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"The Well Tempered Guitarist"
By: Vic Garbarini
Guitar World (October 1999)
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He is arguably
the most influential and successful living American rock guitarist of the
century -–our greatest innovator since Jimi Hendrix died almost 30 years
ago. He is also easily the most important rock guitarist to emerge
from Europe, where he was born and trained in the European classical tradition
until his family moved to Los Angeles when he was seven. (No, the
insular English emphatically do not consider themselves part of Europe.
Englishmen have been known to brag that they’ve never taken the 20-mile
ferry ride to France. You’ve probably driven farther for snacks!)
In a very real
sense, Eddie Van Halen’s progress as a musician mirrors to development
of American music over the last hundred years: European immigrant
moves to the New World, where his classical and folk influences are augmented
by the artistry of black musicians, resulting in a radically different
musical style. A classical piano prodigy in his native Holland, Ed
embraced rock guitar when his family came to the U.S., finding within it
his entrée to American culture. Ultimately, it was by fusing
the two genres that he found his unique musical voice in a combination
of blitzkrieg riffing and two-handed tapping. Virtually overnight,
Ed exploded the boundaries of rock guitar and, in the process, created
an entirely new language for the instrument.
After achieving
instant success with Van Halen’s self-titled debut album in 1978, Ed worked
his way through the usual Behind the Music rock cliches: exorbitant
fame was followed by an often-crippling sense of self-doubt and alcoholism,
no to mention the departure of certain band members and their subsequent
public sniping. A few years ago Ed emerged from the haze of alcoholism
and insecurity with the help of his remarkable therapist, Sat-Kaur Khalsa,
and began his life and music again at a higher level of awareness.
While Van Halen
3, his bands’ first effort with former Extreme vocalist Gary Cherone,
met a decidedly mixed reaction from both fans and critics, Ed’s playing
was praised for it’s astonishing fluidity. Using a regimen of advanced
breathing exercises and meditation techniques, he’s managed to tap into
a deeper well of pure inspiration, and the creativity has flowed freely
every since.
We caught an upbeat
Eddie at his 5150 studio where he’s been busy recording the follow-up to
Van Halen 3 with Los Angeles veteran Danny Kortchmar producing.
Cradling his guitar and spitting out riffs to emphasize his points throughout
our two late-night interviews, Eddie reflected on his own musical and personal
evolution over the past 20 years – as well as the innovations that have
changed the face of music over the past 10 years and 10 centuries.
Guitar World:
Music and the millennium is a pretty overwhelming topic. So let’s
start off with an easy one, Ed: Please sum up the major musical highlights
of the last one thousand years for us in one sentence.
EVH:
Okay, there was church music, then Bach popularized tempered tunings, and
now we’re playing chainsaws on stage and lighting them on fire. How’s
that? [laughs] Basically, since Bach there’s really
been nothing new under the sun.
GW:
So tempered tuning chopped up the natural scale into neat little equal
segments, which began modern music. But it was artificial.
Did we lose or gain by that?
EVH:
Well, both, because tempered tuning isn’t really true or natural; it’s
artificial, as you say – a compromise. So when I play a major triad
on the piano it just kills me, because the vibrations between the overtones
ain’t jivin’ right. But if we go back before Bach and use a natural,
untempered tuning for the piano, we can only play in one key.
GW:
Why did the guitar become the most important instrument of this century?
Is it because on a guitar you can bend the strings and get in between those
nice, neat tempered notes and find more complex tones and emotions to express?
EVH:
Absolutely. I’m not sure I’d really want to hear somebody bend the
strings on a piano. It’d be fun to watch them try! But with
a guitar you can bend or use vibrato to reach all those microtonal notes
and those feelings that fall between the cracks on a piano. The same
is true of any fretless stringed instrument, like the violin and the cello.
Listen to Yo-Yo Ma play the Bach cello suites. I’ve been playing
a lot of cello lately – you’ll probably hear some on the next album.
And at this point, I’m finding it pretty easy to fall through those cracks
– a lot more than I want to. [laughs]
I think the guitar
is such an expressive instrument because, like being with a woman, you
touch is everything. You can play angry, you can massage it sexy
– how it responds depends on your touch. There’s touch involved in
piano, but you’re not actually touching the strings. You hit a key,
which triggers a hammer, which then hits the string. So there’s an
agent in between you and the strings – a middleman. Little music
business joke there, folks!
GW:
You were a child prodigy on the piano when you came to America from Holland.
Why the switch to rock and roll and the guitar?
