were very cordial, very chatty and ‘up’ and cracking David Lee Roth jokes. So it was a nice warm welcome. And I was a little nervous, but I think that tends to bring out the best in me."

The studio – in a converted garage, and designed by Donn Landee – was the band’s HQ and Eddie’s man-cave. Can you describe what you found in there?

"It was definitely funky. Everybody was smoking like crazy and drinking this high-alcohol content beer. Luckily I didn’t really drink beer, so I avoided that. So yeah, it had a vibe. It wasn’t the cleanest or most hygienic place I’ve ever spent time in, but it was acoustically designed and they had developed the sound in there. It definitely had a sound."

What tracks did they have ready at that stage?

"They had demos of all the tracks that made the final cut, pretty much. The only one that wasn’t demoed was Dreams, and I would say that was the one I had most involvement with from an arranging point of view. I think I really brought something to that song, especially Sammy’s vocals.

"I worked very long and hard with him on that, and he told me it was one of his all-time favourite performances. He was singing so high that he was hyperventilating. He almost passed out! I really pushed him. But we got it."

With Dreams and other songs such as Love Walks In, Eddie played the riffs on synthesizers...

"He developed his own style of keyboard synth stuff . It was a slightly different direction, but it was still rock. It really felt good when I first heard the songs. And they made it pretty easy for me. They gave me a great drawing board. Gradually as we got to know each other, things really gelled."

Eddie was also experimenting with different guitars.

"Of course he was playing that famous red Strat with the cream gaffer tape around it, but also a Steinberger. I used a Steinberger for a while at that time."

Did you hear this as Eddie reaching for something beyond the classic Van Halen ‘brown sound’?

"I didn’t really dissect what it sounded like. I just knew that it was powerful. And I felt that we captured the spirit of what was going on. I think they really wanted to show David Lee Roth that he wasn’t indispensable – let’s put it that way."

Certainly there was a different tone in Get Up, a really fast and furious track.

"I’d never heard anything like it in my life. It sounded like four guys fighting inside the speaker cabinets, beating the shit out of each other!"

Presumably you didn’t feel the need to coach Eddie as one guitar player to another?

"He was so talented, so there wasn’t a lot I could add or suggest from a performance point of view. And he had a unique style, obviously. I didn’t want to say things for the sake of it. I thought seriously about what I was saying, what I was contributing."

But he would look to you for approval, for feedback?

"Yeah. I think he respected my songwriting – he knew I could write songs, and that was a plus for me. Some of the songs needed a bit of tailoring, and I think I provided that, as well as feedback. I wasn’t afraid to speak up about how I felt, which was a little risky, I guess."

It seems strange to ask, but were there moments when you said, ‘Sorry Edward, that I don’t think that solo is good enough’?

"There were several times that happened – and then I would sprint out of the door and run into the forest at the back of the studio! But I think we respected each other, and we both had the experience to be able to sensibly exchange opinions."

So you and Eddie had a strong connection?

"We got very close, especially when we were doing guitar overdubs and solos. He was completely out there – not drug-wise, he just went into this trance state as he played. I’d be sitting there on the left side of the console and he would come over and lean on me while he was playing. And it was kind of weird – it was like it was coming through me. It was coming down, let’s say, from above, and we really got very close in those moments."

Did you and Eddie find time to jam together?

"Yeah. We had a few fun moments. Eddie tried to teach me the tapping thing. It was a hilarious hour or two."

There wasn’t any tapping on subsequent Foreigner albums.

"No. I didn’t latch on to that at all."

Brian May told Total Guitar that when he and Eddie worked together on the Star Fleet Project album, he had some fun playing Eddie’s Frankenstein Strat. Did you?

"Yeah, but I remember the fretboard was quite wide, and I haven’t got really big hands, so I had a little difficulty covering the size."

What was Eddie like as a person?

"Eddie had an irresistible grin, almost constantly when we were working, and outside the studio, too."

Did you feel that this was a musician completely dedicated to his art?

"Yes, he was a very musical person, always picking up new things, and very aware of the art of it all. You could compare him perhaps to Bach, Beethoven – uncannily talented and driven by a need to express himself in a dazzling way. So he was a complete musician."

And as someone who witnessed Jimi Hendrix performing at his peak, did you view Eddie as a genius comparable to Jimi?

"Yes, I think there are some individuals that are kind of chosen to be the carriers of the feeling and the spiritual side of things. I’ve always tried to fathom where and how that comes through. It happens with guitar players, it happens with singers... It does separate people. It separates the men from the boys. It’s a gift. And it’s such a powerful gift that sometimes it destroys the messenger. But I remember them both as very sweet guys, so charming, radiant and so super-talented."

The making of 5150 took a lot out of Mick Jones. “I was completely exhausted at the end of it,” he says. “We were running a bit late – and the band had a tour booked. So there was pressure.” But in the end, the album proved a huge success.

Released on March 24th, 1986, 5150 was the band’s first US number one album. And that victory tasted even sweeter when David Lee Roth’s Eat ’Em And Smile, featuring rising star Steve Vai on guitar, only made it to number four.

5150 turned out to be one of the most important albums Van Halen ever made. And Mick Jones is proud to have played a part in it. “It was a pretty intense experience,” he says. “But we achieved something very special.”

Sammy Hagar claims that he helped Eddie Van Halen become a better musician when they were together in Van Halen — and says that Eddie didn’t make new music in the 2000s because he was “dried up”.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Hagar says that Van Halen fans have misunderstood the creative dynamic between himself and EVH.

Hagar states: “When I joined the band, everyone says, ‘Oh man, they started playing keyboards, and Hagar wants to write all these love songs.’

“I didn’t bring the music to Eddie. Eddie brought the music to me.

“He had used that guitar neck up. He did everything and anything that that neck could do, and changed his amps and got his sounds. And over the years, he kept changing his sound to try and re-inspire some new guitar things.

“That’s why he wrote Can’t Stop Loving You. It’s a classical piece of music, and so is 5150.

Hagar says of his role in Van Halen: “I had to find a place to sing. But he [Eddie] sat down at a keyboard. It felt fresh.

“And I always say that to the hardcore Eddie heads: Eddie’s musicianship blossomed when I joined the band.

“People don’t realise that Eddie expanded as a musician because he got a singer that could say, ‘I can sing that.’ And we went on a fucking musical adventure.”

Between 1986 and 1995, Van Halen made four studio albums with Hagar as singer, all of which made No.1 on the US chart.

But after the 1998 album Van Halen III (with Gary Cherone replacing Hagar), the band made no new music until the 2012 album A Different Kind Of Truth, which featured original singer David Lee Roth and turned out to the final Van Halen album.

In the Rolling Stone interview, Hagar refers to this fallow period and says of Eddie Van Halen: “He stopped writing, I think, because he just ran out. Shit, how much do you need? How much can you squeeze out of the dude? He gave his blood, brother.

“Look, everybody gets fuckin’ dried up a little bit. And also, he had to be inspired by something.”

Hagar also says that working with guitarist Joe Satriani reminds him of the years he spent with Eddie.

“I loved Eddie like a brother,” he says. “I miss him so bad.

“Every time I play music, every time I pick up a guitar or go to rehearsal or jump on stage or try to get with Joe Satriani rehearsing a song we might want to play or write, I miss Eddie.

“Joe is the closest thing on this planet for me, not for the world, but for me, to Eddie Van Halen. The way Eddie and I wrote, Joe and I, we write that way, and it’s very special.”

Sammy Hagar is sensationally claiming that his new song was written with Eddie Van Halen — a year after the legendary guitarist’s death.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, ex-Van Halen singer Hagar says that this song — titled Encore, Thank You, Goodnight — is the product of a dream he had in 2020, in which he was reunited with Eddie.

“He had a guitar around his neck,” Hagar says, “and we were having a love fest since we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. And he just started playing this riff, and I started singing.”

Hagar says he woke from that dream with the music in his head.

“I just grabbed a pad and a pencil,” he recalls.”And I got my iPhone. My wife’s screaming, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Writing a song!’

“It just kept coming and coming. When I got up the next day, I grabbed my guitar and started to figure out the chords.”

Hagar insists: “This was one hundred percent a communication from the beyond. There is no question about it.”

He adds: “I dream about Eddie all the time, quite honestly.”

Hagar says he finished writing the song earlier this year, and then decided to record it with the musicians featured in his current touring band — guitarist Joe Satriani, former Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony and drummer Kenny Aronoff.

He says that Satriani’s encouragement was key.

“I thought, ‘I’ll never write a song with Eddie again. This is the closest I can come to it.’ When I told Joe about the dream and played him the thing he went, ‘Oh man. Hell yeah. Let’s finish that. That’s a cool song.’”

Satriani has been performing classic Van Halen material with Hagar on tour.

“Joe’s a scholar,” Hagar says. “He knew Eddie’s guitar solos and his chord structures inside and out. And so he tried to bring in some of those classic Eddie-style parts.”

Encore, Thank You, Goodnight also features a chant of “Eddie” recorded during a Van Halen concert in Hawaii in 1995.

And if the backing vocals sound like classic Van Halen, that’s because they used an old trick courtesy of the guys who worked on the band’s classic albums — produced Ted Templeman and engineer Donn Landee.

The pair advised Hagar’s producer Dave Cobb to double Michael Anthony’s vocal and then add another of his vocal tracks to a double-tracked Hagar vocal.

As Hagar says: “We went in there, did that, and holy fuck, what a trick!”

EVH Gear has refreshed its keenly priced Wolfgang WG Standard with three sweet finishes and swaps out the Floyd Rose vibrato for a TOM-style bridge and stop-bar tailpiece for a fuss-free performance.

This could be the sleeper hit of 2025. It could be the year’s best runaround electric – a hyper-playable platform for rock and metal guitar, without any faffing around with a Floyd.

That’s the thing with Floyds. Pretty much everyone can agree that a high-performance electric guitar is a lot of fun. The quick neck, the compound radius fingerboard, the jumbo frets – not to mention the high-output pickups.

But, sometimes, having a Floyd Rose can be a pain in the backside, especially when some wiseacre in the band suggests tuning down from Standard to Dropped C just to give the riffs some weight (Cue an intense session with your good friend Allen Key and his buddy Peterson, the guitar tuner).

Here there is none of that. You’ve got an easily adjustable EVH-branded TOM bridge based on the original Gibson Tune-O-Matic design. And a guitar that’s based on the original Eddie Van Halen Wolfgang platform, complete with that trademark 3x3 headstock.

As you will find across all of the Fender-owned high-performance brands – Jackson, Charvel and EVH Gear – you’ve got some very shred-friendly dimensions and specs. We have a 12” to 16” compound radius fingerboard, the 22 jumbo frets, and above all a super-thin neck.

This baked maple neck measures just a hair over 2omm at the 3rd fret. Nonetheless, reinforced with graphite rods, it should be super stable, resistant to fluctuations in temperature and humidity. EVH Gear has given it an oil finish to make it extra tactile.

A key feature of these Wolfgang Standards is the direct-mount humbucker pairing, the idea being that these uncovered, agreeably hot electric guitar pickups pick up the vibrations of the basswood body and sound more alive with sustain.

Dial in some juicy overdrive on your guitar amp and you’ll get all those harmonics. Dime said amp and you’ll get some musical feedback, and you can tame all this by rolling back the black “Speed” knobs for volume and tone.

There is a treble bleed feature, so when you roll back that volume the tone won’t go dark. Other player-friendly features include the forearm carve that really puts a unique spin on this third-gen T-style vibe. There are oversized buttons for your guitar strap. No pickguard gives these a nice minimalistic look. The binding on the body’s top ties the look together.

Choose from Gloss Black, Cream White and – our favourite – Sea Foam Pearl Metallic. The Wolfgang WG Standard TOM is available now, priced £519/$599 street. See EVH Gear for more details.

The announcement came on April Fool’s Day, 1985. But this was no joke.

America’s biggest rock band had lost its superstar singer. David Lee Roth had quit Van Halen.

To everyone outside the band, it was shocking news. At that time, Van Halen were at the very top of their game.

Two years earlier, they had headlined the US Festival in California before an audience of 375,000 – and pocketed a reported $1 million fee.

The following year, their single Jump topped the US chart and its parent album, 1984, was well on its way to selling 10 million copies.

Eddie Van Halen was the most famous guitar player in the world, yet even he wasn’t the biggest star in his own band.

That was Roth, aka Diamond Dave.

A fast-talking, high-kicking showman with a huge ego and a seemingly endless supply of comic one-liners.

To fans and media alike, the band would be sunk without him.

There had always been conflict within Van Halen, and it reached critical mass months before Roth left. “The band had disintegrated into a spiteful bunch of bleary-eyed, argumentative, procrastinating individuals,” the singer later explained.

Roth’s exit had been carefully planned – he had been rehearsing in secret with a new band closely modelled on Van Halen, right down to virtuoso guitarist Steve Vai.

Roth had already tested the water at the start of 1985 with Crazy From The Heat, a four-track covers E.P. which reached No.15 in the Billboard chart.

In the battle between Van Halen and their newly departed singer, the smart money was on Diamond Dave…

But if Roth had a head start on his ex-bandmates, the guys he’d left behind weren’t about to just roll over and die.

And what they found in Sammy Hagar was a new singer with the charisma, the force of personality and the brass balls to replace Diamond Dave.

Hagar was always cocky, and in 1985, at the age of 37, he had every right to be.

The California native had first come to prominence in the early '70s as the singer for Montrose, a band that had a profound influence on American hard rock in general and Van Halen in particular.

After being fired from Montrose, Hagar forged a successful solo career that reached a pinnacle with 1984’s VOA and the single I Can’t Drive 55, an all-American protest song from a fast car enthusiast.

After Roth’s exit, Van Halen had considered several other singers, among them Cold Chisel frontman Jimmy Barnes, future Mr. Big vocalist Eric Martin and even a female singer, Patty Smyth.

But Hagar was in a different league. Moreover, he knew and liked Eddie Van Halen.

“I’d met Eddie twice at festivals,” he said. “He was a Montrose freak, and I thought he was the nicest guy in the world. He was very naïve, innocent, humble. He was like a kid.”

When Van Halen reached out to Hagar in 1985, they were, in his words, “high and dry”. But he retained the mindset of a solo artist. “I’d come off three platinum albums,” he said. “I said, ’I’m gonna get Eddie to play on my record.’”

That plan was quickly forgotten. As Hagar recalled: “Eddie was insistent. He was like, ‘You gotta come tomorrow!’ I said, ‘I just got home from a tour. I ain’t gonna do nothing tomorrow.’” But within a few days, Hagar was at Eddie’s home in LA’s Coldwater Canyon.

The house was modest, described by Hagar as “a two-bedroom county-style place, small – not a badass house whatsoever”.

In an adjacent garage was Eddie’s recording studio, 5150.

Named after the Californian police term for a mentally disturbed person, the studio had been designed by Donn Landee, the engineer who had assisted producer Ted Templeman on every Van Halen album, and also the two albums Hagar recorded with Montrose.

In the weeks prior to Hagar’s arrival, the band – Eddie and his brother, drummer Alex Van Halen, plus bassist Michael Anthony – had begun work on some new songs, recorded by Landee.

Hagar admitted he was a little nervous on the day.

“It wasn’t like I was auditioning,” he said, “but if you walk in and start singing with a band, you can feel pretty fucking uncomfortable.”

Eddie walked him into the studio to meet the other guys. Also present were Donn Landee and the brothers’ jazz-musician dad, Jan Van Halen. Hagar noticed that the band were frazzled from a lack of sleep. “They’d been up all night,” he said. “I was impressed with the work ethic. But I was thinking, these guys are fuckin’ crazy…”

He was also astonished at the conditions inside the studio. “It was a mess,” he said. “There must have been 300 beer bottles and cans laying around. Half of them had beer in them and old cigarettes. Every ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts. There were butts left burnt on the floor. That place stunk like a fucking bar that hadn’t been cleaned for a hundred years. Eddie’s guitars were everywhere – maybe 30 guitars, laying against walls, on the floor, just knocked over.”

First, they talked. They knew Sammy could sing. What they needed was a sense of whether he would fit the band as a personality. The last thing they wanted was another Roth.

As the talk turned to business, Hagar was struck by their naïveté.

“I asked these questions,” he said. “Like, ‘How much did you net on the last tour?’ I realised I was making three times more money than any one of those guys. They’d been spending most of it, splitting it four ways. I’m thinking, ‘Do I really wanna be in a band like this and take a pay cut?’”

But as soon as they started jamming, everything changed.

The band played a grooving, mid-tempo riff and Hagar jumped on it. “I started singing to it, making up words,” he recalled. “And right off the bat I sang, ‘Summer nights and my radio…’

“They all got excited. ‘Oh man, this guy can sing!’ And Jan was diggin’ that I could scat like a jazz singer.”

The jam session lasted from noon ’til midnight, without a break.

They went through all the song ideas the band had, including the punchy riff that would form the basis for the track Good Enough. Donn Landee got it all down on tape.

The following day, after Hagar had gone back to his home in Mill Valley, California, he listened again to what they had recorded.

It sounded good – so good that Hagar made his decision there and then.

He called Eddie and told him: “I wanna do it.” Eddie was ecstatic.

Then Hagar called his manager, Ed Leffler: “I’m doing it.”

Leffler’s first reaction was disbelief: “You’re fucking crazy.” After a moment’s thought, he added: “Let me talk to David Geffen…”

For Hagar to join Van Halen, an agreement would have to be negotiated between his label, Geffen Records, and the band’s own label, Warner Bros.

Hagar knew this would not come easily – he was Geffen’s biggest artist, and owner David Geffen was not just going to let him go.

But Hagar was not inclined to wait. He celebrated with his new bandmates at a Mexican restaurant in Hollywood. “We ate tacos and drank margaritas and laughed all night,” he recalled.

A period of intensive rehearsals began as Hagar moved into a rented house in LA. They had five new songs written and partly recorded before Geffen shook hands on a deal with Warners president Mo Ostin.

“Sammy, you have no fucking idea what you cost me,” Ostin later told the singer, though the mogul knew it was a price worth paying after he heard the song that would become Van Halen’s comeback single.

The band had already recorded a demo of Why Can’t This Be Love, but when Ostin visited 5150 they chose to perform the track live off the studio floor, with Eddie playing keyboards and Hagar on guitar.

“That freaked him out to begin with,” Hagar said. “But when we finished playing it, Mo had the biggest grin on his face. He put his finger in the air and said, ‘I smell money!’”

From this defining moment, another important decision was reached. Such was the stature of Dave Lee Roth that one Warners exec, in all seriousness, suggested that the band be renamed ‘Van Hagar’. According to Hagar, this idea was considered for one day.

“At first I was flattered,” he admitted. “But then I thought, fuck that – this is Van Halen! I’m joining them. We’re not starting another band.”

More importantly, Hagar had total self-belief. In his mind, he was better qualified than Roth to be the singer in Van Halen.

“I was a fan of the band,” he said, “but Roth always bugged me. He was fake and contrived.

“If anything, Dave had been mimicking me. He started wearing bandanas after I did. He started drinking Jack Daniel’s on stage after I did. I didn’t have enough respect for him to fear that job.”

As Van Halen continued working on the new album at 5150, there was one notable absentee.

For the first time in the band’s career, they were making an album without producer Ted Templeman.

Worse, Templeman was producing Roth’s first full-length solo record.

Van Halen viewed this as an act of betrayal.

“We were the anti-Roth camp,” Hagar said. “He was the enemy of all enemies. Not to me – I didn’t even know the fucker. But I’m a team player, and he’s the enemy, right? So Ted Templeman was too.”

By default, Donn Landee assumed the role of producer. Hagar had doubts about this, but the others were happy enough. The music was flowing out of them, and for Eddie, the band’s primary songwriter, working with Hagar was a revelation.

“From the first second, Sammy could do anything I threw at him,” Eddie told Rolling Stone. “It just opened up a whole new door. Finally, we felt like we were four people with a common vision. All of a sudden everything felt complete.”

Synth-heavy ballad Love Walks In was the best example of how Eddie’s writing was developing. It wasn’t the first Van Halen song based around synthesisers, nor was it their first ballad. But it had something new: a deep emotional quality.

“The first time Eddie played me that song, late one night, I got goose-bumps,” Hagar said. “It was so beautiful. I wrote the lyrics on the spot, and I sang it live with a hand-held mic. If you listen closely, it ain’t the best vocal sound in the world, but the performance is slammin’.”

More typical of Van Halen was the hard rock anthem Best Of Both Worlds. “It’s such a funky song,” Hagar said. “That’s R&B played full volume.”

There was also a goofy throwaway track, Inside, on which the new Van Halen made jokes at the expense of their former singer. If they sounded drunk on that track, it was, according to Hagar, a fairly accurate representation of the way these guys operated.

