Eddie Van Halen's Home Studio (1998) | You Had To Be There

I think I'll lock you in a clockwork orange. No, better not, my things are up there. In 1983 we were recording Diver Down and half of that album are covers and there is a lot of criticism about it. Why weren't they writing more music? Because? Aren't you reading? That's why I built the

studio

, because I'd rather bomb with my own music than be the biggest cover band in the world, so to speak, so I built this place, but it was illegal, uh, because it's against zoning laws, Yeah, yeah, so what did I do? I built a racquetball court and here's the uh, city inspector?

He goes hmm, a two foot thick cinder block, a rebar, a man filled with reinforced concrete, he was really worried about your neighbors and he said, yeah, you know, I play late at night and I hit the ball. very hard, you know and it's like you know, yeah, yeah, which side of the glass you like to be on, you like to be like that, you'll touch your stuff here, you're a little, actually, actually, I'm never into this. side because I hate wearing headphones because for me that isolates me from I play there you play there yeah yeah and now you see my speaker cable runs through here to the cabinets and I keep my head there and I plug it right into my head and I have the vibrates, you know, our mirrors move, I like to feel it, yeah, okay, it's the same board that I have in my bathroom

studio

that I wrote the whole record pin on and on the in the pot, you know, It's like in the morning I get rid of toxins and new things come, you know, I'm very serious, where do the ideas come from?

You know, you're just giving up on the colonel's illegal knowledge, I added, I made a hole in the wall there and I added this room and, uh, this used to be, you know, closed and there was a door, it was just storage, so for this record I removed this and you should have seen these engineers say ah, we don't know how to do it, right? put a damn metal pole to hold that up and go, hey, great idea, so you're an architect anyway, this used to be just a tape storage room and we'll see all those tapes, especially the numbered ones, um, they're all music that I have written since I built the studio and what Don Landy with whom we made eight albums.

Well, we had a computer from Radio Shack and we ended up numbering everything, we hit it on the computer and it tells me what was on it. Well the computer took a dump uh we even took it to used labs to see if the research labs see if they get anything from the hard drive and nothing so this is all waiting to be archived by someone yeah and the The only person who can do it is me because no one knows what I like, but it's my dream job for someone to sit in a room and spend the next year and a half listening to your music.

I mean, there's so much stuff in there that one day I just grabbed the ladder and went up and Put It On and it was uh uh right now and it was labeled 1983, which is when you wrote the music, yeah, actually, before you jumped. Wow, I'm playing slide guitar on the nylon, you know, but you can't do that, yeah, you can. Do anything, you know, it's not music theory, it's not a fact, you know, I'm like lawyers and doctors who still practice, they haven't understood it yet, you know, but it's music theory, it's not a musical fact and there are no rules. that I never learned. how to read music um maybe that's why I'm so twisted and unorthodox but if I had taken guitar lessons I wouldn't have or I wouldn't have done all the dumb things I did you know people like it or they don't you know what Is that your choice?

So your child is in kindergarten. No, he is a first grader. He's fine, but he has a music class once a week and Wolfy asked me. It goes, you know? when you're doing that, the loud stuff on the guitar. which my mom said why do you have to make that loud crying noise a little bit did you buy your house that's not like that but uh well yes it works I really like it when you do that and you do well that's called improvising or you deviate from the melody, others can you understand that there you go oh this is george hello george studio manager and I'm building my pedal board and an electronic wizard here so anyway he there was what they call pumpkin day halloween , it's okay and they are singing songs. and he's improvising, you know, he cuts the melody a little bit, teach your game a timeout and devours the stuff from him, so he took and picked up pumpkin food from the teacher.

I'm going next time, at least aim better and reach the space now, so I got a call from the principal, I had to go there and I just said: you know there are no rules, I don't want my son to learn that way, his life is surrounded by music all the time and I don't want it. He showed me a book. I've always liked building guitars, destroying them, and I've wasted a lot of guitars. I have come across many great ideas and like this one, this one I built, this one is the original. guitar that um, I mean, if people really saw this up close, I mean, what happened was, uh, the body, there are boogie bodies, the only wayne charvello in the place, this is not the original neck because when I used to run, jump and kick the amps.

One time my foot got stuck in the grill cloth and it broke, that's not good, but it was basically the same thing, but you know, I took it apart because I wanted a vibrato. This predates Floyd Rose. on the first record it's black and white and I didn't know how to rewire things. Look, this is a switch that's supposed to be there. You know anyway, I didn't know how to plug it back in, so I told myself. I wonder what happens if you just lift the back and see that it says tone. Well, it's a volume knob, but when you turn it up you get a nice tone and it worked, so I'm going to say: what the hell do I need more? and people say, well, what is that and what am I secretly going to do?

It's not even connected, it doesn't do anything and I just use it. It looks great, although I only used Schwinn bike paint and uh, I stopped the trucks that fell one night and I'm going to say hello. some spotlights for the end of the show, yeah, and I don't know, I just collect things and it's a little cello that I broke. Great, thank you very much, Eddie, this is great.