EVH:
When I cam to America, I couldn’t speak English. I was a minority
kid. Music was my way of getting around my shyness to express my
feelings. Meanwhile, we were being raised like that guy in the movie
Shine [pianist Geoffrey Rush]. I’d practice one piece
on the piano all year to go down to Long Beach city College and be judged
in this competition. But even after I discovered rock and roll, I
continued to play the piano and compete. I actually wont that competition
three years in a row.
GW:
Is the problem with classical music that you’re playing someone else’s
emotions instead of your own?
EVH:
Well, yeah, but I fought against that because I never really learned how
to read music. I would just watch my piano teacher’s fingers and…
GW:
Wait a minute – you mean you won three piano competitions by faking it?
EVH:
Yeah, I guess I was blessed with good enough ears to pull it off.
I won fist prize three years in a row out of 2,000 kids. And the
judges would make remarks like, “Hmm, very interesting interpretation of
Mozart.” And I’d think, Oh, shit, I thought I was playing it right!
But I guess they got off on the fact that I put myself into it.
GW:
Many of the great composers left room for improvisation in their pieces.
EVH:
Oh, exactly. That’s why my favorite pianist was always Vladimir Horowitz.
He had such a great sense of humor in his playing, and he always put his
own improvisation on Bach of Chopin or whatever he was playing. Segovia
did the same thing for classical guitar with his transcriptions, but the
people who just copy him note for note lack emotion. They don’t have
their own voice. When I found the guitar, I refused to take lessons.
This was my real emotional release, and I didn’t want to be taught how
to approach the instrument.
GW:
Do you think you guitar patting technique was an unconscious way of bringing
some of your classical influences into you rock style? “Eruption”
is full of classical references.
EVH:
You may be right. Frankly, when I do this [taps up the neck],
it kind of sounds like…yodeling, to me. [laughs]
GW:
Was the guitar your spiritual and psychological therapy even before you
even knew what the term therapy meant?
EVH:
Definitely. Playing guitar was my sanctuary. It was the one
place I could go to if I got fucked around by a girlfriend, or anyone else,
for that matter. It still is. If there’s something I can’t
deal with, I can just spend hours playing. It’s a God-given gift
– I certainly don’t know where the ideas come from. They’re obviously
given to you, and you have to keep your fingers moving and your mind quiet.
I try my best to not think about thinking, so I can just let it flow.
Because when I start thinking, forget it.
GW:
What does it feel like when you get beyond thinking?
EVH:
It’s anything from a very heavy, stunned “Whoa, what just happened?” to
a very high…I can’t relate it exactly to an orgasm, but sometimes when
you come out of it, you’re exhausted. It’s just emotions pouring
out.
GW:
For centuries, artists thought that alcohol or drugs spurred their creativity.
Since you have up alcohol and got beyond some of your ego fears, do you
literally feel that the energy is moving your fingers?
EVH:
yeah, I realized alcohol was actually blocking my creativity. But
when I can naturally play from that place that’s beyond my fears and ego,
it’s almost like I’m just a puppet. A lot of guys, when they become
junkies, can play some brilliant stuff at first. But after a while
they can’ play like that anymore because they can’t depend on that artificial
high – it fades away and fucks them up.
GW:
Are there are practical things you can do to get to that place where the
music just comes? Robert Fripp once said that you can’t make the
wind come, but you can learn to raise your sails to catch it. How?
EVH:
Well, what happened today is a good example. I had some solo guitar
stuff to do for the new album, and a couple of good friends including Rob,
our engineer, were all there in the studio. And as soon as I started
playing, they all stopped talking and watched me. And I went, “Hey,
guys, do me a favor; keep talking and make all the noise you want.
Because when you stand there and silently stare at me I get self-conscious
and start thinking about what I’m playing.” So we all joked around
and talked and I said, “Rob, record.” And I kept talking until he
punched me in and I told the others to keep on talking naturally.
I listened back, and it was great. Because it wasn’t…how do I explain
it? It was me – but not.
GW:
It was from you real self, not your ego.
EVH:
Exactly. There’s never any ego involved when you’re in that space.
It’s like you’re driving a car, but your higher self or something is driving
it. Wherever that driver steers me is not my conscious choice.
And if I fall out of that space, then it really becomes work.
Now, I’m not saying
you don’t have to work to keep your chops up. That’s one place where
the “raising your sails” thing comes in. If I don’t play for just
a weekend, I’ll pick the guitar up Monday morning and go, “Holy shit, I
need to stretch!” I need to play for a good hour before I can do
anything.
GW:
When you started out, the idea that you could only create great music from
pain was pretty widespread. It still is, but you seem to have moved
beyond that illusion.