“I wasn’t a big drinker,” he said, “but the whole time we were making that record, everybody had a beer, constantly, except me. Ed would say, ‘I gotta take a piss.’ He’d come back with two beers – one for him and one for Al. And Al would do the same, only sometimes he’d bring two or three beers for himself and one for Ed. Ed would drink all day and night. I just wished I could play that great sober.”

Hagar could tolerate the drinking. What he couldn’t do was let the band finish the album without the aid of a recognised producer. It was too important for that.

“I felt that Donn Landee was just an engineer,” Hagar said. “And Ed wasn’t a strong leader who would produce a record. So I said, ‘We need a producer. How about Mick Jones?’ The guys said, ‘Sure.’ We were a very diplomatic band.”

Mick Jones, the guitarist and founding member of Foreigner, had known Hagar since the ’70s, when Montrose had toured with Jones’ former band, Spooky Tooth.

Jones had co-produced many of Foreigner’s biggest albums, including the multi-million seller 4.

“I thought Mick was a great songwriter, and would help us hone our songs,” Hagar said.

Jones was in LA when Hagar contacted him. Immediately, he agreed to go up to 5150 to hear some music and talk with the band.

“Sammy picked me up,” Jones recalled, “and as we were driving up to the studio I said, ‘What should I expect up there?’ He said, ‘Mick, you and I have been around awhile. But let me tell you, this is something else. Hold tight and enjoy the ride!’”

The first track the band played for Jones was a frenetic heavy-metal blowout, called Get Up. That was all it took for him to sign up as producer.

“I’ve never heard anything like that I my life,” he told them. “It sounds like four guys fighting inside the speaker cabinets, beating the shit out of each other. I’m in!”

Hagar’s instinct was right. A proven hitmaker, Jones bought his wisdom to bear on Van Halen’s new songs.

He helped turn Why Can’t This Be Love from a lengthy jam into a bona fide hit-in-waiting, and he encouraged the band to develop an Eddie Van Halen keyboard riff into the barrelling Dreams, coaxing out one of Hagar’s greatest ever vocal performances in the process.

“I was able to push Sammy to new heights,” says Jones. “Literally. He was singing so high that he was hyperventilating. He almost passed out.”

Jones took a different approach with Eddie Van Halen, just letting him do his thing.

“There’s not much I could have done to improve Eddie’s performances,” he said. “He was completely out there – not drug-wise, he just went into this trance state as he played.”

In these moments, Jones was reminded of the times he spent with Jimi Hendrix in the late ’60s, when Jones was the guitarist for French superstar Johnny Hallyday and Hendrix was the opening act on a European tour.

“When I worked with Eddie, it was the first time I’d met a guitar player who had a similar gift, who had that thing running through him from up above,” Jones said.

As work on the Van Halen album neared completion in December 1985, there was a buzz in the air at 5150.

“We all felt,” Hagar said, “that the music we were making was on such a high level, we just didn’t feel like anyone could touch that. There was a quote that was said maybe five times a day: ‘Wait ’til the fans hear this shit.’ We knew.”

But there was one person who wasn’t smiling. From the first day that Mick Jones arrived at 5150, he had sensed animosity from Donn Landee.

“Donn had expected he would produce the album,” Jones said. “So there was an atmosphere of resentment between him and me.”

Jones handled this with quintessential British reserve. Until, that is, Landee flipped.

“Donn had a bad moment,” Jones explained. “He locked himself in the studio and threatened to burn the tapes. It was a stand-off for almost a day – like one of those situations where somebody’s going to commit suicide. He was very highly strung. But in the end, we talked him down.”

Surprisingly, there were no repercussions for Landee. He cleared the air with Jones, and together they completed the final mix of the album in January 1986. “We had to work fast,” Jones said. “The band had a tour booked.”

On a sunny LA day in February, Mick Jones was driving in a convertible sports car, the top down, the radio tuned to a rock station, when a DJ announced in an excited voice: “Here’s something brand new from Van Halen!”

He played Best Of Both Worlds. Jones cranked up the volume.

“It sounded amazing,” he said.

He was certain that Van Halen had nailed it.

In early March came the first single.

Why Can’t This Be Love was an instant hit, rising to No.2 on the US chart.

The 5150 album was released on 24 March. It was an out-of the-box success.

“The album went platinum in one week,” Hagar said. “It was the fastest million-selling record in Warners’ history.”

The reconfigured Van Halen kicked off their first tour on 27 March in Shreveport, Louisiana.

The first song they played that night was Hagar’s 1982 solo hit, There’s Only One Way To Rock. Coming from Van Halen, it was a powerful statement of unity.

A few weeks later, before a show in Atlanta, Georgia, the four members of Van Halen were summoned to their manager’s hotel suite for a meeting. Champagne was poured, and the band were told that 5150 was at No.1.

“We fuckin’ partied!” Hagar said. “It was such a high. None of us had ever had a number one.”

There were attempts to spoil the party by a small number of old-school Van Halen fans loyal to Roth.

Hagar said: “I saw people in the audience holding up these banners: ‘FUCK HAGAR, WHERE’S DAVE?’ ‘SAMMY SUCKS! WE WANT ROTH!’

Hagar claims that Roth had a hand in this. “Dave would pay for these guys’ tickets,” he said. “But the truth is, we didn’t give a fuck. We were selling records faster than they could print them and we were selling out every show. We felt invincible.”

In July, Roth’s album Eat ’Em And Smile was released. It peaked at No.4 on the US chart.

Hagar insisted that Roth’s failure to match Van Halen’s No.1 was not the cue for another celebration.

“We didn’t care about him,” he said. “We were so absorbed in our own success.”

But the numbers would tell the story. Roth’s album sold one million to Van Halen’s five million. The enemy had been defeated.

When Sammy Hagar reflected on what he calls “my crazy ride with Van Halen”, he had mixed emotions.

But he was never a man to hold grudges.

“The bad shit doesn’t carry with me,” he said. “As bad as it was at the end of my time with that band, I have no resentments, no regrets.”

He said of 5150. “It was a mind-blower. To have the success that we had with that record – a second run for the band – it was kind of a miracle in rock’n’roll.

“The fans could have rejected it, but they bought into our trip.

“I would say that record was the highlight of my musical career. And the power in those songs – you can still feel it.”

This original version of this article appeared in Classic Rock in 2014.

Joe Satriani says that his 2024 tour with ex-Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar was “amazing” - but he admits that even he had difficulty playing some of those classic songs in the style of Eddie Van Halen.

Speaking to Guitar World magazine, Satriani describes how he performed on Hagar’s Best Of All Worlds tour, in which he and the singer were joined by another former Van Halen star, bassist Michael Anthony, and celebrated drummer Jason Bonham.

The setlist for this tour included hit songs from Hagar’s solo career and from his early tenure with the band Montrose, but the bulk of the set was drawn from the singer’s years with Van Halen.

Satriani recalls in Guitar World: “Opening with Good Enough, Poundcake and Runaround is amazing.”

But he adds: “I quickly realised that the order of Eddie’s embellishments is really important to the fans.

“Even though Ed would move things around, this audience knows the studio versions and they will want the scream here, the harmonic cascades there and the finger tapping there.”

Satriani says that the two songs that were most difficult to master were Summer Nights and Poundcake - the latter famously performed by Eddie Van Halen using an electric drill.

“The Poundcake drill is hard to nail,” Satriani admits. “The beginning of Summer Nights is difficult because of the picking and gain structure.”

He says of Summer Nights: “I don’t think I got the intro right until halfway into the tour. It felt so odd to my fingers.”

The full interview with Joe Satriani is in the new issue of Guitar World out now.

Toto guitarist Steve Lukather has dismissed reports that he will play on a ‘new’ Van Halen album.

This came about after De Telegraaf, the Dutch daily newspaper, reported that Alex Van Halen was working on a load of unreleased Van Halen recordings and that Lukather was helping him complete the project. The drummer said: "Ed and Steve Lukather were very good friends and they often worked together. There is no one who can do this process with me as well as he can."

In the same article, Lukather, is quoted as saying: "Did Alex say that? Oh, in that case the news is true. Ed, Alex and I were very close for years. It is true that we worked on it together."

However, over the weekend the Toto man took to Instagram and cleared up what all this means - whilst he’s involved, he is absolutely not playing guitar on any ‘new’ Van Halen tracks. "For the record: Ever since Alex Van Halen dropped some we were gonna work together I think there is a huge misunderstanding. "I will NOT EVER play a guitar note on a VH song ever!

"Al asked me to help him go thru a ton of unfinished recordings of Al and Ed writing and recording that never saw the light of day. As of now that's all I got.

"The fact that ANYONE would think for even a second that I would play anything on this is ridiculous. I have too much love and respect for that and ... I play nothing like Ed.. more as a co-producer or something. I am honored Al would ask me though.”

So that’s that sorted out.

Lukather and Van Halen go back a long way. The two guitarists both played on Michael Jackson’s Beat It and Eddie contributed to both Lukather’s 1989 solo album and his 2003 Christmas album SantaMental.

When this unreleased material will see light of day is unclear. Eddie Van Halen died in October 2020. His brother has talked about there being enough unheard tracks for another “three or four records.”

Speaking on Steve Jericho’s Talk Is Jericho podcast, Alex Van Halen said: "I've talked about it loosely, and I am rather superstitious, but I can say a couple of things that I've mentioned before. We're gonna go through the 'vault' and go through some of the musical ideas that were there."

He added: "There was some good stuff in there. And you have to remember, when in the thick of it, sometimes the really great stuff kind of passes you by. And it's not until you revisit it going, 'Whoa, I forgot about that. This kicks ass.' But that takes time. And you wanna do it right. I wanna do it right."

A remarkable report has emerged from the Dutch newspaper De Telegraf that says a new Van Halen album is in the works, with Alex Van Halen reaching out to Steve Lukather of Toto to fill in for the late Eddie Van Halen on electric guitar.

After Eddie’s death on 6 October 2020, the Van Halen story has been one of tribute tours that have never got off the ground. No one could have foreseen a reality in which we might hear a new album from the band.

Lukather and Eddie were close friends. Both famously played on Michael Jackson’s Beat It, a groundbreaking moment in pop history. They had jammed onstage together. Eddie even played bass guitar on Lukather’s 1989 solo debut, sharing writing credits on album opener Twist The Knife.

The pair would later embrace the festive spirt on Lukather’s 2003 Christmas album, Santamental, Eddie playing on Joy To The World. Alex Van Halen, Eddie’s older brother and drummer for the Californian rock legends, tells De Telegraf [paywalled] that Lukather has the bona fides to join him on this project.

“Ed and Steve Lukather were very good friends and they often worked together,” says Van Halen. “There is no one who can do this process with me as well as he can.”

It is no secret that there is a wealth of unfinished song ideas and archive material in the Van Halen vault.

Speaking to Rolling Stone upon the launch of his memoir, Alex shared some previously unheard material, recorded some time post-2000, that “never became anything” but now, perhaps, it’s time may come. And there are many more songs like this, riffs, melodies and the raw materials of songs that could yet be finished.

“They’re all little pieces,” said Alex. “A bunch of licks don’t make a song.” He then admitted that he had reached out to OpenAI about the potential for generative AI to analyse his brother’s ideas and synthesize something from them. He says he has Robert Plant in mind to sing on them.

There was no reporting on who might front the band on this new Van Halen album. David Lee Roth’s last studio work with Van Halen was in 2012 for A Different Kind Of Truth, which has had a troubled legacy. Roth did not like it.

Details about this post-Eddie Van Halen album are scarce. But De Telegraaf spoke to Steve Lukather after Toto’s show in the Netherlands, and he confirmed that he is involved.

“Did Alex say that? Oh, in that case the news is true,” said Lukather. “Ed, Alex and I were very close for years. It is true that we worked on it together.”

Steve Vai was the guitar-playing sidekick for David Lee Roth in the late ’80s, appearing on the first two albums that the singer made after leaving Van Halen - Eat ’Em And Smile and Skyscraper.

But as Vai tells MusicRdar, one of the best things about working with Roth was the chance to perform classic Van Halen songs in concert.

“I mean, every one of those songs was a classic!” Vai says. “Have you ever tried playing along to those parts? They’re so fun!

“Panama, Unchained, Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love... they’re all incredible. That band had written so many great songs.

“For a guitar player, those parts were so much fun. They’re like little orchestrations that fit really well together.

“It was all so well-organised. They were put together in such a cool and appropriate way that made them speak. It was fun, heavy and rock ’n' roll.

“I could play the same parts that Edward played - anybody can within reason. But it never sounded like him.

“At the time I knew not to even try because that would have been a dead giveaway I didn’t have anything to offer.

“That would also piss the fans off, because you are inviting comparisons and trying to fit into somebody’s shoes, as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, well I wear a different pair of shoes!’

“I guess if I had to pick a favourite, it was probably Panama, because I loved all the chords.

“Hot For Teacher was great, too," Vai says. "We would also do Pretty Woman, and I loved playing that.

“Such great tunes to play. Every young rock guitar player would be bound to enjoy going through all that stuff.”

They say you should never meet your heroes. But Steve Lukather has been talking about the time he met one of his – George Harrison. And the ex Beatle didn’t disappoint. Far from it.

In an interview with Guitar World, the Toto guitarist recalls crossing paths with the Harrison in 1992, just before he was due to commemorate bandmate Jeff Porcaro. "I had met George a few days before we were doing a tribute to Jeff Porcaro after he tragically passed. I said, 'Hey, man, I just wanted to say hi and thank you for my career.' He turned out to be the nicest, funniest guy I'd ever hung out with."

The two guitarists got chatting and Lukather, being the polite fella that he is, tentatively asked Harrison if he’d like to come along to the Porcaro show. “(I said) ‘I’ll leave a couple of tickets for you,’ never in a million years thinking he’d take them,” says Lukather. “Sure enough, the last thing we were going to do was A Little Help From My Friends, which was the Joe Cocker version, ironically!

“So, we’re all sitting in the dressing room getting the vocal parts down, and somebody goes, ‘There’s somebody here to see you.’ I said, ‘Dude, right now? Really!?’ They go, ‘No, I think you want to see them – this guy’s from Liverpool…’ I went, ‘No fucking way.’”

“The door opens up, and George is standing there. There were a lot of famous people in the room, but when a Beatle walks in, it’s got a different vibe, man.”

Too right there were other famous people there. Sharing a stage with Lukather that night was another guitar icon: one Eddie Van Halen, as well as Don Henley and David Crosby.

Lukather said he’ll never forget the night – he handed Harrison his old ‘59 Les Paul and the Quiet One joined Van Halen and Lukather on stage.

“I gave him my Les Paul (to use), which, just by him holding it, increased its value by, like, a million dollars,” recalls Lukather. “I know this because I got my guitar appraised, because there are pictures of me and George, and George is playing that guitar.”

That Les Paul may have been blessed by a Beatle, but Lukather says he has no intentions in parting company with it. "I'm never gonna sell that," he insisted. "My son Trev, a great guitar player, will get it.”

Mike Rutherford, star of Genesis and Mike + the Mechanics, has revealed that he recorded with Eddie Van Halen in the ’80s - but admits that the results of that collaboration may never be heard.

Speaking to My Planet Rocks, Rutherford recalled how his 1982 solo album Acting Very Strange was the catalyst.

"I think Eddie heard a song from my second solo album, which I sang – God knows how I thought of this! – and he rang me up and said, ‘Will you do some writing?’ I mean, my voice for God’s sake!”

The two guitarists arranged to meet in Los Angeles, where Van Halen lived and worked. But Rutherford was surprised when Van Halen scheduled their rendezvous.

“He says, ‘Hey Mike, come over about 1:30.’ And I thought, ‘Well, that’s going to work for me, a little lunch.’”

Van Halen then clarified: “a.m.”

“He starts at nighttime, and works through the night,” Rutherford recalled. “I just couldn’t really do that.”

They did get together eventually. “It was fun,” Rutherford said. “I mean, he was a great player.

“We had some sessions. We wrote some songs. Bits. I’m not quite sure…

But Rutherford admits that the results of these sessions may be lost.

“I can’t find the tape,” he said. “I’ve got two boxes of cassettes. I’m not sure I’m mad enough to go through them! Lots of cassettes.”

Is Eric Clapton’s solo in Cream’s version of Crossroads the greatest live blues-rock solo ever recorded?

Here, we pose the question - and bust a few myths in the process.

Robert Johnson’s Delta blues masterpiece, originally titled Cross Road Blues, was recorded by Cream at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium on 10 March 1968, and featured on the trio’s platinum-selling double album Wheels Of Fire.

This electrifying live version of Crossroads stands out for its break-neck tempo, the memorable open-position riff that Clapton devised, and a speedy turnaround lick that he refers to and refines throughout.

Jack Bruce’s bass playing is fierce, adventurous, and downright terrifying, while Ginger Baker pounds the skins as only he can, holding down the tempo and tying the three competing titans together. However, the track’s crowning glory is unquestionably Clapton’s solo - performed in two fabulous but deeply contrasting parts.

Robert Johnson recorded two takes of Cross Road Blues in 1936, two years prior to his death, aged just 27, with one released the following year and the other on a 1961 compilation.

The song’s legend is that of a man selling his soul to the devil in return for unworldly musical ability. The more likely truth is that when Johnson left the Robinsonville, Mississippi area where he was living, having already gained a few ideas from blues contemporary Son House, he stayed with Isiah ‘Ike’ Zimmerman in

Hazelhurst, Mississippi, from whom he picked up another, different set of techniques.

When Johnson returned to Robinsville a year later his playing was transformed, leading to the ‘devil’ myth.

Equally, there are various myths surrounding the Cream version of Crossroads.

Where was it actually recorded? Which guitar did Eric play? And was the final version a clever edit, as has been proposed?

In order to get to the bottom of this triple conundrum we spoke to Italian author and teacher Edoardo Genzolini, whose excellent book, Cream: Clapton, Bruce & Baker Sitting On Top Of The World: February-March 1968 (Schiffer Publishing LTD, 2023), is a nerd’s paradise.

We asked Edoardo why, considering there’s so much live footage of Cream, that there’s no film of this legendary performance?

“No, the only footage we have from when Cream played in San Francisco is in Tony Palmer's 1968 documentary, All My Loving,” he confirms. “According to Tony's journal, he and his BBC crew filmed Cream on 16mm at Winterland on Saturday, 2 March, and Saturday, 9 March. The 9 March shows were also professionally recorded for an official live release, and songs from that night such as Sleepy Time Time, Sunshine Of Your Love and NSU, appeared respectively on the later releases, Live Cream, Live Cream Volume II, and the box set Those Were The Days.”

Sadly, while Cream did play Crossroads on Palmer’s recorded performances (the band played a punishing two shows a night), it was the subsequent evening’s first set on 10 March that spawned the version we know and love, and no known film of that show exists.

“It does!” you may scream. “I’ve seen it!” Unfortunately, what you’ve almost certainly seen is a later Royal Albert Hall performance (Clapton wearing shorter hair and no moustache) with the Wheels Of Fire ‘Fillmore’ soundtrack cleverly edited beneath it.

Look around and you can find the original Albert Hall version; same video but a far scrappier Crossroads.

Another confusion surrounds whether the definitive Crossroads was recorded at San Francisco’s Winterland or Fillmore Auditorium. The fact is that Cream played both venues between 7-10 March.

As Genzolini explains, “The wording ‘Live at the Fillmore’ on Wheels Of Fire’s sleeve is mostly correct and applies to all the live songs except Traintime, which is from Winterland, 8 March. And, as sound engineer Bill Halverson reports in my book, ‘That string of shows had been booked for four nights at Fillmore. Bill Graham overbooked it, but Winterland [a much larger venue] was available, so we had to do Thursday 7 March at Fillmore, tear everything down, go Friday and Saturday at Winterland, tear it all down again and go back to Fillmore for Sunday 10 March.’”

As for which guitar Clapton played, the aforementioned Royal Albert Hall edited version, and many other mis-statings in magazine articles and websites, have it as Clapton’s red 1964 Gibson ES-335. However, all the photographic evidence - and Genzolini himself has unearthed many never before seen shots - shows that it was Eric’s psychedelically painted 1964 Gibson ‘Fool’ SG.

Genzolini explains: “The dozens upon dozens of photos I have discovered unarguably support this information: photos taken by the late Jim Marshall [not to be confused with the maker of Clapton’s 100-watt amps] from 10 March clearly show the band playing a venue that’s unquestionably the Fillmore. Also the black and white negatives of Frank M. Stapleton from the Fillmore show display a sequence of songs that’s easily recognisable by Clapton's finger positions on the fretboard, and which match the official setlist of 10 March from the Atlantic Records logs.”

So there’s little doubt the only guitar he had on this leg of the show was the fabled SG.

Genzolini concurs: “Eric played the ‘Fool SG until 12 April, the first of a three-night residence at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. On 13 April, he bought a Gibson Firebird I at the local Music City store and played the rest of the tour with that guitar.”

And for our final diversion from the music, despite various music historians claiming Crossroads to be an edited, overdubbed or shortened version, the evidence reveals it to be a straight take - exactly as heard on Wheels Of Fire.

