“There was never a single moment when he did not have the guitar in his hand” Eddie Van Halen’s friend remembers how obsessed he was with guitar
Legendary rock journalist Steven Rosen was friends with Eddie Van Halen for a long time. And in this time, he learned a thing or two about his relationship with the guitar. Now, in a new interview with Igor Paspalj, Steven recalls how it all began for the “guitarist’s guitarist”, who was only a “local Hollywood phenomenon” when the two first met in July 1977.
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Steven has written a new book Tonechaser on this friendship, providing deep insights into just how far the Van Halen guitarist’s musical obsessions went. It also looks at some of his personal quirks. “[Eddie] was a pretty complex person”, Rosen recalls, and that “the longer I sort of knew him and hung out with him, I realise there were more facets to his personality.”
“Music was first and foremost and everything for him. I mean, I know you’ve heard it before, but with him, it was everything.”
Steven was able to get to know Eddie on such a personal level because of their proximity: the two only lived eight minutes away from each other. Eddie lived in the luxurious Coldwater Canyon, while Steven lived in the comparatively “funky cheap rent part of Hollywood”. Because of this, it “wasn’t long before he would just sort of come over… Or I’d drive over to his place in Cold Water”, where Eddie lived with his future wife, American actress Valerie Bertinelli.
Whenever Steven would visit Eddie’s Coldwater Canyon home studio, “He was always sitting in the chair and having a talk. He was playing, he was changing strings. It was always about the guitar.”
It was through these studio encounters that Rosen realised that his more musical side was intensely private: “When he was in the musician mode and he needed to work, he needed to be by himself. It was almost an unspoken thing. I mean, I could sense it. He’d kind of be playing, and you kind of look over, and I just knew it. ‘Hey man, I’ll see you later.’”
Because of this key moment, he also discovered how important it was to Eddie that people respected this part of him: “And if you disrespected him, he held on to that for a very long time.”
In other recent Van Halen news, a recently unearthed interview with Ed from 1991 revealed that far from being enamoured with the rise of shred guitar in the 1980s, he seemed to be quite disdainful of the idea – “what’s important to me now isn’t how fast I can solo. It’s the whole picture,” he explained.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
