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

i think i'll lock you in clockwork orange no i better not my stuff's up there 1983 we were recording diver down and half that record is cover tunes and there's a lot of criticism about that why weren't you guys writing more music why aren't you reading that's why i built studio because i would rather bomb with my own music than be the world's biggest cover band so to speak so i built this place but it was illegal uh because it's against the zoning laws yeah yeah so what i did is i built a racquetball court and here's the uh the the the city of inspector he's going hmm two foot thick cinder block rebar enforced concrete filled man he was really worried about your neighbors and going yeah you know i play late at night and hit the ball real hard you know and it's like you know yeah yeah which side of the glass do you like being on do you like being that you you'll play your stuff here you're a little i'm actually i'm actually never on this side because i hate wearing headphones because to me it it isolates me from i play in there you play in there yeah yeah and now you see my my speaker cable goes to through here to cabinets and i keep the head in there and i plug straight into the head and and i get the vibe the you know our mirrors move i like to feel it yeah okay it's the same board i have in my bathroom studio which i wrote the whole record pin and on the on the on the pot you know it's like in the morning i relieve myself of toxins and new comes you know i mean really seriously where do ideas come from you know you're just giving for unlawful colonel knowledge i added i knocked the hole in the wall there and added this room and uh this used to be just you know closed up right and there was a doorway it was just storage so for this record i knocked this out and you should've seen these engineers going ah we don't know how to do it can't you just put a damn metal pole to support that and go hey great idea so you're an architect anyway this this used to be just a tape storage room and well see all all those tapes especially the number numbered ones um those are all music that i've written since i built the studio and what we what don landy who we did eight records with right um we had a radio shack computer and we ended up numbering everything punch it up on the computer telling me what was on it well the computer took a dump on us uh we even took it to used laboratories to see if research laboratories see if they get anything off the hard drive and nothing so all this stuff is waiting to be archived by somebody yeah and the only person that can do that is me because nobody knows what i like but it's some dream job for somebody to sit in a room and spend the next year and a half listening to your music i mean there's so much stuff there one day i just kind of grabbed the ladder and went up there and put it on and it was uh uh right now and it was labeled 1983 which is when you wrote it the music yeah actually before jump wow i'm playing slide guitar on the nylon you know but you can't do that yeah you can you do anything you know it's not it's music theory not fact you know i'm kind of like lawyers and doctors still practicing they ain't got it down yet you know but uh it's music theory not music fact and there are no rules i never learned how to read music um maybe that's why i'm so twisted and unorthodox but if i would have taken guitar lessons i wouldn't have done or i wouldn't do all the silly stuff that i did you know the people like it or not is you know that's their choice so your son's in kindergarten no he's a first grader okay um but uh so he's got a music class once a week and wolfy asked me he goes you know when you're doing that uh the high stuff on the guitar which my mom used to say why do you have to make that high crying noise a little you bought your house didn't it but uh well if it goes i really like it when you do that and you go well that's called improvising either you stray off the melody else can get that there you go oh this is george there hello george studio manager and uh building my pedalboard and uh electronic wizard here um so anyway he there it was uh what they call pumpkin day halloween okay and they're singing songs and he's improvising you know strain off the melody a little bit well teach your game a timeout and wolfie up their stuff so he took up a picked up a pumpkin food at the teacher i go next time at least aim better and hit the gap now so i got a call from the principal i had to go down there and i just said you know there are no rules i don't want my son learning that way his life is surrounded by music all the time and uh i don't want him taught by a book i've always been into building guitars tearing them apart and i've wasted a lot of guitars i've stumbled onto a lot of a lot of great ideas and like this this one i built this is this is the original guitar that um i mean if people really saw this thing up close i mean what happened was uh the body there's a boogie bodies the one wayne charvello in the place this isn't the original neck because when i used to run jump and kick the amps i one one time my foot got stuck in the grill cloth and that broke off that's not good but uh it was basically the same but uh but you know i took it apart because i wanted a vibrato in it this is this is pre floyd rose uh on the first record it's a black and white and i didn't know how to wire stuff back up see this is a switch that's supposed to be there you know anyway i didn't know how to wire it back up so i said to myself i wonder what happens if you just take the back up straight to see it says tone well it's a volume knob but when you turn up you get a nice tone so and it worked so i'm going what the hell do i need anymore you know and people go well what's that and what's that i'm going secret it's not even hooked up it does nothing and i just use looks great though i just used schwinn bicycle paint and uh stopped the trucks dropped one night and i'm going hey with some reflectors for the end of the show yeah and it's just i don't know i just whatever i collect stuff and it's a little cello that i kind of broke great thank you very much thank you eddie this is great

Channel: MTV News

Views: 1,522,347

Keywords: mtv news, celebrity news, entertainment news, pop culture, Van Halen, Eddie Van Halen, You Had To Be There, Chris Connelly, Studio City, house tour, tour, celebrity homes, Jump, Panama, Runnin’ with the Devil, Hot for Teacher, Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love, You Really Got Me, Why Can’t This Be Love, Can’t Stop Lovin’ You, Eruption, Dance the Night Away, memorial, van halen death, van halen dies

Id: WpzyxHnN7HM

Length: 7min 41sec (461 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020