Genzolini again: “[Fillmore promoter] Bill Graham's recording on reel-to-reel from the first set of 10 March, preserved at Wolfgang's Vault [a website dedicated to vintage posters, nostalgia and archive recordings], as well as an audience recording of the complete 10 March sets, proves it to be unedited.”

Wolfgang’s Vault itself underscores this view, saying, “Many have claimed Clapton's blistering solo is a result of studio overdubbing, but here it is on this raw two-track recording, fully intact, exactly as it went down, proving that one of the most blazing guitar solos of all time was indeed done spontaneously, live on stage.”

But back to the music - and Clapton’s solo. The first part, a tasteful 24-bar, mostly major pentatonic workout that was pretty quick by 1968 standards, is both perfectly paced and superbly executed.

Eric begins down at the 2nd fret, fourth string, and climbs up the fretboard until he climaxes with a B.B. King-style flurry between 9th and 12th frets. He finishes off with a neat sliding blues lick that takes him back to his 5th fret, pentatonic ‘home’.

It’s a gloriously wholesome 24 bars with a clear beginning, middle and end; a succinct story that, even on its own, represents a stunning moment in blues-rock. This clearly deliberate, if not necessarily conscious tactic, keeps Eric’s powder dry and ready for his second, rather more unfettered outburst.

Here, Clapton takes the roof off with a 36-bar break that starts with unison bends and double-stops, building inexorably to a frenzied climax with a final reworking of his turnaround lick. All this action takes place between the 15th and 18th frets. Among the techniques employed are hammer-ons, pull-offs, Eric’s trademark bends and vibrato, various forms of double-stops and much more. It’s on-the-spot composing of the highest order.

While analysing Crossroads musically is all well and good, it misses the point that here is a band of supreme equals, improvising at the ultimate peak of its powers. And remember, Clapton had yet to turn 23 years old and this recording, which still stands as a shining monument to blues-rock, was made 56 years ago!

Until their brief reunion in 2005, Cream’s 1968 ‘farewell’ tour which culminated on 26 November at London’s Royal Albert Hall, would be the last time the trio played together as a unit.

Clapton himself never liked his playing on Crossroads. “I actually have about zero tolerance for most of my old material, especially Crossroads,” he told MusicRadar in 2004. “The popularity of that song with Cream has always been mystifying to me.”

What annoys Eric is that during his second break he found himself playing over the wrong beat. While to most of us this creates an exciting tension that Clapton expertly releases as he finds his way back into time, it leaves the guitarist bemused at our adulation of his mis-step.

As Clapton told Mojo magazine: “Most of that solo is on the wrong beat... Instead of playing on the two and four, I’m playing on the one and three and thinking, ‘that’s the off beat’... No wonder people think it’s so good - because it’s wrong!"

Back to Edoardo Genzolini: “It undoubtedly is one of the best solos ever conceived for its lyricism, and its recognisable structure building up to a unique climax,” he says. “And what makes it one of the best is the fact that it was captured live on stage. It was clearly a good night for Cream, and we are lucky that [engineer] Bill Halverson and [Cream producer] Felix Pappalardi were there to record it.”

Wolfgang’s Vault’s agrees: “This is a blistering performance, in which Clapton, Bruce, and Baker all seem to be soloing simultaneously. Crossroads is a dazzling display of their fury and bravado when Cream was at the pinnacle of their powers.”

Whether or not we’ve convinced you that Crossroads is indeed the finest live blues performance on record, let’s leave the final word to another legendary six-stringer, the unashamed Clapton fan Edward Van Halen who called it simply, “one of the best live recorded songs ever.”

That’ll do for us!

Iron Maiden guitarist Adrian Smith has spoken to MusicRadar about his formative influences - and why shredding isn’t for him.

Taking time out from Maiden’s US tour, Adrian says: “When I first started playing, my hero was Ritchie Blackmore. But obviously you can't play like that when you start out.”

Instead, when Adrian and fellow Maiden guitarist Dave Murray formed their first band as teenagers in the early ’70s, they took inspiration from boogie legends Status Quo.

“We were playing Stones and Beatles stuff, and lots of Quo. You could get away with playing Quo. So Dave taught me barre chords, which is what Quo was all about.

“When I perfected that, I thought, well, if I can play one chord, I've got ‘em all. But my dad said, ‘You’re gonna learn properly’, and sent me to a guitar teacher. The teacher said, ‘Play an open C.’ I didn’t have a clue how to play any open chords.

“The guitar lessons didn't last. But Status Quo were the thing when I was a kid, because you could play it, you could get something going, it was very simple.”

He continues: “You get guys that have been playing guitar since they were kids, formal lessons, practicing three or four hours a day. I never did that. I wanted to be in a band. I wanted to sing, I wanted to play, I wanted to write. I didn't necessarily want to be a virtuoso.

“To me, the Thin Lizzy guitarists, Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham, they weren't really shredders, they were tasteful players, so that’s what I always aspired to. Something memorable, a bit of melody and feel, rather than just sheer technique, which I respect it, but it's like maths or something to me.

“I suppose if technique comes fairly easily to you, you can get carried away with it, because it is impressive. You can impress your girlfriend and then go and impress everyone else!

“But a guy like Eddie Van Halen was so much more than a shredder. He had great songs, great riffs, melodies, feel.

And there’s also a physical thing. Eddie Van Halen and Gary Moore were kind of animal players. They had huge hands, they were strong guys. [Yngwie] Malmsteen’s like six foot three and he’s just like a beast!

“So it's like sports. You are directed by your physical limitations. So just make the best of what you got.”

Eddie Van Halen’s performance on the Michael Jackson classic Beat It is widely recognised as one of the greatest guitar solos of all time. But his brother Alex, the drummer for Van Halen, wishes it had never happened - and describes it as “a mistake”.

In an interview with Rolling Stone to promote his forthcoming memoir Brothers, Alex talks about the time in 1982 when Eddie agreed to play on Beat It.

It was Alex’s belief that the four members of Van Halen should not work outside of the band. His logic was simple. It was all about maintaining a sense of unity within the group.

And so, as he reveals to Rolling Stone, he told Eddie not to play on the Michael Jackson song. He even thought of turning the tables and inviting Jackson to sing on a Van Halen track. But his appeals fell on deaf ears. Eddie lit up Beat It with that stunning solo. And all these years later, Alex Van Halen is still hurting about it.

“Why would you lend your talents to Michael Jackson? I just don’t f*cking get it,” he says. “And the funny part was that Ed fibbed his way out of it by saying, ‘Oh, who knows that kid anyway?’ You made the mistake! Fess up. Don’t add insult to injury by acting stupid.”

Eddie himself said of the fact that he never received payment for the Beat It solo: “I was not used. I knew what I was doing – I don’t do something unless I want to do it.” Eddie’s wife at the time, Valerie Bertinelli, was quoted as saying: “Ed never saw a dime, nor do I believe that he ever thought to ask to get paid. That was Ed.”

In the Rolling Stone interview, Alex Van Halen also states a belief shared by many Van Halen fans: that the band’s greatest music was created by the original line-up of Eddie and himself plus singer David Lee Roth and bassist Michael Anthony.

“The heart and the soul and the creativity and the magic was Dave, Ed, Mike, and me,” he says.

• Read more: “The world’s greatest guitarist is what everyone says. It’s kind of a dicey title”: A deep dive into the Van Halen catalogue proves the point

In a much-discussed excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, Brothers, Alex Van Halen writes to his late brother: “The world’s greatest guitarist is what everyone says. It’s kind of a dicey title. You never liked it.”

It’s understandable that Eddie might resist the title. Labels can be uncomfortable. But the truth is inescapable. Musical opinions are subjective, but the fact that Eddie Van Halen was the finest electric guitarist of his generation is a reality as irrefutable as gravity.

Like it or not, EVH, you were the best we’d ever seen. In six deep cuts from Van Halen’s golden era, we explain why…

I’m The One (Van Halen, 1978)

Eruption was the young Eddie’s definitive guitar statement, but I’m The One demonstrated he could do it in the context of a song. It also introduced the world to Van Halen’s phenomenal swing. Shuffles are always a fine art, but to groove this hard at 230bpm is scarcely believable.

Eddie throws in blazing lead fills and drops back into the riffs without once wavering from his telepathic sync with Alex Van Halen. It’s tempting to call it inhuman, but no computer has ever grooved like this. It could only be human, and it is humanity at its finest.

Spanish Fly (Van Halen II, 1979)

The first Van Halen album contained a lifetime’s worth of guitar innovation, so it is if anything even more impressive that Eddie was producing new tricks just a year later. Translating his Eruption tapping technique to classical guitar was one thing, but Eddie somehow lost none of his aggression in the process.

The ascending triplet sequence that begins at 0:18 is ferocious. Eddie picks the first note and the last three in every group of six, hammering on the others. Countless guitarists ripped it off, but none matched his fire, nor the effortless fluidity of his tapped phrases.

Romeo Delight (Women and Children First, 1980)

Although Eddie often used tapping for large interval leaps, he was capable of absurd fretting hand stretches, as he demonstrated on Ice Cream Man (1978) and on this underrated blaster that opened Van Halen’s legendary 1983 US Festival set. Many guitarists try to tap phrases like the face-melter at 1:55, but fretting it all with one hand meant Eddie kept his signature pick attack.

Without catching breath, EVH produces a series of the lairiest string bends, yanking his strings up four frets at a time like a jet-fuelled Albert King. We’ve somehow got this far without mentioning Eddie’s explosive tapped harmonics, so just check out this intro.

Push Comes to Shove (Fair Warning, 1981)

Van Halen’s funk crossover fares better than most thanks to Eddie’s unparalleled ability to sit behind the beat. It’s worth getting out headphones to hear the way his layered parts interweave. He swells those opening chords beautifully, perfectly controlling his guitar on the edge of feedback.

He doesn’t even pick a note for the song’s first 40 seconds, articulating everything with fretting hand slides while riding his volume control. The solo is an adventure in itself. Tendon-threatening stretches abound, with Allan Holdsworth-inspired shapes that find Eddie getting away with notes that would sound flatly wrong coming from almost anyone else.

Little Guitars (Diver Down, 1982)

Van Halen’s irresistible appeal came from the fact they were fun, and everything about Little Guitars is fun: the preposterous mini Les Paul that Eddie played it on, that irrepressible riff, Eddie grinningly admitting he “cheated” at the flamenco-inspired intro.

Where a classical virtuoso would play the bassline with the thumb and fingerpick the high notes, Eddie thought, “screw this, it’s too hard,” and applied his signature hammer-on approach to the bassline while tremolo picking the high notes with a plectrum.

While Little Guitars is playful, it’s far from stupid: it grooves as well as any Van Halen tune and the riff triumphantly uses major and minor triads, exemplifying how Eddie expanded hard rock harmony beyond power chords.

Drop Dead Legs (1984, 1984)

Another feelgood intro, and another example of Eddie’s mastery of the volume pot: that switch from clean to dirty when the drums enter comes from controlling the guitar, not stepping on a pedal. Many assume that Edward Van Halen, undisputed master of the Floyd Rose, played this riff with the whammy bar.

In fact, all those slinky moves come from fretting hand bends, hammers, and slides. Eddie’s tone walks the tightrope of being aggressive enough for metalheads and sweet enough for the radio, and his timing continues to be worthy of Nile Rodgers. The exuberant outro is the sound of brothers with a deep musical bond, and that’s how Van Halen should be remembered.

Alex Van Halen is set to release the last track he worked on with his brother Eddie as an extra in the audiobook version of his upcoming memoir, entitled Brothers.

The book, Brothers, is published on October 22 and Alex himself narrates the audio version. The new track, simply titled Unfinished, is according to Harper Collins the last piece of music the brothers wrote together before Eddie died, aged 65, in 2020.

And that would appear to be that as far as Alex Van Halen and music is concerned. The 71-year-old drummer raised eyebrows recently when it was revealed that he is auctioning off his entire collection of drums and musical equipment. Not least amongst his former bandmates.

“We reached out to him a dozen times,” Sammy Hagar said in an interview with Ultimate Classic Rock. “Email, text message, phone call, message on the machine… No response. I mean, we made every offer to get together or to just talk or to have breakfast, lunch or dinner. Go to the studio and play. Come to my house or I’ll come to your house. Let’s just do something. Let’s get together. And nothing.”

“I actually texted him on his birthday this month, and I didn’t hear anything back from him,” said the group’s bassist Michael Anthony in a recent interview with Ultimate Guitar. 

“I was pretty surprised when I heard about this auction… It appears like he's selling everything right down to his last drumstick. I know that he continues to grieve today over Eddie’s passing. And basically, Eddie was the only person that he actually ever played music with.”

Anthony did say that he was looking forward to reading Brothers. The book has been described by Harper Collins as “nothing like any rock ’n’ roll memoir you’ve ever read,” and Van Halen’s “personal story of family, friendship, music and brotherly love… (It’s his) love letter to his younger brother Edward (maybe ‘Ed’ but never ‘Eddie’), written while still mourning his untimely death.”

“I was with him from day one,” Alex writes in an excerpt from Brothers: “We shared the experience of coming to this country and figuring out how to fit in. We shared a record player, an 800-square-foot house, a mom and dad, and a work ethic…We shared a depth of understanding that most people can only hope to achieve in a lifetime.”

Van Halen has said of the memoir: “This is my tribute to my brother; my way of saying goodbye. Ed, I love you and miss you. When I see you again, I’m gonna kick your ass!”

No one can say Joe Satriani went into Sammy Hagar’s Best Of All Worlds Tour underprepared. Playing Eddie Van Halen’s guitar parts was not a job Satch took lightly. Indeed, he took it so seriously he collaborated with 3rd Power on a custom tube amp just for the tour.

But as the tour rolls on and songs are swapped in and out of the setlist, new challenges keep coming up. Like when Hagar says they should revisit his final studio album as Van Halen frontman, 1995’s Balance, and put its most successful single, Can’t Stop Lovin’ You, into the set. 

Speaking to Sirius XM’s Eddie Trunk, with a few shows under his belt, Satriani sounded wholly at ease with the gig, knowing where and when he had to nail Eddie’s solos just like the record and where there was room to put his own stamp on it, to “pay homage, be respectful, try just to memorise the stuff but at the same time celebrate it as it was intended”. 

But Can’t Stop Lovin’ You is a problem. How to get that clean electric guitar tone with his rig? This was going to be the challenge, covering all bases, and even for Eddie Van Halen this is tone out of left field, a sort of gussied up Nashville tone, a little LA studio polish and '80s pop on top. This, right now, is top of Satriani's to-do list. 

“When [Sammy] mentioned Can’t Stop Lovin' You I realised it was a technical issue for me because it’s got that super-clean guitar sound,” says Satriani. “Eddie’s got one or two or three guitars playing super-clean on that song, and so when Sammy mentioned it I said, ‘You’re gonna have to give me a few weeks’ notice to do some tweaking with my tech to make sure I can get that guitar sound together.’”

Satriani says he is approached this tour with Van Halen’s 1986 concert movie, Live Without A Net, as the reference. This was Eddie Van Halen on the road, playing a little fast and loose with his arrangements because, as Satch says, he would never play the same thing twice.

“Once they took it out on the road, I couldn’t find one live clip of Eddie playing the same song that was remotely similar!” says Satriani. “He was just so creative.”

Live Without A Net demonstrated that it was one of Eddie’s talents that he could assemble a live rig that offered an “all-purpose sound” that covered both the Roth and the Van Hagar eras of the band, but that, of course, pre-dated Can't Stop Lovin' You. “That’s what I’ve done with the [3rd Power] Dragon Amps,” says Satriani. “But I may need a separate amp to cover that just one song.”

Satch’s 3rd Power Dragon Amp was designed by the company's founder, CEO and designer, Dylana Scott, and it is nominative determinism in action, a real fire-breather with a Plexi/Cascade gain switch and all sorts of tricks for getting that juicy Van Halen saturation. As it turns out, Scott might already have offered Satriani a workaround.

“It’s funny, we started thinking about that, and she solved it really fast,” he says. “It was just switching out a tube to basically go in the other direction [gain-wise], because when you think about it that is a unique guitar sound for Eddie. That was really clean and, I dunno, pop-country, whatever he was trying to achieve, but it was beautiful sounding and I’ll do my best to get as close as I can to it.”

There’s no sign yet of Can’t Stop Loving You in the setlist. File that under coming attractions. The Best Of All Worlds Tour rolls on, with the Hagar-led band hitting Ridgefield, WA, on 14 August. Tickets are on sale for all dates. 

With Sammy Hagar and Joe Satriani presently tearing it up across the USA as The Best of All Worlds Tour gathers momentum, Hagar has offered a ringing endorsement of Satch’s bona fides, arguing that no one is better qualified to play the late Eddie Van Halen’s guitar parts live.

Speaking to Classic Rock, the Red Rocker said there were no shortage of players who could play EVH’s parts. But there’s a difference between being able to play them and really understanding them. He says hiring his Chickenfoot bandmate was the “smartest move” he could have made.

“A million guys could’ve done it, well, not a million,” said Hagar. “But you walk into a music store and you see a 12-year-old kid sitting on an amp with one of Eddie's guitars and he’s playing Eruption. These genius little kids can do it now, but he doesn’t necessarily know what he’s doing. You ask him to write a song like that, and he’s going, ‘Ah, I don't know how.’ You say, ‘Joe, write me a song like that;’ Joe'll write you a song like that ‘cause he knows where it's coming from.”

As far as we know, Satriani won’t be writing any songs with Hagar in the style of Van Halen. But in a Best of All Worlds set, they will be drawing heavily from Hagar’s time in Van Halen, and that presents Satriani with a lot of room for stretching out with his solos. 

Hagar describes Satriani is a “professor” and a “scholar” who knows Eddie’s style inside and out, and that means he can reference him even when improvising.

“A lot of people are going, ‘Joe, he doesn't play like Eddie.’ I know that – but he can,” said Hagar, noting that Satriani’s musical intelligence tells him when to deploy a workaround for the unplayable parts, when to put a twist on it, and when to run with the ball and cut loose.

“Certain solos are just iconic,” argued Hagar. “There’s just certain notes where it ends or starts. Joe’s got all that down. He’s not skipping over any of that shit. And when Eddie would start stretching out Joe starts stretching out off of Eddie’s theme, so it still sounds and feels like Eddie but you’re listening and going, ‘Oh! That’s Joe!’ It’s brilliant.”

Satriani has not been taking this gig lightly. After the lineup appeared on the Howard Stern Show and played a few Van Halen hits, he was pretty harsh on himself, promising never again to do live TV with no rehearsals. Did he miss some notes? Probably, but if he does, Hagar says only Satriani notices. The guitarist’s ear for detail is unbeatable.

Nailing Eddie Van Halen's era-defining electric guitar tone would of course be a huge part of the equation, and Satriani revealed he had been rethinking his rig for the tour, working with Dylana Scott of Nashville-based guitar amp company 3rd Power to develop the Dragon – a Marshall-inspired tube amp with vintage JTM45 and JMP flavours onboard.

It has a gain section that can dial in everything from Plexi crunch to OTT saturation. Phil X recently gave the 3rd Power Dragon a test drive and found it to be a fire-breather.

Hagar’s all-star lineup for the tour also features original Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony and Jason Bonham on drums. The band play the Alpharetta Ameris Bank Amphitheatre, Georgia, tonight. Tickets are selling fast.

By the time Black Sabbath began their Never Say Die UK tour on 16 May 1978 in Sheffield, the wheels were perhaps starting to come off the Ozzy-era of the band. And it didn't help that their support band was starting to get more attention than them. But looking back now, Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler can see Van Halen's presence on the tour as more of a double-edged sword.

"They were great – I really liked them", Geezer tells Brave Words in a new interview promoting his autobiography, Into The Void: From Birth To Black Sabbath-And Beyond. "They did one of my favourite all-time Kinks songs You Really Got Me, so I immediately really liked them from the cover of that and that was one of their first hits singles. But as the tour went on, cracks started to appear between the upcoming LA rockers and the established Birmingham godfathers of heavy.

"David Lee Roth became like an Ozzy clone, and it was really upsetting Ozzy at the time," explains Geezer. "Whatever Ozzy did one night, David Lee Roth would say the same thing the next night, and it was upsetting Ozzy." There was also tension between Tony Iommi and Eddie Van Halen on the guitar side. 

"Eddie was doing these extended solos, so Tony had to have word about that," adds the bassist. The two would later become close friends, but Geezer also saw distinct advantages to Van Halen's presence on the tour. 

"But it was good because they brought in this whole younger audience for us and they actually brought in some women and girls [laughs] that we'd never really had at our gigs. But what pissed us off was Warner Brothers completely concentrated on Van Halen and it was almost like we were the support band," says Geezer. "Warner Brothers were like, 'You're old hat and Van Halen are the future'. They did everything for Van Halen and nothing for us – no promotion for us whatsoever. But [Van Halen] were great guys and a great band [and there were] long-lasting friendships – especially Tony and Eddie." 

