MTV's Chris Connelly visited Eddie Van Halen's home studio in 1998 to discuss building the space, breaking down guitars, and being a dad.
The Conversation
I think I'll lock you in
clockwork orange no i better not my
stuff's up there
we were recording
diver down and half that record is cover
tunes
and there's a lot of criticism about
Eddies Racquetball Court
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
Headphones
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
Bathroom Studio
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
Tape Room
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
Computer Dump
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
which is when you wrote it the music
yeah actually before jump
wow i'm playing slide guitar on the
Slide Guitar
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 now
Guitar Lessons
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
Improvisation
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
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
Guitar Talk
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