Wolfgang Van Halen: “I’d rather fail at my own thing than succeed on my dad’s legacy”
With Eddie Van Halen as his father – and having served a stint as Van Halen’s bassist himself – it would have been easy for Wolfgang Van Halen to build a sustainable career rooted in the monolithic legacy Eddie left behind.
But he’s long been determined to carve out his own path, and with the recent release of his band Mammoth’s third studio album The End, it’s safe to say he’s built his own name through and through.
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And it’s very much an all-or-nothing mentality, too, as he explains in a new interview with Billboard: “I would rather fail on my own thing than succeed on my dad’s legacy.”
“I’m proud of the way that I’ve handled myself in this business,” he says. “I’m not sitting there playing Van Halen songs and trying to shack up in the legacy of my father. I’m trying to set out and do it on my own.
“Whether I’m successful at that is a subjective opinion, but I’m at least proud that I’m not sitting here going, like, ‘Hey, the only place you can hear a Van Halen play Panama is over here.’”
“Subjective opinion,” he says, but given his band Mammoth has amassed a considerable following of hundreds of thousands of listeners across the globe, toured with the likes of Guns N’ Roses and Dirty Honey, and released three albums in a span of four years, it’s safe to say he’s doing alright.
Elsewhere in the interview, he touches on his decision to drop the ‘WVH’ from his band’s name (until this year the band was called Mammoth WVH).
“I’ve wanted to be [Mammoth] from the beginning,” he says. “There’s a much higher chance of organic discovery when it’s just Mammoth. People have a lot of complicated feelings about me because of my family and how I started out, and I think a lot of people decided how they feel about me and my music before they even heard it.
“So I think now it’s a nice opportunity to get in that window of people just hearing something and get that unbiased reaction – and then they’ll see who it is and get pissed off, but before that it might be, ‘Hey, it’s actually good, but I still don’t like him!’”
We here at Guitar.com were lucky enough to catch up with Wolfgang Van Halen earlier this month to ask him about his five favourite guitar players.
Alongside Aaron Marshall of Intervals – who WVH has cited numerous times before as his favourite player – Van Halen names Adam Jones of Tool – who should also have their own “Mount Rushmore” – and his father Eddie, but notes despite his world-shattering talent, was a “terrible guitar teacher”.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