Sabbath's time would roll around again with Ozzy, and their last reunion even birthed a new studio album in the shape of 13. The 2013 Rick Rubin-produced album saw a back-to-basics approach with Sabbath seemingly going back to their roots, but it's becoming clear that some of the band were not satisfied with the results. 

"When we did the 13 album that took forever," reflects Geezer. "And some of it was great, and some of it not so good. It just didn't have the same feeling as the old '70s albums or even Heaven & Hell… I think the longer you take over something, it becomes forced in the end and you lose the initial rawness and feel of the music."

Neither the bassist or bandmate Iommi believe they would repeat the experience of working with Rubin again.

"Nope," he laughs. "He certainly wouldn't work with me ever again, or Tony. Tony was incredibly disappointed with him. In fact Tony took some of the master tapes and redid them."

Ozzy Osbourne himself lamented to Stereogum in 2022 when asked if he felt good about the record being their final creative statement. “Not really, because, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t really get a charge from the album," the singer said. "Although [producer] Rick Rubin is a good friend of mine, I wasn’t really… I was just singing.

“It was like stepping back in time, but it wasn’t a glorious period," he continued. "Though Geezer did a lot of lyric writing for me, which he’s very, very good at. It wasn’t an earth-shattering experience for me." Ozzy also suggested in the same interview that he didn't regard 13 a true Black Sabbath album because original drummer Bill Ward didn't play on it – Rage Against The Machine sticksman Brad Wilk performed session duties for the record. 

On that note, Geezer admits he still doesn't know why Bill Ward was fired from the band after they'd started working on 13 "I still haven't got an answer from anybody [as to] who fired him and why," he tells Brave Words. "I mean there's been rumours about his health and that kind of thing but I was listening to stuff that we were doing with Bill on that 13 album and I love it – it really does sound like the old Sabbath, the first three albums, the drumming on it and I love that kind of thing."

Ward later turned down the band's offer to play with the band on "two or three songs" when they toured and felt they "couldn't risk it" when it came to possible health issues once the world tour was underway. But perhaps there's a chance to put things right to some extent… 

"Ozzy's been texting me about doing one final show and that's it, with Bill," Geezer reveals. "But it's just not gonna happen… but then I always said the original Black Sabbath wouldn't get back together and then the next day the next Ozzy called me up said, "[We need] to get the band back together!' You say these things and hopefully if a miracle happens it would be great to do it but it's up to everybody's health and how they feel about it."

Geezer's perspective is clear on the matter though

"I'd love it to happen to do a final [show] even if it's just one song with all four of us with Bill on the drums. It certainly couldn't be a tour, it could only be one or two shows and three or four songs I suppose. But that would be it, it wouldn't be a tour or anything like that."

• Geezer Butler: “Drugs never made me play better. I’d think so at the time - then when listening to it back sober, I’d have to redo everything”

You never know what will happen when the Foo Fighters are onstage. Last night (11 May) at their Welcome To Rockville festival appearance at Daytona International Speedway, Florida, Dave Grohl launched into what we thought was him playing Van Halen's Eruption. And at first his tapping looked legit, until Grohl abruptly stopped playing, the camera cut sidestage and the real player was revealed; Wolfgang Van Halen.

After the prank with Eddie Van Halen's son revealed (Wolfgang's own Mammoth WVH band had played a set earlier that day), he then launched into an impromptu burst of Hot For Teacher's intro with the Foo Fighters' Josh Freese accompanying on drums. 

"Don't even get us started on that Van Halen shit," launched Dave Grohl. "We can play that shit all night." And with Wolfgang involved, we'd be more than happy to hear it – he really can play his dad's music incredibly well and already has form for having a lot of fun doing it with the Foos… 

• "There are no rules" – Eddie Van Halen: the last guitar mag interview

Dweezil Zappa has always had a taste for the ambitious but there is one project that he has had boiling away in the background now for decades that might be his own musical Everest, and he insists he has every intention of finishing it.

Long-term Zappa followers will know of this track. It’s titled What The Hell Was I Thinking? and it features “at least” 40 different A list guitar players, including Brian May, Joe Walsh, Eric Johnson, Steve Vai, Steve Lukather, Steve Morse, Brian Setzer, Warren DeMartini, Jimmie Vaughan, Robben Ford, Angus and Malcolm Young – plus a pair of solos from Eddie Van Halen.

Speaking to The Vinyl Guide podcast, Zappa told host Nate Goyer of the myriad problems he has had in putting this together, and why he is finally in a position to finish the track now that he has Atmos technology in his studio to mix it.

“This project is definitely going to be great for Atmos because it is a totally immersive experience, so that’s what I am going to focus on when I really have time to try to wrap it up,” he says. “But I have been working on that thing since 1990, or even 1989. It’s a long time coming.”

And not without its problems. One of which were the original recordings, which were tracked to analogue tape on a machine with inconsistent tension. As the reel got to the end the tension changed, ever so slightly changing the pitch of what was recorded, creating problems for overdubs.

“Let’s say you recorded guitar, bass and drums; you wouldn’t really hear the slight pitch change but when you tried to do an overdub it would never stay in tune, so you would have to redo all of the guitar and bass stuff, so that it would stay stable,” says Zappa. “There became a few things like that where some of the stuff that got recorded, I couldn’t add overdubs because it would be tracked in a way where it would gradually be going sharper.”

Zappa says he made progress when transferring the old analogue recordings to Sony 48-track but “out of nowhere” the machine started to erase tracks of its own accord.

“There are a bunch of things it ate, so then I had to go back to the original analogue tapes and transfer them to a different digital format,” says Zappa, “and I had to do different overdubs.”

This was all before recording’s digital transformation. Getting the original tracks onto the computer was the next step, but even then things didn’t go so easily, and when Zappa’s hard drive got damaged, he would have been forgiven for thinking the project cursed. What The Hell Was I Thinking? was aptly named.

Once more, Zappa was sent back scrambling through the old analogue tapes to transfer them to his DAW. But all these various crises have been a blessing in disguise, giving him time to develop the over-arching concept of the recording, and with Atmos recording technology in his studio, he can give it an immersive audio treatment that would have been impossible had he finished it in the ‘90s.

“I am not worried about it,” he says. “It will be what it will be when it is time to hear it!”

And what it will be will be quite something. Mark Knopfler has already given us the all-star guitar track of 2024 with the charity rerecording of Going Home, the theme from Local Hero. Perhaps 2025’s will be What The Hell Was I Thinking?

“The idea of this piece of music was that it was a continuous piece of music that’s morphing all the time,” he says. “It changes from style to style, and the atmosphere where the music is taking place also changes – so it might go from being like an old-time record sound to a live music hall.”

In a 2020 interview with Sunset Sound Recorders, Zappa described it as “an audio movie” – an instrumental that was just guitar, bass and drums, with him teasing new sounds out of the electric guitar. “I make the guitar sound like bagpipes,” he said. “It is the guitar taking on these different roles. And then these guest appearances take place. From moment to moment the style of music changes, and then you just hear different guitar players falling out of the speakers.”

One of those guitar players will be Eddie Van Halen, and Zappa says his part is particularly special, having been tracked at 5150 Studios using the original guitar amp he used on the first Van Halen records.

“He hadn’t used it in a long time,” says Zappa. “At that point he was using the 5150 amp that he had designed with Peavey, but we pulled out the old amp.”

As with all the guests, Zappa would be in the room with them directing traffic. He got Yngwie Malmsteen to play over a slow blues track. 

“Yngwie Malmsteen’s on there. I made him play on a really slow blues,” he says, “That was fun because he still plays seven billion notes, but at a really slow tempo on the track, so he sounds even faster.”

When Brian May got to Metropolis Studios in West London and found out his part was in 5/4, he panicked, insisting he couldn’t play in that time signature. Zappa says he did just fine and the session gave him a unique insight into how May recorded.

Joe Walsh rocked up at the studio with a small Fender amp and a talk box and done his bit in under 10 minutes. But Eddie Van Halen? Having him at his disposal was like having “a toy Eddie Van Halen” with which you could make any EVH sound come out of him. And by the sounds of things, that’s exactly what Zappa did.

“He has two solos, but the main solo is like all his greatest hits of all of his best guitar licks,” says Zappa. “And it was kind of a joke because I said, ‘Let’s do a thing where you put all these licks that are from your solos and just see if you can find a way to connect them.’ He said, ‘Well which licks?’ And I would have to show him. ‘Play this lick!’ So he was saying, ‘What don’t you play it – you sound just like me anyway.’”

Zappa can’t tell Goyer exactly when he is going to finish this work. There is the small matter of his upcoming Rox(Postroph)y Tour, which opens on 1 August in Phoenix, Arizona, and is another crazy ambitious set that celebrates the 50th Anniversary of his father Frank’s Apostrophe (’) and Roxy & Elsewhere albums.

But once that wraps it sounds like Zappa is on the home straight and sooner rather than later What The Hell Was I Thinking? will be a case of What The Hell Have I Done? In the meantime, Zappa’s invite remains open to Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and David Gilmour should they want to join in the fun, and there are still some players he wants to record if possible.

Check out the full conversation at The Vinyl Guide podcast. See Dweezil Zappa for full tour dates.

The Beat It solo’s tortuous tale of how it was magicked into reality is only ever half told. 

Van Halen wasn’t first choice for the gig, debate rages over what remuneration Van Halen received for his input, and how - preposterously - he would wind up fighting with himself for the number one spot. 

There are speakers bursting into flames, an unexplained knocking sound and just who did buy those two packs of beer?

Here for the first time is the full twisting story of how the track was made, recorded and solo’d and then entirely re-recorded to make Eddie’s work the centre-piece miracle that still elicits joy and praise over 40 years later. But first, let’s turn back the clock.

The year was 1982 and still hot from Off The Wall, Jackson and team – legendary producer Quincy Jones, super-engineer Bruce Swedien and Brit songwriting genius Rod Temperton – put the band back together for its sequel. An album that would go on to be the biggest-selling album of all time – Thriller.

But by 1982 the mood had switched away from the mellow grooves of Rock With You and wary of disco being a dirty word Jones was in a quandary as the new album took shape. While Wannabe Starting Something was funky and Thriller was exciting, what the album needed was something tough…

In his autobiography Q, Jones says “Michael was writing music like a machine. He could really crank it up. In the time I worked with him he wrote three of the songs on Off the Wall, four on Thriller and six on Bad. At this point on Thriller I’d been bugging him for months to write a Michael Jackson version of My Sharona [the spikey new-wave hit by The Knack that had proved a hit on both sides of the Atlantic]. 

“One day I went to his house and said, “Smelly [Jones’ affectionate nickname for Jackson], give it up. This train is leaving the station.” He said, “Quincy, I got this thing I want you to hear, but it’s not finished yet. I took him to the studio inside his house. He called his engineer and we stacked the vocals on then and there. Michael sang his heart out. The song was Beat It.”

"I wanted to write the type of song that I would buy if I were to buy a rock song," Jackson told Ebony in 1984. "That is how I approached it, and I wanted the children to really enjoy it – the school children as well as the college students."

Jones loved the new track and moving the sessions to Westlake Studios A and B on Santa Monica Boulevard West Hollywood, set about giving the demo the full treatment alongside trusted engineer Bruce Swedien.

It’s worth taking a moment to convey just how seriously Jones and Swedien took the recording process around this time. The pair worked in slick partnership, always eager to work with new equipment and, between them, armed with decades of tricks and techniques. 

For example, Swedien had built his own custom drum riser and would insist that all drums were recorded upon it. “It’s 8’ square, 10” off the ground. It is very heavily constructed, braced and counter-braced. The surface is natural wood and is unpainted,” he explains in his autobiography Make Mine Music. 

“The reason I wanted the drums to be up off the floor is to keep the low-frequency drum sounds, such as the bass drum and tom-toms, from coupling with the surface of the floor and entering the sound pick-up area of the microphones of the other instruments in the session. 

"By putting the drum set up on my drum platform those low sounds never have a chance of connection with the floor and creating off-mic, obscure, secondhand pick up.”

Soon Swedien reasoned that if it sounded good for drums, why not record vocals on it too? Placing Jackson on the platform and surrounding him with studio Tube Traps, Swedien would painstakingly position them to create the perfect soundfield before capturing his vocals with vintage mics.

But he was no slouch on the latest tech too. At the time the hot new innovation in the best studios in the world was SMPTE. ‘Striping’ - as it was known -  a track of tape with a digital code allowed two tape machines to lock together. Thus a 24-track tape machine, side by side with its ‘slave’, locked together, would effectively give you a 48-track machine. Well, 46 - minus two for the timecodes. 

The SMPTE box would listen to the code on both tapes and run them in perfect lockstep. Rewind on one machine and hit play and the other would do the same. Magic.

Swedien used the technology to instigate his mysterious “Acusonic recording process”. He would record a performance on multiple synchronised tapes as he’d grown convinced that each time a tape was played it sounded a little worse. Soon he began the laborious process of putting one tape away as the master while continuing to work with the other. Upon mixdown he could swap back to the fresh, unplayed tape and spin it in as fresh as the moment it was recorded.

Thus Beat It was taking shape across two synced together 24-track tapes and was effectively in the can. But there was something missing. Eager to take his “rock track” experiment to the next level, Jones hatched an idea to further stamp it with authenticity. 

Calling Mr Van Halen…

Quincy Jones had first worked with Toto guitarist Steve Lukather on his album The Dude after being introduced to him by songwriter and producer David Foster. Jones had found him an excellent creative foil, devising guitar parts on the spot and encouraging the guitarist to “do his thing” wherever guitar was needed. 

He had already made use of his input on Thriller’s The Girl Is Mine featuring Paul McCartney, but it was Lukather’s friendship with Van Halen’s Eddie Van Halen that would prove more pivotal for Beat It. 

Obtaining Lukather’s endorsement and Van Halen’s number, Jones made an out-of-the-blue call to the guitarist to request his services for a solo. But being called by Quincy Jones to play a solo on a Michael Jackson record? This is a wind-up, right? Van Halen hung up on his prank caller four times before wising up.

“I went off on him. I went, “What do you want, you f-ing so-and-so!” Van Halen explained to CNN in 2012. “And he goes, “Is this Eddie?” I said, “Yeah, what the hell do you want?” “This is Quincy.” I’m thinking to myself, “I don’t know anyone named Quincy.” 

"He goes, “Quincy Jones, man.” I went, “Ohhh, sorry!” [laughs] “What can I do for you?” And he said, “How would you like to come down and play on Michael Jackson’s new record?” And I’m thinking to myself, “OK, ABC, 1, 2, 3 and me? How’s that going to work?” 

"I still wasn’t 100% sure it was him. I said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll meet you at your studio tomorrow.” And lo and behold, when I get there, there’s Quincy, there’s Michael Jackson and there’s engineers. They’re makin’ records!”

But what about the rest of the band that bears his name. What would they say about their star player batting for the other side? “I said to myself, ‘Who is going to know that I played on this kid’s record, right? Nobody’s going to find out.’ Wrong!” he laughs. “Big-time wrong.”

With Jackson’s vocals and basic guide percussion (Jackson banging on a drum case) on the master tape and the demo spanned out across the slave reel, there was bags of room on the master for Van Halen to work his magic. And mindful of the fact that Eddie liked it loud and his golden ears were far too valuable to risk, Swedien was eager to dip out of the session.

Speaking to Future Music magazine Bruce Swedien explains, “When Eddie came in to play, he was in Studio B at Westlake and I was in Studio A with Michael and Quincy, but I went in there when he was tuning and warming up and I left immediately. It was so loud, I would never subject my hearing to that kind of volume level! 

"I didn't record that solo, I hired his engineer - I figured his hearing would probably be a little suspect right now anyway.”

Thus button-pushing duties fell to Van Halen’s regular engineer Don Landee who arrived with the maestro at Westlake studios for a quick briefing from Jones. 

Van Halen explains: “I asked Quincy, “What do you want me to do?” And he goes, “Whatever you want to do.” And I go, “Be careful when you say that. If you know anything about me, be careful when you say, “Do anything you want!” And with that the pair were left to their own devices, but upon listening to the track Van Halen was less than impressed.

Perhaps naive as to the landscape of rock, the 16-bars of backing Jones and Jackson had laid out for Van Halen to explore were the repetitive chugging, one-note chant that still exists on the finished track from 2:21 to 2:49. While Jones and Jackson saw it as a rhythmically diverse and thrilling playground, for Van Halen it was a 16-bar wasteland with zero musical peaks or valleys for the ambitious soloist to traverse. 

Feeling hemmed in by the scant musical progression on offer, Van Halen suggested that it’d be far better for him to solo over the song’s verse instead and that the song be rearranged so that his solo could “have some place to go”. 

As chins were being rubbed in Studio B, Jones and Swedien and Jackson had other fish to fry, along the corridor in Studio A. There was the small matter of knocking out an E.T album for Steven Spielberg…

Yes, even as far back as 1982 entertainment corporations were sufficiently savvy to plunder every possible merchandising avenue, and with all the signs that Spielberg’s upcoming family-baiting, sci-fi weepy, ET: The Extra Terrestrial, was going to be a smash, they needed product on shelves to mop up the hysteria. With the home video market in its infancy, the team reasoned that if punters couldn’t watch the movie at home, then at least they could listen to it. 

Thus a deal had been struck between Universal Pictures, MCA Records, Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson to make a soundtrack album and storybook featuring John Williams’ movie score alongside Jackson narrating a cut-down storyline and new songs and music by regular Jackson collaborator Rod Temperton. 

Jones and Jackson reasoned that with Williams’ music in the can, the studio booked and the talent already assembled, how hard could it be to cut two albums at once?

Thus - bizarrely - Thriller (and Beat It) were completed side-by-side with E.T’s soundtrack sharing the same studio and production team. 

Cutting the tape

Back in Studio B, and with Jones and Swedien’s backs turned, Van Halen and Landee had found a solution. If Landee edited in a copy of the verse, lengthening the song and ending his solo with a chorus Van Halen would have his dream 16-bar playground. 

Thus Landee took a razor blade to the two-inch 24-track master tape of an unreleased Michael Jackson song, making a gutsy call in order to deliver the canvas his boss required. 

Firing up a modified Hartley Thompson amp that Van Halen had borrowed from guitarist Allan Holdsworth (an HT45 combo and HT45S cab), his favourite Echoplex tape delay and, of course, his Frankenstrat, two takes later the deed was done and lightning was captured in the bottle. But what would the fastidious Thriller team - not least Jackson himself - think of Van Halen and Landee’s hasty rework?

Speaking to CNN Van Halen says, “I was just finishing the second solo when Michael walked in. And you know artists are kind of crazy people. We’re all a little bit strange. I didn’t know how he would react to what I was doing. So I warned him before he listened. I said, “Look, I changed the middle section of your song…”

“Now in my mind, he’s either going to have his bodyguards kick me out for butchering his song, or he’s going to like it. And so he gave it a listen, and he turned to me and went, “Wow, thank you so much for having the passion to not just come in and blaze a solo, but to actually care about the song, and make it better." He was this musical genius with this childlike innocence. He was such a professional, and such a sweetheart.”

With the musical transaction complete within half an hour and Jackson’s seal of approval, there was just the small matter of extinguishing a flaming monitor… 

The story goes that during the recording of Van Halen’s solo his playing was so “hot” that a speaker in the control room burst into flames. "The speaker is on fire! This must be REALLY good,” exclaims Rod Temperton on Van Halen’s solo in a BBC documentary about the making of the album. 

However, given that Temperton wasn’t present it’s Jones' version of events that are probably more likely. Yes, during the mixing process for the album a speaker did catch fire, but Van Halen’s solo wasn’t to blame. “We knew the music was hot. On Beat It the level was literally so hot that at one point in the studio, Bruce Sweden called us over and the right speaker burst into flames,” says Jones in Q. “We’d never seen anything like that in forty years in the business.”

But while spontaneously combusting monitor rumours can be extinguished, Van Halen DID leave the team with an even bigger problem. Beat It spanned two 24-track tapes, a master and a slave, locked with that SMPTE stripe. 

But by cutting one of the tapes, inserting a new section and gifting Van Halen his playground, Landee had committed the cardinal sin of SMPTE and inadvertently destroyed the continuity of the code. Now the two halves of Beat It wouldn’t play together… So while Jackson’s vocals and Van Halen’s solo were safe and sound together on one tape, the second, containing the in-progress backing track was cut adrift.

Returning to Westlake the next day Jones and Swedien realised that they had a dilemma. Their perfect Jackson vocal and blazing Van Halen solo were now trapped on a tape separated from the rest of the track. And as for bouncing them down or transferring to the other tape? Don’t be ridiculous. There was only one thing for it. 

Jones made a call to Steve Lukather. “You gotta make the track backwards to what you can hear on the tape. I don’t want to do Michael’s vocals again. I want to keep it first generation. I’ve got Eddie’s solo and you’ve gotta make it work,” explained Jones…

Rebuilding Beat It

With Westlake maxed out with the Thriller-plus-E.T. double-header, Lukather was instead dispatched to Sunset Sound with the Jackson-plus-Van Halen master tape along with fellow Toto luminary, drummer Jeff Porcaro and engineer Humberto Gatica.

The tape featured just three sounds: Jackson’s multi-tracked, multi-layered lead and backing vocals, Van Halen’s blistering solo and the sound of Michael Jackson beating on a drum case marking time on beats two and four - a sound which, if you listen carefully, is there in the final mix. 

Toto’s guitarist and drummer would have to recreate everything else on a track they’d not heard in full (or so far had any part in) from scratch…

Where to start? Listening closely, Porcaro tuned into the bleed from Jackson’s headphones and taking a pair of sticks was able to play along with the distant backing track, tapping the sticks together to create his own human click track. Once committed to a new tape synced with the master he was then able to play along, nailing Beat It’s drum track in just two takes.

With Beat It’s beat in place and taking inspiration from Van Halen’s scorching solo, Lukather fired up a quad-speakered Marshall cab and amp and gave it both barrels for his rhythm guitar parts. And, although by no means a bassist, Beat It’s basic bass meant that Lukather was able to nail that too. Thus, after a few hours the pair had ostensibly turned back time and rebuilt the track bigger and better than ever before.

Time to get Q’s verdict… And he wasn’t happy. 

While he admired the duo’s game-saving performance, when slung alongside Van Halen’s solo it was all getting a little too heavy. "Q said, 'We love it but Lukey it's too much, I've got to get this on pop and r’n’b radio and it's just too metal,” explains Lukather to Rick Beato. “You've got to come back down. Get that little Fender of yours out, don't turn it all the way up. Give it the gas… but don’t…” Understanding Jones’ vague diktat, Lukather reached for his old Paul Rivera-modded Fender ‘68 Deluxe black face and instead recorded a sound that’s solid rock but easy on the metal.

And just as Van Halen had nixed the idea of his boring solo spot, so Lukather found Beat It’s original two-chord guitar part more than a little lacking. 

The original verse was a relentless thrash with Jackson’s writing at the time still in its infancy. Wanna Be Starting Something, for example, is similarly just two chords, C and D and inspired by Jones to create something like the naggingly repetitive My Sharona, Jackson done just that. Assuming that the repetition was the song's strength Jackson had kept it simple. Now Lukather wanted to amp it up.

“They had the same riff going for something like 45 bars but I was like, 'Nah, try this, it makes it more interesting',” says Lukather of his variation that you hear at bar five and thirteen in the verse. “I had to sell them on it but they finally went for it.” Add synths from fellow Toto bandmate David Paich and Lukather and team had officially saved the day. But wait a second… What’s that sound?

Who’s a-knocking?

There’s still debate as to the origins of the strange knocking sound that can be heard at 2:44, immediately before Van Halen’s solo flight.

One theory is that it’s Van Halen himself, knocking to get into the recording booth, eager to begin his solo. Another is that it’s an impromptu percussion performance by Jackson. Thriller’s sleeve notes give a credit to Jackson as “Drum Case Beater” which would solve the mystery, but, as we observed earlier, this is referring to the two and four beat extra ‘thwack’ Jackson performed alongside his vocal.

The sound is therefore most likely Van Halen dragging his plectrum a few clicks down the bottom E string or simply his guitar strap or tremolo arm flexing and creaking as he makes himself comfortable.

It’s remarkable that the sound is there at all. The super-fastidious Swedien – a man who would religiously isolate and fix every kick pedal squeak or mic stand thud – would have normally nuked it but it’s clear that Jones and Jackson wanted it left on board as part of the performance. 

“Even when we do backgrounds. Michael does little vocal sounds and snaps his fingers and taps his foot,” says Swedien in Make Mine Music. “I keep those sounds as part of the recording. I absolutely love those little sounds as part of Michael’s sonic character,” Obviously the team felt likewise about Van Halen’s pre-performance creaking.

The sound at 2:44 proves to be the perfect precursor for the carnage to follow. It’s easy to picture Van Halen firing up a chainsaw before delivering his devastation. With it Beat It’s solo doesn’t so much ‘begin’ as get pistol-whipped awake, revved up and then uncaged. 

Money’s too tight…

Needless to say upon the track’s release on Valentine’s Day, February 14th 1983 the song proved a huge smash, coming off the back of Billie Jean it cemented the album’s reputation, making good on Jackson’s Thriller aim that “every track would be a killer.” The track went on to become a five-times platinum number one single, selling seven million copies worldwide.

All of which must have meant quite the payday for Van Halen’s 20 seconds of work (31 including knocking and divebomb to finish)… But by now you’ve probably deduced that this story can’t end like that.

One take on Beat It’s financial aftermath would be that Van Halen was done up like a kipper. As a friend of Lukather (and summoned by none other than Quincy Jones) Van Halen simply turned up and did his thing as a favour with no talk of payment for his time and effort. He reworked the song, conjured up one of the most amazing guitar solos ever and helped bring Jackson’s music to a whole new league of fans… And got zilch.

Van Halen debates this take on events. “I was a complete fool, according to the rest of the band, our manager and everyone else,” Van Halen says. “I was not used. I knew what I was doing – I don’t do something unless I want to do it.” And writing in Edward Van Halen: A Definitive Biography, author Kevin Dodds quotes Eddie’s wife at the time Valerie Bertinelli confirming that “Ed never saw a dime, nor do I believe that he ever thought to ask to get paid. That was Ed.”

Jones has stated that he provided beer at the session by way of thanks but even this scant offering is upturned by Van Halen himself. “Actually, I brought my own, if I remember right,” said Van Halen to CNN, which would mean that he literally got nothing for transforming the track.

"Certain people in the band at the time didn't like me doing things outside the group," the Van Halen News Desk reported Eddie as saying. "But Roth happened to be in the Amazon or somewhere, and Mike [Anthony] was at Disneyland and Al [Van Halen] was up in Canada or something. So I thought, well, they'll never know."

But - of course - given Van Halen’s unique style they would find out sooner or later. “I was in a parking lot on Santa Monica near Sweetzer, the 7-Eleven, and there were a couple of butch Mexican gals with the doors open on their pickup truck and the new Michael Jackson song Beat It came on,” says Roth in Kevin Dodds’ book. “I heard the guitar solo and thought, now that sounds familiar… Somebody’s ripping off Ed Van Halen’s guitar licks. It was Ed, it turned out and he had gone and done the project without discussing it with anybody.”

The rest of the band were furious. They’d all pledged that any external projects would have to be mutually agreed by the rest of the band and now here’s Eddie getting all the Van Halen limelight (for none of the cash). And things were about to get worse in the eyes of his bandmates…

Van Halen’s album 1984 had been ascending the charts with a genuine shot at number one. Writing in his book Speed of Sound, Thomas Dolby came face to face with the band's dissatisfaction with Van Halen’s generous nature. 

Visiting Van Halen’s mock Tudor Mullholland mansion to record his contribution for Dolby’s Easter Bloc album track and Close But No Cigar single he got the cold shoulder from Alex Van Halen. 

“He looked at me suspiciously,” says Dolby. “‘I hear you’re not nuts about Eddie playing on my album?’ I inquired. “You got that right bro,” said Alex. “Last time we let him do that he did a solo on that little fucker Michael Jackson’s record. That was the only reason 1984 got stuck at number two.”

And thus the story is complete and history is made… But it could have been so different. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2020 after Van Halen’s death, The Who’s Pete Townshend insists it was he who got the call first. 

“I was once asked by Michael Jackson to play electric guitar on the Thriller album,” Townshend said. “I said I couldn’t do it but recommended Eddie who called and we chatted. 

"He was utterly charming, happy about the connection, but told me how much he was enjoying playing keyboards. His smile was just classic. A man in his rightful place, so happy to be doing what he did.”

Joe Satriani will undertake the toughest job in electric guitar this summer when he joins Sammy Hagar for the The Best Of All Worlds Tour and is presented with the task of performing Eddie Van Halen’s guitar parts – not to mention nailing Eddie’s tone.  

Speaking to Classic Rock, Satch offered an update on where he’s at with the mission and right now he is “trying to unravel the mystery” of EVH’s playing. While we might consider Satch to be at an advantage here – after all, he is one of guitar’s GOATs – he reminds us that he is a late bloomer when it comes to the Van Halen catalogue, because the last thing he wanted when developing his playing style was to be A N Other Eddie Van Halen copycat.

“Now all of a sudden I’m doing a crash course on the idiosyncrasies and the genius of his guitar work,” he said. “I know these songs but I've never actually played them. It’s a task.”

Satriani had a baptism of fire when it comes to this forthcoming set when he joined Hagar and co live on Howard Stern with next to zero rehearsal time, to then be put under the spotlight, and ultimately being asked to play the unplayable – namely, Mean Street.

We’ll say he did a great job. Satch begged to differ, and in an interview with Guitar World, he apologised. “I royally screwed up, which hurt like a thorn in my side,” he said. “But I'll get over it.”

Tone is going to be one of the key battlegrounds for Satriani, and it’s one he is taking deadly seriously. In January, he revealed that he was getting a custom 3rd Power amp built for the tour that will be voiced to give him Eddie Van Halen’s tone circa ’86, which in Satch’s opinion (and Hagar’s), was the acme of EVH live tone – and crucially would give him the harmonic juiciness required for successfully landing tracks such as the aforementioned Mean Street.

This is the sort of "Friday night tone" that in part inspired the track Nineteen Eighty from Satriani's 2021 studio album, Shapeshifting. Speaking to MusicRadar, Satriani said that was a golden year for guitar. “It was still Eddie Van Halen and Mark Knopfler. It was still Brian May and AC/DC and it was fun,” he said.

When it came time to write a song about that time, he looked down in his studio and saw one of the essential pedals for Van Halen tone, there was no question he was going to press it into service.

“I was literally in my home studio and there on the floor was an Eddie Van Halen MXR Phase 90, with the special Eddie paint job on it, and I said, ‘I have to use this!’” said Satriani. “I can’t tell you how happy I was that Eddie came on the scene and just lifted up guitar playing again, and he had what you just said, he had that Friday night tone, that Friday night attitude. It was devastatingly perfect; his timing was just so perfect, and he wrote such good songs.”

In Satriani’s favour, however, he has a deep affection for the material. He told Classic Rock that if he misses a note it won’t be for the lack of preparation – and if he does, well that’ll just be a little secret between him and the audience.

“What I can guarantee is they're gonna see someone who’s hell-bent on being the most respectful guitar player to the legacy of Eddie and his playing,” he said. “I’m busy creating workarounds. I have every intention of nailing everything, and when I can’t I'll wink to the audience and they’re gonna know that one’s just gonna slip by.”

The Best Of All Worlds Tour will be an all-star event. Hagar’s band sees Satriani joined onstage by Jason Bonham on drums, and Van Halen alumnus Michael Anthony on bass guitar. It kicks off on 13 July at the iTHINK Amphitheatre, Florida. If this was any time other than 2024, this would be the guitar event of the year; Satch plays Eddie, two Van Halen alumni and a Bonham on the drum stool. That’s magic. 

But this is 2024 and it has already bore witness to the original G3 Tour, with Satriani reunited with Steve Vai and Eric Johnson, and there’s the small matter of the ongoing Satch/Vai Tour, which swings through North Charleston Performing Arts Centre, South Carolina, tonight (29 March). 

You can find dates and ticket details at Steve Vai’s website. Later today, the two guitar masters debut their first collaborative single, The Sea Of Emotion Pt. 1, which is taken from their forthcoming album. Earlier this week, Satriani revealed that the The Sea Of Emotion was a trilogy, and Vai’s instalment will feature restored audio of the pair playing together when they were teenagers.

For dates and ticket details for this summer's Best Of All Worlds Tour, head over to Sammy Hagar's site, the Red Rocker. You can hear more from Satriani on his Best Of All Worlds Tour preparations over at Louder.

Back in 2010, Guitarist magazine's Simon Bradley spoke to Floyd Rose for a rare interview about his achievements and legacy in the world of guitar. He spoke about the development of the system from its very first incarnation, how he felt about the licensed version of his design and the impact a certain Eddie Van Halen had - both on his business and on music itself…

Les Paul, Leo Fender, Seth Lover  Marshall's Dudley Craven and Ken Bran – the catalogue of inventors who have genuinely altered the course of the electric guitar and its associated music is, if you actually chew it over for a while, a fairly short one. However, any list that doesn't include the name of Floyd Rose is incomplete. 

His creation – an innovative type of guitar bridge and nut that securely locked the strings at both ends – hit the streets with an almost mythical sense of timing: it coincided with the emergence of a four-piece band, blasting out of Pasadena, California, and history was baying to be inscribed onto the slabs of time. The band was Van Halen and the invention was shortly to become the double-locking tremolo system.

"Oh yeah, Eddie (Van Halen) was the driving force, especially in the advertising," concedes Floyd over a freakishly clear transatlantic phone line. "Many people ask if this would have happened without Eddie and I think it would have, but certainly not as quickly. I think guitar players wanted to stay in tune, but Eddie's power and popularity at the time made it explode onto the scene."

Floyd is a little fuzzy on the exact date of the genesis of the concept of the Floyd Rose tremolo system, but it's certain that he filed for his very first patent towards the end of the seventies...

"I'm not very good at timelines, being 61 now, but I started when I was 28 I think," Floyd laughs.

That makes it 1976 by our shaky subtraction and there are so many conflicting accounts of the bridge in the public domain that we're grateful to be able to take our opportunity to ask him how it all started."How much detail do you want?" he asks us with what we're certain is a knowing raise of the eyebrows. "All of it? Okay...

"Well, being in a rock band myself and being a big fan of Hendrix and Deep Purple, using the whammy was something I wanted to do, only I'm real finicky about being in tune when I play," he begins. "All the tricks that we used just weren't good enough for me – lubricating the nut, aligning the strings, using fewer winds around the peg, that type of thing.

"My first modification [Floyd played a Strat back then] was to loosen the six screws the bridge rocks on in front so I could get more range, and I also had the 1/4-inch bar [arm]. To my dismay that increased range just made it more unstable. I like to start a song with a whammy bar effect but so often you'd come in on the first chord and it was like... horrible!

"So, one night after practice I got back home and I was watching TV while noodling on guitar. I had the nut kinda close to my head and as I pushed the bar down I noticed that the windings on the low E string slid across the nut."It just came to me that that was the problem, so I got a pen and marked the string, went down on the bar, let it come back under spring tension and sure enough that string didn't come back into position. So I figured that, if friction was the problem, the answer was to remove it completely: no friction, no movement.

"So I got some Krazy Glue, glued the string after it was tuned, went down slowly and sure enough it worked for a while, until the glue let go. Boom, it came back in tune... well, at least that string did!"

This all sounds like something any of us might do in an idle moment, but the next step would rely not only on Floyd's inventiveness and inspiration, but his engineering skill too.

"At the time I was making jewellery so I had a lapidary rig – you use it to cut stones and silver – and I took a piece of brass and made the first nut which had three little U-shaped clamps and a hole through it," he continues. "I put it on my '57 Strat neck, which is of course sacrilege – every time a collector hears that, they just cringe – but I wanted it to stay in tune. I was real careful too, so I made sure it fitted into the original nut slot – it was maybe just a little bit wider than 1/4 inch – and all I did was drill two holes underneath where the nut would sit. So I started using it and, as long as I didn't go too deep on the bar, it was fine.

"So from there I needed a stronger one that'd hold the strings, so the next version I designed I had made at a machine shop: it cost me $600! I had to borrow the money from my parents, but it worked pretty well. I started the learning process of metalworking and hardening, the fact that the steel on the strings dents the metal after you clamp a few times, so it stops working."

Floyd considers this as the very first version of what would become the familiar double-locking system. The second version included both a locking nut and a new bridge, with the third featuring an improved bridge design. Floyd takes up the story.

"The progression was set in place and when I showed it to a few people, of course they wanted one. The second guy I sold one to was Randy Hansen, an amazing Hendrix impersonator.

"That version didn't have tuners on the bridge, but it didn't need it since I hand-made them and I would hand-sand the lip of the nut clamps so that when they went down in the rails they couldn't twist when you tightened the wrench. When we started to mass produce them, you couldn't really make them that accurately anymore so that's when I started to think that there had to be a way to tune it after it was clamped. That's when I invented the version with the fine tuners.

As we continue to chat, Eddie Van Halen's name starts to crop up with increasing regularity. VH's kinetic debut hit the streets in 1977, and even then the guitarist was looking for a way to keep his guitar in tune. Perfect timing, see?

"A friend of mine, Linn Ellsworth of Boogie Bodies guitars, was making guitars for Eddie at the time so I went with him to show Eddie the tremolo. He liked it and gave me a guitar to put one on, which was the one without fine tuners, the fourth version."

How about the EVH Signature Floyd Rose bridge that is fitted to the latest [in 2010 this was Peavey] version of the Wolfgang?

"Well, he always wanted to have his name on it and I wouldn't agree to that; I wanted my name on it!" laughs Floyd. "But on the one he's using, his version, we let him put his name on it as a 'thank you' to him for his part. That version is made like the originals."

Was there any other player at the time who had a hand in increasing the trem's profile?

"Well, there was [Journey guitarist] Neal Schon... I would sell these by going to big concerts and I would get backstage," Floyd says. "I learned real quick that if I asked to speak to anyone from the band, you didn't get anywhere, so I asked to speak to the guitar tech for the guy and of course he's all excited. So I would show them first and they would show the artist, and that's how I got in.

"Neal saw it and wanted one put on his Les Paul, and he gave me one that he said he'd never liked the sound of. I brought it back to him and it became one of his favourites as I'd taken so much wood out of it the sound had changed."

As ever, there are original Floyds and there are derivatives, some officially licensed and others... not so. How do you feel about the whole licensing trend?

"Well, if it doesn't say Floyd Rose on it, then it's not a real Floyd Rose, y'know? The way that came about was when I went with Kramer we needed bridges right away, because Eddie was endorsing and we were getting tons of orders.

"When I got all the patents secured and Kramer started selling guitars like crazy with tremolo on them, the other companies started copying. So we had to go visit them and then, because of that, we had a big discussion about how to address the problem – we couldn't just constantly sue everybody – so Kramer CEO Dennis Beradi and I made a deal that other companies could license and make the bridges.

"Of course, when we did that deal we just didn't think that approving the quality mattered at the time - it was just impossible to police. That's how the licensing thing came along and we felt that we could sell the companies that cared the original as an OEM piece.

"Again, people immediately wanted to put them on lower-priced guitars, so they went to manufacturers in Asia, but the quality... they didn't know how to make one. The metal hardening is critical and they didn't know how to do it, so the bridges failed pretty easily."

• Visit Floyd Rose for more info 

As guitar players, we can learn so much from our idols. Our ultimate goal is to find our own sound and create something unique, but along the way we can pick up a few helpful pieces of advice from some of the greatest in the game.

In this lesson we’re going to check out five signature guitar techniques that you can learn from five iconic guitar players. Each of the guitar tricks we learn are things that each of the mentioned players have become known for, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them in your own way. Use these techniques and ideas as building blocks when creating something of your own.

John Frusciante funk riffing

John Frusciante is best known for his many tenures as the guitarist in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Through the bands career, Frusciante has shown many difference angles to his playing, from Hendrix-inspired fuzzy leads to stunning chord work, but what he’s best known for his is ability to hold down a tight funk groove.

This funk riff is inspired by his frantic style of playing. The riff is made up of muted triplets which are broken out of to add double-stop accents or lead line embellishments. 

Before starting this, it’s important to get used to playing the muted triplets as tight as you can, consistent rhythm is very important in this style.

The lead embellishments in this example are simple phrases from the D minor pentatonic scale, you can improve your own licks in this style to give it a different flavour.

 Jeff Beck tremolo slide effect

The late, great Jeff Beck was known for many things, one of those was his expressive use of the guitars tremolo system. This lick is a Jeff Beck-style lick that emulates the sound of a slide guitar phrase.  The bar is used to simulate the sound of sliding in and out of notes, but also moving from one note to another and pitch matching.

The lick, on paper, looks like it’s just three notes, but the finesse comes into play with how you control the tremolo arm.

For the first note, you want to slightly dip the bar and bring it back to pitch as you slide into the 8th fret on the B string, this simulates the sound of a slide going to it’s note. 

The next part is using the bar to move from one note to a set target note. Play the 6th fret on the B and dip the bar slightly until the pitch of the string hits that of the 5th fret.

The final part is a slide to the 7 on the G. You’ll already be in a position with the bar dipped, so jump your finger to the G, slide up and let the bar return to it’s starting position and add plenty of tremolo arm vibrato.

John Mayer triad chords

If you’ve ever felt bored of your chord progressions, this tip is a great one to break out of that box. This is a great concept on how to get more mileage out of your chords. While this is something John Mayer is known for, this can also be considered to be a Jimi Hendrix style technique which is likely where John Mayer got this from.

This approach involves taking your regular six-string major and minor barre chords and breaking them out into smaller, triad chords on the G, B and E strings. This removes the high E and A string from the chord, freeing up more sonic space and just focusing on the key elements of a major or minor chord.

In this approach, you also use your thumb to reach other the top of the neck and play the root note.

Once you’ve got this chord style under your fingers, you can then extend the chord by barring the high E with your index finger, or using your now free little finger to add some melodic notes around the chord. 

If you’re playing a major chord, the notes you can add should come from the major pentatonic, and if playing a minor chord use the Minor Pentatonic scale.

Dave Mustaine spider chords

Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine is a thrash metal pioneer. He was one of the earliest archiects of this style of metal and has contributed some of the genres most iconic albums, songs and riffs. This technique is something Mustaine uses to enable fast, cross-string power chord movements without needing to shift your entire hand.

This technique will give your fretting hand fingers a stretching workout. 

Be sure to use your index finger and ring finger for the power chords rooted on the A string. Once you play that power chord, you keep those fingers in place while using the middle and little fingers to stretch over and play a power chord on the Low E string.

This is a really great technique for quick power chord changes across two different strings.

Eddie Van Halen two-handed tapping

This is quite possibly the most borrowed technique from a guitar legend, but it’s an essential one for most rock guitar players to know. If you’ve never borrowed or stolen any tapping licks from the Eddie Van Halen school of guitar playing, now is the time to start!

Two-hand tapping looks impressive and it sounds way more difficult than it actually is. Think of this like an extended pull off. 

Your fretting hand, in this example is just doing a constant pull off from the 8th to the 5th fret of the B string. With your picking hand, instead of picking the string, you’re tapping a higher note from the scale, in this case the 12th and 13th frets on the B string.

The tapped finger pulls off to the fretting hands 8th fret, which pulls off to the 5th fret.

This technique can be used with any scale, anywhere on the guitar, experiment with this and see where it fits your playing style.

Joe Satriani is really up against it for his Best Of All Worlds US tour this year with Michael Anthony, Sammy Hagar and Jason Bonham; imagine having to play the Eddie Van Halen songbook onstage with the world's guitarists judging you in the audience and on social media? We've already seen some of that with the challenge of playing Mean Street with very little prep on the Howard Stern Show, but even with rehearsals, there's more challenges; how do you recreate Eddie's sounds? And which era do you go focus on?

Well, Satch has been given it a lot of thought already. "What I learned from The Howard Stern Show, besides it's still important to rehearse and you can't do gigs without rehearsals," Satraini told  Australian Musician in the video below. "But what it confirmed was a couple of things I was thinking about, which was that Eddie had specific gear. He didn't play with the gear I used or Steve Vai or Slash or Tom Morello or any of his contemporaries. He actually had a very specific setup. 

"And you ask yourself, 'Well, why?' Well, it's because, besides he was a genius, as we know, he knew that in order for him to play those parts, he had to have his gear tweaked a certain way; otherwise it wouldn't work," continued Satriani. "So, like when you go to play the beginning of Mean Street, if your setup is not allowing those harmonics to jump out, it's gonna sound like you're not hitting them. You've gotta get the setup right."

But what setup? Satch confirmed he'd tried – and still has – contemporary EVH heads even before this year's tour was discussed and he was approached for the original Van Halen tribute with Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth that fell through. 

"Now I learnedhttps://3rdpower.com/that because of those two amps right there," continues Satriani. "I got those back when Alex and Dave called and asked me to do the Eddie tribute tour, and I thought, 'Well, I've gotta figure this out.' So the first thing I did was I got a couple of those and I thought, 'Well, this is great. You get all the harmonics, but, man, this is really small-sounding…

"If I was 20 years old and I was playing modern rock, those would be the best amps ever," notes the guitarist. "But I'm not, and I still wanna hear sort of the body of the guitar and I wanna hear a more dynamic mix. So I started to think, 'Well, what's my favorite Van Halen section?' And I did find that period in '86. And I did talk to Sam quite a bit about it and he said, 'Yeah, that first 5150 [tour], he was still using Marshalls. In Sammy's view, his favorite sound that Eddie ever made. It wasn't small and then [it was] stereoised. So I reached out to Dylana Scott at 3rd Power Amplifiers, and she is building me what we believe is going to be the amp that does it."

"I know I need it," continues Satch. "And this goes back to what I said earlier that the gear is so important for the performer. I know that when we step out onstage, and whether I'm talking about Aint' Talkin' 'Bout Love or 51510, I'm gonna need to hear and feel that sound to keep going. And if it's not working then I'm gonna say, 'Well let me have my solo rig.' 

"But my solo rig is designed… it probably has a little too much gain and is designed to make the high strings really fat sounding – because I play all the melodies. I play very little rhythm guitar all night long… and I can't play the Hagar set like that, it's just the wrong sound. In Chickenfoot it kind of worked, but for the Van Halen stuff to really pop, and we're doing Montrose, we're doing Sammy Hagar solo stuff, we're doing my stuff, we're doing Chickenfoot – it's a really fun setlist – but I know in my heart, I want to hear that sound in my head. That mythical Eddie Van Halen sound that we all hear in our minds, and I want to be able to feel it. So I've been getting these clips from Dylana every week and that stuff that she's building is really amazing."

Satch confirms that the plan is he will have a dry/wet system with one dry cab and two stereo wet cabs. "But I don't think I'm going to try to replicate stereo chorusing from the stage so much," he told Australian Musician, suggesting it won't be completely authentic to Eddie's 5150 tour approach. "He likes it loud and rough," Satch says of Hagar, "so I don't wanna go too processed." 

The front-of-house engineer will then assume the role of adding some digital effects, including chorusing. "I'll probably try to keep it as simple as possible," adds Satch. "I'll have a couple of pedals on the floor – I'll have a wah-wah, you have to have one of those momentary flanger pedals. But the main thing will be, can you have that one sound that will carry you through? And that's what I learned from the Live Without A Net [live recording] – most of the stuff sounds similar [amp-wise] and Eddie is just having the time of his life, he's running around like crazy. And he was such a solid player, he could do that, and it didn't bother him that he wasn't representing each song as it was recorded." 

Eddie was using his Kramer signature and Steinberger during the 1986 5150 tour with what is reported to be a Bob Bradshaw wet-wet switching system and rack effects including two Roland SD3000 delays, Eventide Harmonizer, Rocktron 300 Compressor and RX2H Exciter/Hush. The key to all this is the mix of the components and the guitarist hadn't yet begun his amp journey via a Soldano SLO  on the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge album in 1991 before the 5150 amp with Peavey. 

He was still using the late '68 Marshall Plexis (Super Lead) with a Variac transformer (to lower the voltage). Were his amps modded? According to amp tech and designer Dave Friedman in the video above – who worked on Eddie's amp personally – a 'fat cap' was added to his key original Plexi at some point, and the mid pot on it read 50k. Stock should probably have been 25k - but who's to know it didn't leave the factory with a 50k pot. The heart of Eddie's 'brown sound', an attempt to emulate the favoured EVH Plexi in the digital realm can be found most recently on the Universal Audio UAFX Lion '68 pedal in its Brown mode. 

That's not necessarily the spec Satch is going for as there's no full confirmation on what the Plexis were on the 5150. It's never been conclusively confirmed. But in terms of the amp most prevalent in classic era Van Halen, it's a 100-watt Marshall Super Lead. 

• Joe Satriani talks Surfing With The Alien track-by-track

Andy Wood's Eddie Van Halen pedalboard reveal late last year had us excited, and now he's ready with a full hour-long reveal of it to show us how it sounds and the reasoning behind his choices. 

Wood revealed that the idea came about when he was going to do a Van Halen-leaning video on the BOSS SDE 3000VH and fellow VH fanatic Pete Thorn beat him to it. So he got thinking about a bigger idea, integrating that delay pedal based on the digital delay rack unit Eddie used: 'What would it be like to shrink Ed's $30,000/$40,000 rig into a pedalboard?"

Well now we know, with the help of XAct Tone Solutions (XTS) in Nashville. The results can switch from wet/dry/wet to mono with the flick of a switch. XTS even put it on a striped pedalboard. 

The video above includes XTS talking through how the 'board works, as well as session pro Andy's playing and the reaction of guest players to the rig. Spoiler: in case you didn't know, Andy has his EVH chops down. 

Pedals on the 'board that are paired with the EVH 5150 amp include the MXR 5150 Overdrive, signature Phase 90 and Flanger, Dunlop EVH95 wah and the Eventide MicroPitch for Van Hagar era delay.

And just to prove how good the pedalboard is, it's run through three mic'd Roland Micro Cubes instead of the 5150s, and it still sounds amazing! 

Check out more of Andy Wood's videos at his YouTube channel. 

With the arrival of the Boss SDE-3000EVH digital delay pedal earlier this year, the prospect of the ultimate Eddie Van Halen tribute pedalboard was truly within reach. Now solo musician and session guitarist Andy Wood – who calls Eddie the greatest rock n' roll player of all time – has seized the opportunity with most fully-realised floor rig we've seen for capturing his iconic tones.

It's all here: the SDE-3000EVH, MXR 5150 Overdrive, signature Phase 90 and Flanger – and let's not forget the Dunlop EVH95 wah. The Eventide MicroPitch is a wise addition, and I found from my review that it can nail the tone-widening sounds of post-1984 to Van Hagar era that Eddie got with rack units. There's a custom-looking boost in there too, plus the mini ISP Deci-mate noisegate. But things step up again when it comes to the wet/dry capabilities of this pedalboard. 

"Wanna be W/D/W ? No problem flip the switches up on the tricked out iso output box," says Andy. "Need to be mono? No problem simply flip them to mono. No unplugging ever. Wet level control on its own custom controller. Lemme tell y’all this is unreal, you can use it with three half stacks, or three Deluxes (using the 5150 distortion pedal) or straight up three Micro Cubes lol – all the while being one switch away from old school straight into the amp."

We can't wait to hear Andy's video demo of it all. But in the meantime, check out a roundup of the session supremo's previous form paying tribute to Eddie and sharing his insights below. Needless to say, that pedalboard is in excellent hands! 

Even for Joe Satriani, signing up to join Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony and Jason Bonham for The Best Of All Worlds Summer Tour 2024 is a big deal. It might not be an Eddie Van Halen tribute tour, but it’s the next best thing, and it will require Satch not only to learn the material but to replicate arguably the most sought-after tones in electric guitar.

Having appeared on Howard Stern with zero rehearsals and a bunch of tunes to play live in the studio, on TV, Satriani has already proved he has got the stomach for this gig. But when it comes time to load in for 2024’s most-anticipated tour, how is he going to nail Eddie’s tone?

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Satriani acknowledged that was a tall task, not least because Eddie Van Halen’s guitar tone evolved over the years as he pushed the envelope, moving from Marshalls to Soldano and Peavey amps and developing the 5150, which for many hard rock players is the ultimate tube amp. What works for Van Halen II doesn’t necessarily work on material from Van Halen III.

“For a guitar player, this is a remarkable set of changes that affords you different ways of pulling things off,” he said. “And one doesn’t work for the other. Using one of the brand new amps to represent something from the first album, it’s very difficult. And it’s difficult playing later songs with the earlier setup.”

Satriani doesn’t say whether he will be looking in the garage for some vintage Roland SDE-3000 rack-mounted digital delay units, a Lexicon PCM70, and perhaps a couple of Eventide H949s – he could always add a couple of recently released Boss’s SDE-3000EVHs to his rig, with the digital delay pedals shipping with Eddie’s actual live settings on them.

He does, however, have a plan. Satch’s current thinking is centring on Eddie’s 1986 Live Without A Net live rig, a setup with Marshall amps at the heart of it, and the most important thing for him is that it gets him in the zone for performing classic Van Halen songs.

“I’m going to try to get close to the sound of each of those eras,” Satriani said. “Primarily, it’ll be for me. It’ll help me get in the mood to play the parts the way he did.”

Besides, trying to replicate one of the world’s greatest ever players is a fool’s errand. “If you’ve been tasked with the job of imitating him, it’s like, ‘Well, which moment?’” said Satriani.

But what we all know to be true, and what Satriani acknowledges here is that, in the face of the myths, legends and documented fact about 100-watt Marshall heads modded by José Arredondo, Variacs and wet/dry/wet setups vs wet/wet, etc, is that, ultimately, it’s not the horse. It’s the rider. That tone was Eddie Van Halen’s feel more than anything.

“He just had a beautiful touch on the guitar,” Satriani said. “He played with such intensity. I don’t want to generalise and say that he made everything sound good, but he did. [Laughs] You notice that when you have one of his guitars and his setup or his model, he just can’t be replaced.”

Few guitar players will have a busier schedule in 2024 than Satriani. He has The Best Of All Worlds Summer Tour, and the intense rehearsals that the set will demand. He also has the original G3 Tour, in which he reunites with Steve Vai and Eric Johnson. 

And to top it all off there is the Satch/Vai Tour, in which he and his former pupil Vai will embark on a co-headlining tour and for the first time ever collaborate on new music together.

• Joe Satriani: 10 guitarists that blew my mind

When Sammy Hagar extended an open invitation for David Lee Roth to join him, Michael Anthony, Joe Satriani and Jason Boham for the forthcoming Best Of All World's tour celebrating the music of Van Halen in the US next year, few would have expected a response. Even less an acceptance. But Diamond Dave has confirmed he wants in. But it's now been revealed that Hagar has some firm conditions. 

As Van Halen's original vocalist, Roth is one of the missing pieces alongside drummer Alex Van Halen and his nephew Wolfgang, but he's communicated through the Van Halen News Desk site to respond with the brief but clear statement for Hagar via the site: "I'm ready to go. Let's do this."

Great news – it just wouldn't be the same to hear Hagar singing the classic first-era songs, but is it really that simple? Unfortunately, it isn't. In a stinging reply to Roth while replying to fans asking for his thoughts on Roth's comments in the Instagram post shown above, Hagar didn't hold back.

 "He can come out and sing a song on a show or two, if he can remember the words," Hagar said in one reply. 

Then he followed up with another reply elsewhere in the comments below his video: "He's not invited on the tour NOOO F;()$(.g way. [The invitation] was to sing a song with us somewhere like a lot of singers guitarists etc are going to do on this tour. I know better than to have him on tour again. Been there done that."  

Hagar previously toured with Roth as solo artists for the 2002 Heavyweight Champs Of Rock N' Roll tour, but even beyond his first-hand experience with Roth he has reason to be wary. As Eddie Van Halen's son and former Van Han bassist has eluded to before, David Lee Roth was possibly the sticking point in a Van Halen tribute not happening sooner, as well as Wolfgang's recent heavy hint that the last Van Halen studio album, 2012's  A Different Kind Of Truth, isn't on streaming platforms anymore because the singer is dissatisfied with it.

The business end of this is unlikely to be a simple agreement even if Hagar did relent – Roth may have stipulations for performing that the other parties won't or cannot agree to. As the driving force behind it, it's likely Hagar won't bend over backwards to accommodate Roth. But then again, just as the weak first single Tattoo proved a red herring for the high quality elsewhere on A Different Kind Of Truth, this might actually work out ok in the spirit of celebrating Eddie Van Halen. We hope so. 

In an appearance with the touring lineup on Howard's Stern show, Hagar opened the door for Roth's (limited) involvement, as well as Alex Van Halen's (the drummer is even less likely to appear), at least in principle. 

“We’re gonna invite every musician in every town,” Hagar stated. “First of all, whenever you play, if there’s a guitar player in town, no matter what city it is, they come out to see Joe [Satriani], just like they used to do for Eddie [Van Halen]. So, if we’ve got other guitar players, we’ll get them involved. If Alex Van Halen wants to jump up, if David Lee Roth wants to come out and join us, come on, motherfucker. You are welcome! This is about Van Halen."

The Van Halen News Desk stated that, "We have it on very good authority that Roth never got a call from Hagar. No one from Hagar's camp contacted anyone in Roth's camp to ask if he was interested in going on tour."

In fairness, Hagar did state 'we're gonna', suggesting its was an intention for the future, and no full-tour appearance was mentioned. And Roth didn't say anything in his brief statement about a full tour either. But you know us music media / Van Halen fans, we can't resist getting all excited about the prospects. 

Did Roth believe he was calling Hagar's bluff? Is this all one big brouhaha that will come to nothing? After all, we know Hagar's opinion of the original Van Halen vocalist isn't the highest, to say the least. For his part, Roth doesn't tend to respond to any of Hagar's comments about him. Ultimately it's the fans who lose out if some members won't come together to celebrate Eddie Van Halen's legacy.  

The Best Of All Worlds Tour (or not as it may turn out) is currently due to begin in West Beach, Florida and run for 28 dates to the end of August.

In the meantime, Roth has been back on the musical radar sharing another song from his as-yet-unreleased 2007 solo album featuring John 5; the somewhat Doors-esque Wash And Fold surfaced on Roth's official channels yesterday (21 November).

• Van Halen's A Different Kind Of Truth: Wolfgang looks back on the band's finale 10 years on 

EVH Gear has officially launched the Frankenstein Relic Series offering three heavily aged versions of the Frankenstrat that breaks down the red, black and white striped finish of Eddie Van Halen’s original into its constituent parts – and aesthetically this range is a home run.

Looking very much like a work-in-progress that had been dug out and salvaged from a broom closet at 5150 Studios, these high-performance electric guitars are very much built in Eddie’s vision, with many of the specs you would hope to see on one of the late rock guitar icon’s signature guitars.

Everything is geared towards performance. Well, except perhaps the skirted Strat “Tone” knob that serves as the guitar’s volume pot – and the dummy single-coil at the neck position is just for show. 

But wait. Are they just for show? Yes, the pickup has the phenolic red bobbin, it is disarmed as shipped, and just there to fill the space as per the original, but if you so desire, you can wire this up to the circuit; it is a fully functional pickup.

And that ‘Tone’ volume knob? It’s a 500k Low Friction EVH/Bourns pot to execute those Cathedral-style swells a little easier.

It was often said that the ‘80s arms race for guitar technique became like the Olympics, and if so, it is entirely plausible that the IOC would ban the Frankenstein from competition – everything else on the guitar is explicitly performance-enhancing. There are a lot of specs here to support playing styles that err on the side of the spectacular.

There’s the D-Tuna for drop-D on the fly. There’s a Floyd 1000 Series double-locking vibrato for divebombs and making giving those harmonics some place to go once you’ve made them squeal. There’s a direct-mount EVH Wolfgang Alnico II bridge humbucker to complement the overdriven tube amp you’re playing this thing through.

It’s also so very practical, with the heel-mounted wheel for making quick adjustments to the truss rod. And then there are the fundamentals, like the EVH Modified C profile maple neck, quartersawn and finished in a tactile heavy relic lacquer, and the 12” to 16” compound radius maple fingerboard and 22 jumbo frets that will give this a state-of-the-art feel. 

As for other features, well, it’s a 25.5” scale, it has a licensed Stratocaster headstock, the body is basswood, and there are over-sized strap-locks, too. The Frankenstrat Relic series is priced £1,299 / $1,699, and ships in a Striped Series gig bag to keep that finish… 

Well, that’s the beauty of a finish like this. You don’t need to baby this guitar for fear of a ding. Play it hard as soon as it’s out the box. For more details, see EVH Gear.

It’s only Tuesday morning but it already feels like Friday night because pro-shot footage of Van Halen’s 1984 Monsters Of Rock set at Castle Donington – much of which was previously unseen unless you were lucky enough to have been there – has been posted in its entirety on YouTube. 

This is one of those time machine gigs you wish you had been at. It was a simpler time, when festivals were a little wilder, a lot smellier. It was a heady time when electric guitar culture itself was being shaped by the genius of Eddie Van Halen. 

On the date in question, 18 August 1984, the audience had already been watched Gary Moore, Mötley Crüe and Ozzy, but Van Halen, returning to the UK after a four-year absence was the one you wanted to be down the front for.

Hitherto only audio bootlegs have circulated of the performance, and while this, footage, posted to YouTube might not have the multi-cam production of, say, AC/DC’s Live At Donington DVD/Blu-ray, nor the audio fidelity – Van Halen News reports that the audio is taken from a bootleg – it remains a unique document of the band’s final appearance in the UK with David Lee Roth fronting the band, and, of course, Mr Edward Van Halen operating at the peak of his powers.

• New Van Halen documentary takes us back to the early ‘80s to tell the story of how Eddie built 5150 Studios as the band were coming apart

The audio mix might deserve some TLC, a spritz of big-budget mastering to do the performance and the occasion justice. But right now, in 2023, this is the best we’ve got and that ain’t bad. It features an hour of Van Halen, leaving the stage red hot for AC/DC, who were returning to headline Donington for the second time in their career. 

Opening with Unchained, barrelling into Hot For Teacher, and then a drum solo because it was the 1980s and Alex Van Halen was not a man to be contained, it’s a high-energy set of front-to-back classics, with Diamond Dave working the crowd as though 60,000-plus British heavy metal and hard rock fans, quite possibly in advanced stages of refreshment, were in the palm of his hand. 

Castle Donington, now the annual home of Download Festival, was the first in a string of Monsters Of Rock dates that Van Halen fulfilled as the Roth era was coming to an end. This footage emerged only yesterday and has since been taken down and reposted, so get in and watch it at your earliest convenience, and pray/hope that it is still there come the weekend. 

If you want to fast-forward to Eddie's solo, you'll find it 45 minutes in just as the strains of Jump fade out. This is a weekend set from the ultimate weekend hard-rock band.

Wolfgang Van Halen’s career to-date has been far from ordinary. Famously born into one of the most influential families in rock, Wolfgang’s first proper gig came at just 15 years-old, undertaking the small task of filling Michael Anthony’s role as bassist in Van Halen. Following his stint in the family business, Wolfgang went on to play with Alter Bridge/Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti’s solo project, Tremonti, as well as putting in time on drums with Sevendust’s Clint Lowery.

Fast-forward to 2021, though, and Wolfgang unveiled his Mammoth WVH project. With a debut album that bridged the gap between the flare and polish of classic rock and the raw grit of modern, heavier styles, Wolfgang’s music makes the perfect statement for the detractors who would like to think they know how his music should sound, and aren’t shy in letting him know.

It should come as no surprise that the son of the electric guitar’s greatest pioneer since Jimi Hendrix would choose music as his career path. But what might be surprising to more casual listeners, is that while Mammoth WVH live shows feature a band (guitarists Frank Sidoris and Jon Jourdan, bassist Ronnie Ficcaro and drummer Garrett Whitlock), Wolfgang writes and records every single note from every instrument you hear on Mammoth's songs. 

With second album, Mammoth II freshly released into the wild, we caught up with Wolfgang to find out about his approach as a multi-instrumentalist, growing up with his surname, and why his performances at the 2022 Taylor Hawkins Tribute concerts was as much a tribute to his late father.

You grew up in a family with two indescribably influential musicians as role models. Which instrument came to you first, guitar or drums?

"I started playing drums when I was nine-ish. It was the only thing my dad actually sat down to teach me. He sat me down at a table with a couple of magazines. And he had me play eighth notes with my right hand, or quarter notes, I guess. 

"Then with my left hand on the two and the four, and then he's like, if you can do your foot on the one and the three and do that all together at the same time, you're playing Highway to Hell. So once he saw that I could do it. He was like 'Yes!'. 

"He bought me a Roland V-Drums kit immediately. Later, on my 10th birthday he bought me an Everplay drum kit, like an actual acoustic drum kit. So that was the first thing and then basically from there, I just taught myself. 

"I listened to Van Halen, Best Of: Volume One and Enema of the State by Blink-182. I listened to those two albums back and forth, trying to replicate everything I heard. I also had the benefit of being able to watch Al during rehearsals. So it was very, very fun to just see how an amazing drummer plays, up-close."

So you never sat down with Alex for drum lessons?

"No, not even a little bit. Other than that moment of Dad sitting me down, there was never a moment where either Al or Dad sat down like, 'I'm gonna teach you how to do this.’ I wouldn't have had it any other way. I like how I was able to teach myself from looking at guitar tabs on the internet and just trying to replicate every one of my favourite songs."

Who were the drummers that you gravitated towards?

"I mean, still to this day, obviously Al. Just in terms of my family, you know, both Dad and Al, I hold them in a different place. Because they're like a part of me. It nearly goes without mentioning. 

"But when it comes to drummers, Travis Barker is still a very huge inspiration, I was really lucky to actually be able to speak to him during the Los Angeles Taylor Hawkins show. I got to tell him that story, and how Enema of the State meant everything to me growing up. He was super kind, a really, really nice guy." 

He wrote and recorded the parts for Enema…really quickly, too

"That doesn’t surprise me. He elevated them to such an amazing degree, like, the comparison of drumming, from Dude Ranch to Enema of The State is crazy. Nothing against the previous drummer [Scott Raynor], he was just more of a standard sort of punk-beat drummer. 

"But Travis elevated them to such an insane degree. I think it's a big reason why that blew up. Also, just being a single-pedal drummer is already such an inspiring thing to me because I'm more of a double-kick guy, but the stuff that he's able to pull off with just a single kick is so badass.

"But other than that, I noticed a really steep sort of jump in my drum skills when I started playing along with Tool. When I discovered Danny Carey, that was a really, really big jump. 

"It was a really difficult thing for me to do. But once I started to get comfortable with all that kind of stuff, I noticed a big change in my abilities as a drummer. So Danny Carey was definitely a huge, huge inspiration."

Do you have a favourite Tool song to play on drums?

"To play - one of my favourite drum moments is the drum breakdown in Forty Six & 2 off Ænima. I love that part. From Lateralus it's tough to beat Ticks & Leeches or The Grudge for me."

Many great rhythm guitar players also know their way around a drum kit, do you think there’s a connection there?

“Yeah, I think guitar players who started as drummers have this sense of rhythmic qualities to their playing, I come up with a lot of rhythmic [guitar] ideas that follow the drums really, really tightly and I think that's probably a result of me being a drummer first. So, yes, certainly, being a drummer definitely informs your picking hand in how you play for sure."

When you're coming up with guitar parts or bass parts, are you automatically hearing drums in your head?

"Yeah, for the most part, I think it's just kind of all happening at once. Usually, guitar is where an idea starts for me. But the drums follow quickly behind, it always informs how the rest of the things play out. Drums are, to me, the most important part. It's the backbone of everything, at least in what I do."

What did playing bass in Van Halen teach you about the way that guitars, bass and drums interact as a rhythm section?

"I think the most important thing it taught me was locking in with the drums and sort of creating this engine room for the rest of the song, if you will. Because it's kind of what keeps everything going. 

"Being able to play and lock in with Al was one of my favourite things about doing all of that. I mean, there were so many times where Dad would make a mistake, but he wouldn't even realise it because Al and I'd already fixed what he messed up! It was really fun sort of being that safety net for Dad to fly over. I miss it a lot."

How rigid are you with the other guys in Mammoth when it comes to replicating the parts live?

“Oh, well, I'm, I'm in no way a super rigid guy, I think the biggest example is the way Garrett, our drummer is able to have himself pop through the drum parts. As long as he’s generally playing the song I'm cool with but it's like, for certain fills here and there, or just the main vibe of how he does certain things, it’s all him. I love what everyone, the entire live band brings to each of the parts.

"I like to view it as — not nearly in comparison, because they're one of my favourite bands — but like with Nine Inch Nails, how Trent does his thing in the studio, but then the live performance is very much its own thing. That's how I like to view what Mammoth is - the live performance is a sort of different entity compared to the album."

You mentioned the Taylor Hawkins tribute shows earlier, Were you expecting the reaction and response to you playing those guitar parts?

"Not at all! If anything, I was expecting more people to roll their eyes. I don't know if this is a sad thing to say, but I've never seen such a wave of positivity in reaction to me on the internet before.

"It was an honour to have even been asked. I thought it was a joke when I got a text from somebody saying Dave Grohl wanted to talk to me, and I just didn't believe it. Just being able to simultaneously have the opportunity to honour Taylor — because he was the biggest Van Halen fan — and being able to honour my pop in the same performance was a really cathartic thing for me. I wasn't sure I could do it, I almost didn't do it. But I'm happy to have done it. 

"It was a wonderful experience with wonderful musicians. I mean, being able to jam with Josh, Dave and Justin was something I will never forget. They are three wonderful people and incredible musicians. So to be able to play a small part in that was, was an honour."

Most people would agree it was way more than a small part! Justin Hawkins is also an incredible guitar player, have you watched his YouTube channel?

"Oh, yeah. I love it. I love all the stuff he does, man. I loved his awesome commentary on that video of DJ Khaled just beating up that acoustic guitar. And how Justin was able to tell that it was the same chord at the beginning of…I think it was Love Will Tear Us Apart apart by Joy Division. So funny! He’s also just like a sweetheart of a man. He was so kind. We still text every now and then he's a he's a wonderful man."

How much did you have to go back to kind learn the parts for those performances?

"Really, it was just kind of listening through the songs. It was tough for me because I don't know if I've ever really said this before, but I don't really listen to Van Halen anymore. It's a little too tough for me to listen to it. So it was really emotionally difficult, listening to those three songs over and over again, trying to remember the parts. 

"Because I really didn't know all of it. I knew all the bass and I knew the structures, but having to go through and make sure I was doing everything right was difficult. But I was proud of what I was able to achieve."

We can’t talk about you being a multi-instrumentalist without mentioning vocals. At what point did you ‘find your voice’?

"Yeah, that came surprisingly naturally. I think just from such a young age, trying to replicate Michael Anthony's insane, incredible background vocals did wonders for the development of my voice. 

"I mean, I was 14 or 15 when we started rehearsing, and I think it had a monumental effect on training my vocals and my range. So I attribute that to doing those background vocals for 12 years."

Do you think the ability to sing backing vocals is often overlooked or misunderstood?

"I just think it's, it's such an important part of music that people should utilise to the highest degree, because…I know I love harmonies. Coming from things like Enema…in the way that Tom and Mark harmonise. I've always been such a huge fan of harmonies."

With all that in mind, then, what do you see yourself as primarily?

I guess now, the easiest way to describe what I do is I'm a songwriter. Or maybe just catch-all, I'll just say I'm a musician!

Mammoth WVH: Mammoth II is out now and Mammoth WVH is touring throughout 2023. For a full list of dates, click here.

By the second half of 1984 the original Van Halen dream was fading fast; but their album named after that year was one a hell of last gasp and proved to be their final record with David Lee Roth before the dawn of the Van Hagar era. But that final year of the classic lineup also witnessed a one-off occurrence for Eddie Van Halen outside of the band; he played Beat It with Michael Jackson onstage.

By then the song and Eddie's guest guitar solo had been in the collective consciousness of popular music for two years, and it had lost none of its impact, hitting the No.1 spot in April of 1983. The Van Halen guitarist's histronic solo wasn't so much jaw-dropping as beamed from another reality. It remains a feat of prowess for pretenders to this day but back then the idea of Eddie performing it live with the biggest popstar in the world seemed a pipe dream.

Somehow the two artists paths crossed with The Jacksons played the first of a three-night stand at Texas Stadium in Irving on July 14 as part of their Victory tour. As coincidence would have it Van Halen were playing the Reunion Arena in Dallas then for their own trio of sold-out shows there – and it was just 20 minutes drive away. 

As the Van Halen News Desk notes, the performance was unrehearsed, and Van Halen was unable to guest for the following two nights due to his own band's commitments. Luckily this never to be repeated collaboration was filmed with Eddie's Kramer high in the mix.

Time hasn't been kind to the tape quality but let's be grateful for what we have, and Jackson's ecstatic "You got it Eddie! Eddie! Eddie", encouraging the guitarist as he goes into the solo. It's all a little truncated compared at the end compared to the original but the spirit is all there, and we get to hear Eddie play on the whole song. Both musicians' joy is undeniable. 

The backstory of their collaboration makes the moment all the more pure; Van Halen declined payment or even royalties for his appearance on the Thriller song. The guest spot, requested by producer Quincy Jones, may have contributed to the bad vibes that were starting to swirl in Van Halen's chemistry at the time.

"Certain people in the band at the time didn't like me doing thing outside the group," the Van Halen News Desk reported Eddie as saying. "But Roth happened to be in the Amazon or somewhere, and Mike [Anthony, bass] was at Disneyland and Al [Van Halen, drums] was up in Canada or something. So I thought, well, they'll never know."

How wrong Eddie was – he was guesting on what would become one of the best-selling albums of all time. The guitarist tracked two solos, and left him and Jones to select whatever they wanted. 

"I didn't ask for anything – it was 20 minutes out of my day," Eddie reflected to Piers Morgan in 2013. But his impact in that short time went beyond the solo. 

"The funny thing was I actually rearranged the song. The section they wanted me to solo over, there was no chord changes underneath so I had to rearrange the song. Then Michael came in and I said, 'I hope you don't mind but I had to rearrange your song.' And he listens and he goes, 'I really like that high fast stuff you do.' And that was it."

Not quite – Thriller session guitarist Steve Lukather and drummer Jeff Pocaro then had to come back and re-track parts underneath. 

But that's another story. 

EVH Gear has dug deep into the archive of classic Eddie Van Halen electric guitar designs and unveiled a limited edition run inspired by his old Charvel Star. 

The EVH Gear Limited Edition Star shares that guitar’s angular, offset solid body, and has a coke-bottle 3x3 headstock that pays homage to the original’s Danelectro hybrid build.

But there are some modern twists. The Floyd Rose vibrato is augmented with an EVH D-Tuna for throwing the guitar into drop D tuning on the fly, and there is a kill-switch on the lower cutaway for staccato noise effects. As EVH Gear notes, this is a “modern interpretation” of the guitar, not a replica.

We have four finish options to choose from, with Matte Army Drab, Primer Gray, and Stealth Black options with black hardware, and a classy looking Stealth Black model with gold hardware. The kill-switch is red because, well, it’s a button, and it’s an extreme measure.

Like Eddie Van Halen’s original mash-up, this is a single-pickup guitar, and is packing an EVH Wolfgang humbucker at the bridge position. That is hooked up to a low-friction 500K Volume Bourns pot, and a treble bleed circuit so you don’t lose any top-end as you roll that volume knob back – critical if you want to nail those Cathedral-style volume swells that were one of the many trademarks of Eddie’s playing.

Build-wise, these all have bodies of solid basswood, with bolt-on maple necks secured to the body via a four-bolt joint. The necks are quartersawn from one piece of maple, fashioned into an EVH Modified “C” Backshape, and given a satin urethane finish to make them extra tactile.

The fingerboard radius is as you would expect from a Fender-owned high-performance brand in the year 2023; we’re talking a 12” to 16” compound radius, and on this occasion we’ve got a 22-fret ebony ‘board. Cream dot markers count out the fret positions. The Star has a 25.5” scale length and measures 43mm across the locking nut.

The vibrato is a Floyd Rose 1000 Series, exactly what you would expect at that this gigging pro, serious amateur price point, and you’ll find EVH-branded Gotoh tuners on the headstock. 

There are many differences between this model and the next-gen Frankenstein’d original model that Eddie used, but the apple has not fallen far from the tree. Practicality was ever part of the EVH design ethos and it is here, too. Those  buttons are over-sized to help secure your guitar strap.

The Limited Edition Star is available now, and is priced £1,349 / $1,399. For more details, head over to EVH Gear. EVH also announced the release of the Frankenstein Relic series. 

There are Red, Black and White options available, and they really nail the home-made vibe of the classic Frankenstein Superstrat. 

There will also be an expansion on the Wolfgang Special series. Both of these updates will arrive in stores September. In October, the Wolfgang Standard will be refreshed with new finish options.

Things were changing for Van Halen in the early ‘80s. The music industry was changing, too, and the band’s maverick electric guitar wrangler, the peerless Eddie Van Halen, had an idea that could give him and the band more control over their sound, building a firewall between them and the label, between them and the outside world. 

Inspired by Frank Zappa’s independence, Eddie would build his own studio, and there is a new documentary on YouTube takes us back to 1981 to pick up the story.

Produced by The Tapes Archives, the Van Halen 1984 Documentary is a five-part miniseries made by fans that tells the story of the band arriving at their creative and commercial peak, and episode one has a wealth of material for audio engineering geeks and Van Halen fans alike. It’s a story that centres around Eddie and the producer/engineer Donn Landee's decision to build their own studio, close to but far apart – and in competition with – the many other commercial facilities in Studio City, California. 

It was a radical move. Only the radicals, like Zappa, had done so, but it would give Van Halen freedom. They had felt under pressure to write and record Diver Down. The amount of cover songs frustrated Eddie. Speaking to Guitar World in February 1990, eight years on from the album’s release, it still pissed him off that the album was made of half-covers – especially that the synth part he wrote for the band’s cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ Dancing In The Street was intended for one of his original songs.

“At the time I had enough music of my own,” he said. “You know that Mini-Moog riff that opens Dancing In The Street? I’d written that for my own song, but everybody wanted it for Dancing In The Street. I said, ‘What?’ So that’s why I built my own studio. “Put it this way: I’d rather bomb with my own songs than make it with someone else’s. I don’t buy the philosophy of ‘If you redo a proven hit, you’re halfway there.’ That way, you’re not there. I’ve played enough cover tunes.”

There was no going back. Building his own studio, Eddie could keep Warner Bros at arm’s length. He could keep producers out. He could insulate them from outside pressures. And as the documentary discusses, it would also allow him to play around with sound, and for that he needed lots of gear. Sourced from a 1985 article in Recording Engineer Producer magazine, written by the studio designer Howard Weiss, it lists 5150 Studios initial gear inventory in detail.

You can read that article at The Tape Archives. Watch the first two episodes of the documentary above, with the second focusing on the run-up to the band’s legendary performance at The US Festival in 1983, when Eddie won the respect of The Clash’s Joe Strummer.

Was building 5150 Studios the right move? It did cause tension. Eddie Van Halen admitted that it exacerbated tensions with frontman David Lee Roth, who tracked 1984 there before leaving the band and being replaced by Sammy Hagar for 1986’s 5150. But as Eddie explained to Guitar World, he ultimately did it for the band’s benefit.

“The way we did [5150] is basically how I would have liked to have done all the previous records,” he said. “And I think that’s another thing that maybe drove Dave away. Because for 1984, I built the studio and I started wanting to do things a little more my way, and I guess I turned some people off; I created a little friction. Not meaning to. I built the fucking story for the benefit of all of us, for the family, for the band.”

The custom-built Kramer electric guitar that Eddie Van Halen used in the Hot For Teacher and onstage as the VH rock juggernaut conquered the world in 1984 has gone the way of David Gilmour’s Black Strat having now been sold at auction for just over $3.9 million.

Listed by Sotheby’s and sold on 18 April, Eddie’s red-black-and-white stripped Kramer fetched a whopping $3,932,000, making it one of the most expensive guitars in the world – though just shy of Gilmour’s most-famous Fender Stratocaster, which sold for $3,975,000 in 2019, then a world record. 

Both cost considerably less than the 1959 Martin D-18E acoustic Kurt Cobain played on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged session, which set a new world record when it sold for $6,010,000 in 2020. But can you play a super-charged high-legato lead on a vintage Martin acoustic guitar? You sure can on this Kramer.

Built by master luthier Paul Unkert, this took the high-performance S-style to the next level. This being the ‘80s, of course it has a hockey stick headstock, a Kramer decal logo stuck to it. This being an Eddie Van Halen guitar, it was built for radical styles. 

The back of the guitar bears some surgery scars for its flip-up rest for horizontal stunt guitar playing. of course there is a double-locking Floyd Rose vibrato, and no back plate on the tremolo springs as to facilitate quick set-up adjustments. A single Seymour Duncan humbucker occupies the bridge position, with a single volume knob on hand for swells and rolling it back to clean up the tone.

And yet there is lots of classic DNA in the build. Comprised of solid poplar body, it has a bolt-on neck of unvarnished maple, a maple fingerboard with 22 frets, but no sculpting on the neck heel, no aggressive contouring of the double-cutaway. 

Note the oversized industrial loops for the guitar strap. Note the wear and tear. With no lacquer on the body there would always be some serious weathering but this has been through the wars and come out the other side. The striped finish still looks the part.

The Kramer was sold with a letter of authenticity from Unkert saying it was his final project for Eddie and Kramer. Bearing the serial number #CO176, with Unkert’s signature ‘Unk’ stamps on the neck plate. and body, it was put together at the Kramer Green Grove Road Plant in Neptune, New Jersey.

The Kramer shipped in its original case with Warner Bros tags, and, best of all, the straight jacket and white gloves worn by Eddie in the Hot For Teacher video were included. 

The Hot For Teacher video was directed by long-time Van Halen collaborator Pete Angelus and David Lee Roth, and was exactly the sort of thing that fully justifies Sotheby’s listing this Kramer as “one of the most iconic guitars of the MTV era”. No argument here. You can check out more pics and info at Sotheby’s.

And this being Friday, well, what better way to inaugurate the weekend than watching the Hot For Teacher video.

Wolfgang Van Halen's debut album set a very high standard, but one of the greatest things about it was a musician forging his identity as a songwriter while paying tribute to his father Eddie Van Halen, in subtle but meaningful ways. And it looks like he'll be going further on the follow-up.

We already know he used EVH's Frankenstein on the self-titled debut from Mammoth WVH, but in a interview with the UK's Total Guitar magazine (via the Guitar World website) he has revealed he's planning on using a selection of his late father's guitars to track the solos for the follow-up record.

"The only thing I have left to do is track the guitar solos," said Wolfgang. "So what I want to do is go through some of Pop’s notable guitars and do a solo with each of them. Guitars like the Frankenstein or the Shark, stuff like that.”

Wolfgang also went on to detail how the original Frankie feels to play. 

“Well, if anyone’s ever played the EVH Bumblebee reissue, it’s very similar to the Frankenstein profile," he said. "Dad was developing that neck at the same time, and hell, with the Frankenstein reissue it’s pretty much one-for-one. It’s very faithful to the original, which is obviously a lot older. 

“You can feel the history sort of emanating out of the Frankenstein," Wolfgang added. "Picking up that guitar is almost a religious experience, even if you’re not a religious person. You just kinda hold it and feel the history right there in your hands. 

“It’s funny, when I started recording with it back in 2015, we pulled it out and Dad picked it up, played it for a second and then sorta just tossed it on the couch. Everybody in the room gasped! Because to us, it’s quite literally the most famous guitar in the existence of music, where to him it was this little piece of junk he put together. So that divide in opinion over it was funny to see!”

While Wolfgang's debut showed an impressive range of songs, the musician is aiming to go even further with the follow-up.

“On the debut there was this width of what the project was – on the left you had songs like Distance and Circles, those softer vibes, and on the right you had tracks like Stone and The Big Picture," he reflected. "In the middle, there were songs like Mammoth or Epiphany and stuff like that. What I want to do with this album is widen what that breadth is. 

“Further left, for example, there’s a song that’s all on piano... so it has more of a softer vibe. But on the right, there’s some really heavy s**t in comparison to the debut! That’s what I find really exciting, it’s fun to stretch the definition of Mammoth on both sides.”

Read the full interview at Guitar World. 

Rick Beato's new interview with session titan and Toto man Steve Lukather is unsurprisingly excellent – an insight into one of the guitar greats and the session scene of the '70s and '80s. Basically, you need to watch the whole thing below, but we wanted to highlight one part especially concerning his work on the Thriller album.

And although a lot has been said about one of Lukather's famous sessions with Michael Jackson and producer Quincy Jones on the 1982 album, Lukather reveals a full account of just how challenging it was to make the timeless classic. 

By his own reckoning Lukather would write a high percntage of his own parts during sessions, but Jackson sang him Beat It's main riff, then Lukather suggested additions elsewhere. But as most of us know, another iconic player appears on the song – Lukather's old friend Eddie Van Halen. And this is where his account of that time gets really interesting.

"The lead vocal and the electric guitar solo had been done – there was another take of Beat It," he tells Beato. 

"Michael and Quincy, they'd done another take of [the song] apparently," Lukather explains. "And they'd worked on Michael's vocals meticulously – his vocals were quintupled at times, but very slickly done by the genius of Bruce Swedien, the engineer. When they set the tape up to Ed… the ambiguity lies with who cut the tape. It's SMPTE code."

This is a time code – an electronic signal used as identification audio or video tape. It stands for Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers. Lukather went on to explain to relevance to the story. 

"[It was] was two 24 tape machines back in the day, after we were able discover you could get more than 24 track with one machine, they were able to sync up two 24 track machines that would  give you 48 tracks," explains Lukather. "Actually 46 because track 24 on both machines would have a SMPTE code which I believe is a permutation of a 60 cycle thing that would lock the machines.

"Like anything like that, if you cut that it will not lock up," continued Lukather. So what happened was, Ed didn't want to play through the section that they wanted him to so he cut the tape and played the part that's now the record. So what happened is he sent that back to Quincy and it wouldn't sync up. So you had Eddie's first generation [take] and Michael's first generation vocals and the SMPTE code. And the only thing else that was on the track was Michael hitting a trap [flight] case on [the] two and leakage through four of five takes of Michael's vocals through the headphones where you could hear what the track was. 

"So Quincy called me, [late drummer] Jeff Porcaro and an engineer called Humberto Gatica to go to Sunset Sound [LA studio] and fix the track. He said, '… I don't want to do Michael's vocals again, I don't want to transfer them – I want to keep it first generation [with] Eddie's solo on this – you've got to make it work."

Though they were two of the top session musicians in the US at the time, this was a huge challenge; they had to recut guitar, bass and drums for part of the song to fit with the existing vocals and Eddie Van Halen's solo. So they rallied with Lukather's Toto bandmate Porcaro taking the lead. 

"So me and Jeff went down there and Jeff, the musician that he was, he goes, 'I'm gonna go out and I want you to crank Michael's vocal [bleed] so I can hear the two and four.' And he went out there and two drumsticks and a mic, and he made his own classic Jeff [clicktrack] that he would do with drumsticks – I miss him so fucking much, he was the best. He got that together… so of course he goes out and it could have been the first, no more than the second take and he was done. He goes, 'You're up.'

"Once I knew where the groove was as [and] heard Eddie's solo… I got the Marshalls out!" 

The guitarist then had to re-record the rhythm tracks under Van Halen's solo. His initial part backing the solo saw Lukather up the rock ante on the song, playing Beat It's single note riff that features in the final versions intro. He also tracked the bass too. They then sent the results back to Quincy Jones.

"[He] said, 'We love it but Lukey it's too much, I've got to get this on pop and rnb radio and it's metal. You've got to come back down with it. Get that little Fender of yours out, don't turn it all the way up.'"

Lukather went back and double tracked his part again with his '59 Les Paul Standard plugged into Paul Rivera-modded Fender Blackface Deluxe Reverb combo. "They said perfect," remembers Lukather. "Come down to Westlake and do the rest of the overdubs with Michael and [Quincy]."

Mission successful and legendary song tracked. Check out the full interview for more of Lukather's great stories and insights – including his contribution to another classic Thriller track, human Nature. 

• Steve Lukather talks Rosanna, Eddie Van Halen and his new solo album

Steve Lukather has played on hundreds of records. Besides his recorded output with Toto, he has been a prolific session player. He is a Grammy-winning studio veteran, with a discography that reads longer than the phone book, and he’s got the stories to prove it.

Sitting down at Sunset Sound Recorders, the LA studio where he tracked many a record, Toto’s first two albums among them, Lukather shared some of those stories with producer Drew Dempsey, Sunset Sound’s owner and president Paul Camarata, and legendary producer and recording engineer Niko Bolas. And there were some crackers in there. 

There was some wisdom, of course. Technicality? Guitar soloing. That’s brilliant. But you wanna be careful with that; a little goes a long way because “it’s is an exercise in futility at a certain point, because it’s the dumb shit that makes the world go round”. In other words, make sure you’ve got your rhythm guitar game down.

But then there were Lukather’s memories of playing with some of the biggest names in music. He fondly recalls coming through at the same time as Eddie Van Halen, having a WTF moment when he first heard Eruption, and then being one of the few players to have ever jammed with Van Halen live, even joining them in the studio during the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge sessions and lending his pipes to proceedings.

“I think I am one of the few guitar players who ever played with Van Halen live,” he says. “I played with them in Texas. I played with them at the Cabo Wabo opening.”

• 4 guitar tricks you can learn from Steve Lukather

“I sang background on a couple of records,” he continues. “I just happened to be up and they’re like, ‘Come on!’ If memory serves me right, it would have been the F.U.C.K. album, and what was the one before that. Sammy was in the band. Ted Templeman was the producer when I went out there. I think it was Top Of The World. I just did some ‘oohs’ and sang in the background with them. It as no big deal. But I sang on a couple of tracks.”

Lukather and Eddie Van Halen were close friends. He remembers hearing the name Van Halen and thinking it was one guy, not a band. Eddie played on Lukather’s first solo album, in 1989, playing bass guitar on the opening track, Twist The Knife. 

“We did a bunch of stuff over the years,” says Lukather. “We played live at a benefit for Jason Becker, God bless him, for ALS. Before Mike got it, Mike Porcaro [the late Toto bassist, who passed away in 2015]. It was Billy Sheehan, me, Pat Thorpey and Ed, just played some crazy stuff in Chicago.”

If Lukather was always welcome during the Sammy Hagar years, it wasn’t always the case when David Lee Roth was fronting the band. When he popped his head through the door at Sunset during the Fair Warning sessions, there was not much chance of him being invited to lay down some vocals with Diamond Dave.

“I walked in to Studio One looking for Ed once, and Roth was sitting there with Donn Landee [engineer], and I walked in like the ever-jovial self and said, ‘Hey man! Hey, Donn! Where’s Ed?’ And Roth looked at me as if I had just killed his parents or something.’ The look on his face was disgust. Like, ‘How dare you share the same air!’ I got the vibe right away. ‘I’m just looking for Ed, man.’ I got outta there quick!”

Maybe they should have got him in. While a creative success – Mean Street, Unchained, etc – it was the slowest-selling album in the Roth era. That was water off a duck’s back to Lukather. What got to him, or rather who got to him in his time at Sunset, was Prince. 

Lukather first encountered Prince circa ’78, when he was hired alongside the likes of Davey Johnstone, Mike Utley, and Toto’s Jeff and Steve Porcaro to play on Valerie Carter’s Wild Child.

Lukather was in Studio Three, tracking under the supervision of producer James Newtown Howard, who told him that there would be some up-and-coming kid from Minnesota sitting in on the record. Don’t worry, he says. Newly discovered by Cavallo-Ruffalo, this kid, he goes by the name of Prince, is just sitting in. The word was, the higher-uppers wanted him to co-produce.

“I didn’t know Prince, so I go in, and the first thing hear is someone’s called Prince. ‘That’s his name!? Did he give that to himself?’ I’m just being a smart-ass,” recalls Lukather. “I didn’t know nothing about this guy! Prince, huh? So, anyway, he’s there, and he’s just this quiet, skinny little dude.”

Lukather lays it out. He was soloing. Prince was on the couch. Lukather could just see his head poking up. “The couch was down there, so I couldn’t really see him,” he says. The day goes on and on and all this time Prince says nothing. 

“I said to James, ‘What’s wrong with this cat!? He’s creeping me out!’ He never said a freakin’ word to me,” says Lukather. “That was the first Prince encounter. I’m playing all day long and the cat never said nothing to me. he would just occasionally stare at me in a really odd way. Then he becomes Prince.”

This sets the scene for their second encounter – and the way Lukather tells it, it is a Curb Your Enthusiasm-style rivalry in the making. Prince is mixing Purple Rain in Studio Three. Lukather is in Two.

“It was like 10 in the morning,” he says. “I was here for a tracking session for somebody – I forget who it was – and he was sitting on that purple bike, that was in the movie, in a silver lamé suit, sitting on it! He had this huge bodyguard, with the white hair. The cat was on the bike. I see him and say, ‘Hey, man!’ He goes [nods]. I got a little ‘uhh’. I am a big fan. Let me just say, as a musician… But he wouldn’t talk to me, man, and it lasted a long time!”

Ten years on, Lukather got his revenge. 

“We did a show in Curacao, the North Sea Jazz Curacao, and we were headlining one night and Prince was headlining one night,” he says. “We were there the night before. I knew we were going to this island, so six months prior I had booked the biggest suite overlooking the ocean, because it was a vacation I’m going to hang here and I want the nicest room they got. [It's] my dime!

“Well, apparently Prince wanted that room, and I already had it, and he was pissed. I was right above him. I wanted to go see the show and he wouldn’t let us come on the stage and see the show. And our tour manager at the time used to work for Prince. I found it humorous. I was going to drop down a little rubber duck with sign on it saying, ‘Hey, man, are we cool?’”

You can watch the whole interview above, and subscribe to the Sunset Sound Recorders YouTube channel here.

What could have been… it's still hard to process Chris Cornell and Eddie Van Halen no longer being alive, let alone the prospect of them working together when they were. But Cornell's former guitarist Pete Thorn has revealed it almost happened. And there's video to prove it. 

“They were buddies… Eddie always wanted to do something with Chris, musically,” Thorn said during his appearance on the The Mitch Lafon and Jeremy White Show. “He loved his voice and he used to be like, ‘Man, I love him. We were always talking about doing something together.'”

And it was during the sessions for 'rock' versions of the songs Long Gone and the title from Cornell's much-maligned 2009 Timbaland-produced solo album Scream that a crossover began. 

“[Cornell and I were] in a parking lot listening to [the recordings] in my car, I remember," said Thorn. "And he looked at me and he said, ‘Hey what do you think if we got Eddie to work on this?'”

Cornell had already become friendly with Van Halen in the '90s, and Thorn was a huge EVH fan himself. The latter eventually reached out to the guitarist via Dave Friedman of Friedman Amplification. Thorn ended up calling Eddie and visited Eddie at his 5150 studios in Los Angeles to discuss the next step. 

"He took me into 5150 and he didn't even know [I was a fan]," remembered Thorn. "He was so humble in many ways, and sort of unassuming. He said, 'This is the studio where we've done everything since 1984.' I was thinking, yeah I know - I'm well aware!

"So we put on the track as we sat there at the console listening to this song," continued Thorn. "And it's me playing acoustic guitar on it… and I'm sitting there listening to it coming out of the speakers. I thought I would meet this fella sometimes but I didn't know it would be under [these circumstances]. It was incredible but I don't want to get anyone excited thinking it ever got finished because it didn't. But he did work on it."

So we're left with the 'rock' version of Scream without Eddie above, wondering what could have been? Well not quite! 

"It's a long story but it never got a vocal on it by Chris," explained Thorn. "Ed got busy doing the next Van Halen record right around then… it just never ended up getting finished. But if anyone has seen Chris on tour during his Songbook tour, he played to records onstage during that tour – I think it was 2011 / 2012. He would rop the needle on an album and play along; that's actually the version that Ed played on if you can find that on YouTube."

And we did…

The backing recording of Scream Cornell is playing to above on tour in Udine in 2012 is not a previously released version of the song. If this is Eddie's version it's a low key acoustic performance from him from what we can hear. But it's definitely our favourite take on the song – much more haunting, and it sounds like there's some 12-string guitar arpeggiation going on there too. 

So thank you Pete Thorn for shedding light on this unexpected piece of Cornell and EVH history. And make sure you check out Pete's sublime playing on his YouTube channel if you haven't already. He also honours his hero very well indeed… 

"There are no rules" – Eddie Van Halen: the last guitar mag interview

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have shared the latest single from their forthcoming studio album, Return Of The Dream Canteen, and it was written to honour the memory of Eddie Van Halen.

Titled Eddie, the track came together the day after the guitar icon’s death, and while it does not mention him explicitly in the lyrics, it references his life and legacy, from creating an all-new sound and style for electric guitar, to creating a body of work with Van Halen that influences millions of players across generations.

“Sometimes we don’t realise how deeply affected and connected we are to artists until the day they die,” said RHCP frontman Anthony Kiedis. “Eddie Van Halen was a one of a kind.”

Kiedis said Eddie “effortlessly unfolded”, and it all coalesced around a bass guitar motif.

“The day after his death, Flea came into rehearsal with an emotional bassline,” Kiedis said. “John [Frusciante, guitar], Chad [Smith, drums] and I started playing along and pretty soon with all our hearts, a song in his honour effortlessly unfolded. It felt good to be sad and care so much about a person who had given so much to our lives. 

“Although the song doesn’t speak to Eddie by name, it talks about his early days on the Sunset Strip and the rock ’n’ roll tapestry that Van Halen painted on our minds. In the end, our song asks that you not remember Eddie for dying but for living his wildest dream.”

Eddie arrives a month after the release of Tippa My Tongue, the first single that accompanied the surprise announcement that the California stadium-rockers were releasing a second studio album in 2022, with the platinum-selling Unlimited Love being followed by Return Of The Dream Canteen on 14 October – an album the band describe as “everything we are and ever dreamed of being”.  

You can learn how to play Tippa My Tongue here, and take it as read that the return of John Frusciante on guitar has revitalised the band. Once they started jamming old songs, the groove returned and they started writing – one album turned into two, with long-time collaborator Rick Rubin returning to produce them.

“Once we found that slip stream of sound and vision, we just kept mining,” wrote the band in a statement. “With time turned into an elastic waist band of oversized underwear, we had no reason to stop writing and rocking. It felt like a dream. When all was said and done, our moody love for each other and the magic of music had gifted us with more songs than we knew what to do with. Well we figured it out. Two double albums released back to back.”

Return Of The Dream Canteen is available to pre-order now, out 14 October via Warner Records.

Ozzy Osbourne has reopened the Randy Rhoads vs Eddie Van Halen guitar hero debate, not only confirming that the rivalry was real, but contesting the idea that Eddie taught Randy everything he knew.

For a period in the ‘80s, that was the big question: who was better, Rhoads or Van Halen? In hard rock and electric guitar circles, that was Federer vs Nadal, Messi vs Ronaldo – something that was ginned up by the media and perpetuated by fans in bar-room debate, with the occasionally report of frostiness to add some drama. 

Sometimes the guitarists would play along, as witnessed in the recent documentary from Andre Relis, Randy Rhoads: Reflections Of A Guitar Icon, in which there is an audio clip of Eddie offering a back-handed compliment and a casual barb in the then-Quiet Riot guitarist’s direction, alleging that Rhoads had confessed to taking his style from him.

“He was one guitarist who was honest anyway, because I read some interviews that he did and he said everything he did he learned from me,” said Van Halen. “And he was good, but I don’t think he really did anything that I haven’t done. There ain’t nothing wrong with it, man. I’ve copied other people…”

But speaking to Rolling Stone, Osbourne says there is no chance Rhoads cribbed his style from Van Halen. Furthermore, Rhoads would never have had admitted to it. 

“I heard recently that Eddie [Van Halen] said he taught Randy all his licks … he never,” Osbourne said. “To be honest, Randy didn’t have a nice thing to say about Eddie. Maybe they had a falling out or whatever, but they were rivals.” 

Such tension did not go unnoticed in the Quiet Riot camp. With the Van Halen star ascendant, they would wind Rhoads up by taping pictures of Eddie to his wah pedal. 

In an interview with Eddie Trunk, Relis admitted that he was unfamiliar with the Rhoads versus Van Halen rivalry before he started making his documentary.

“From those that were there, the story was that Van Halen and Eddie would come check out Randy quite a bit, and watch him play, and there seemed to be some sort of competition between Randy and Eddie. I think that Eddie, in my opinion, thought of Randy as a threat, and just seemed to be – as you can see from the audio of Eddie – Eddie believes that he ripped his style off, and on the Quiet Riot side, and Randy side, they thought that that was just bogus.”

As Trunk noted, Eddie at the time would turn his back to the audience to hide some of his tricks – techniques that were wholly new at the time and would change the way we play the instrument. Rhoads would face the audience. Relis said they simply came from “different worlds”.

“On the Randy side, that comes from being a teacher, growing up in a music school and just wanting to teach people,” said Relis. “When you do watch the way in which Randy Rhoads stood onstage, and the way in which he focused on the audience… He was definitely teaching and sharing. As far as Eddie Van Halen, obviously they came from different worlds and backgrounds. I think the notion was that Eddie was more of the rock star, a little more arrogant, and Randy, on the other hand, was not.”

Ozzy Osbourne has a had a ringside seat for the evolution of the guitar hero, and after all these years, he retains his gravitational pull over the some of the world’s best guitarists in hard rock and metal.

His latest album, Patient Number Nine, is out now via Epic, and features guests spots from Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and his fellow Black Sabbath alumnus Tony Iommi, with long-time collaborator Zakk Wylde climbing back onboard the crazy train.

Rhoads, however, was the one who lit the blue touch paper on his solo career, and 40 years after the guitarist’s death in a plane crash in Florida, his influence can still be felt across Ozzy’s material. Speaking to MusicRadar, Wylde, who made his studio album debut with Ozzy in 1988 on No Rest For The Wicked, said that no one could fill Rhoads’ shoes.

“He had unbelievable technique and could do all the things on the guitar that are astounding,” Wylde said. “His scales, the diminished scales he used – unreal. But it was his writing and the way he composed his solos – I mean, his solos were songs within the songs… He was way ahead of what everybody else was doing.

“I learned all of Randy’s solos – before I even got in Ozzy's band. But when I was in the band, I absolutely played them Randy’s way. You have to. There’s no reason not to. I mean, it’s not like you could fill his shoes – that’s impossible – but you have to give respect to his music. There is no other way. Whether it was me or Jake E Lee or Gus G or anybody, you’ve got to play Randy’s solos like Randy did.”

In other Ozzy Osbourne news, the Prince Of Darkness and his wife, Sharon, are to return to reality TV in a new show for the BBC, Home To Roost, which will document their return to life in England.

Osbourne has had his health issues of late. But following success of recent performances at the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony with Tony Iommi, and at the half-time show for the LA Rams, he hopes to tour in support of Patient Number Nine, telling People magazine that nothing will stop him getting back out there.

“It’s where I belong,” he said. “The relationship I have with my audience is the biggest love affair of my life.”

“I am determined to get back on stage even if I have to be nailed to a board and wheeled on,” he added. “Survival is my legacy.”