EVH:
I can be perfectly happy and write and play. Put it this way:
I don’t like being bummed. I don’t have to be depressed to play the
blues. And if anyone begs to differ, well that’s their way.
Did you see the movie Marathon Man, where Dustin Hoffman was being chased
all over New York City by these neo-Nazis led by Sir Laurence Olivier?
Well, one morning Hoffman showed up on the set completely exhausted and
shivering. When they asked him what happened, he said he’s stayed
up for 36 hours and sat in a freezing bathtub so he could play this chase
scene where he was supposed to look really exhausted. Olivier just
shook his head and said to Hoffman, “My dear boy, why do you think they
call it acting?” [laughs]
I’m not saying
what I do is fake or acting. But you learn to let go and open up
and draw from life experiences, just like actors do. When I came
to this county I was scared. I couldn’t speak the language.
I used to get the shit kicked out of me by white people, so to speak.
I was a minority. And I can cry in a second just thinking about my
father dying or my mother passing on. I don’t have to manufacture
pain to create.
GW:
Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” was one of the biggest rap singles of all time,
and his album, Loc-ed After Dark (1989), was the first by a black
rap artist to top the pop charts. It was built entirely on a Van
Halen brothers guitar-and-drum sample. Did you feel honored or ripped
off?
EVH:
Well, our management obviously felt ripped off. I thought it was
funny as shit! It was just this, [playing main riff from “Jamie’s
Cryin’”] and Alex’s drum roll. I think 2 Live Crew later took
“Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” and looped the intro through the whole song.
I’m not a big fan of sampling in my own work, but if somebody else does
it, what the hell.
GW:
Compared to when you started out, we now have a vast array of effects to
color our sound. Is there a downside to having all that gear?
EVH:
Yeah, in a way. Being limited gear-wise forced me to find my own
voice on the guitar. That’s why Eric Clapton’s live jams with Cream
were such an influence on me. Back in ’68, he was pretty much just
using natural distortion on those live tracks on Wheels of Fire and Goodbye.
I had no money and couldn’t afford a Fuzz Face, or a wah-wah or a rind
modulator, or whatever Hendrix had in his whole rig. I just plugged
straight into an amp and turned it up to 11, and boom! So in order
to get a different or unique sound, I had to learn to squeeze it out of
the strings with just my fingers.
GW:
Peavey’s Wolfgang guitar features a de-tuner you’ve invented that’s ingenious
but simple. How does it work?
EVH:
It’s called a D-Tuna, and I’ve got a patent on it. I’ve used it for
quite a while; I just haven’t marketed it until now. It’s basically
a cylinder that can be fined tuned and fits over the screw on the bridge.
You just pull it out, and it automatically drops the low E down to a D
– you don’t even have to unclamp the nut. Push it back in and the
D goes right back up to an E. The D-Tuna comes standard on the Wolfang,
now. I also showed my new amp. The 5150, at the last NAMM show, and
it’ll be out very soon. The earlier model was a three-channel amp
– clean, crunch and dirt. The new on has separate tone controls for
each channel. So with just one knob you can turn it up and get a
good clean tone, for instance.
GW:
In 1979, you were recording in analog. Now everything you do is digital.
Some musicians feel digital sounds too and offers you so many choices that
you lose track of what you want. Is the modern studio digital heaven
or hell?
EVH:
To me something like Pro Tools can be digital hell. It gives you
so many options that you can wind up playing take after take of a solo
forever. And I do not want to sit around piecing them together!
If you give people too many options, they’ll start to feel claustrophobic.
It’s like that Springsteen song – 57 channels and there’s nothing on.
And I’m bothered by the lifelessness of digital sound. It’s not musical.
It’s turned into ones and zeros that I don’t like or the gaps in between.
GW:
How do you deal with that when you record today?
EVH:
Well, I have one 48-track digital studio, but I have two 24-track analog
studios. When I re-did my studio, I got an SSL, which is one
of the last great analog consoles. I have an eight-track head on
one of the 24-track tape decks, and both decks use two-inch tape, so the
sonic quality is beyond amazing. We use the 16-track deck for drums,
the eight-track deck for bass and guitar, and we do the vocals on digital.
GW:
So when we hear your guitar, it’s still basically recorded analog?
EVH:
Oh, yeah. You’ve got two-inch tape with just eight tracks on it.
And it whomps.
GW:
Which brings us to CD’s. When you made Van Halen III, you
gave me a cassette of the songs, which sounded great. But later you
told me you were going crazy because you went down to the pressing plants
to get test copies of the CD, and they all sounded bad. I thought
you were being oversensitive, but when I heard the finished CD…
EVH:
…the tape sounded a lot better, didn’t it?
GW:
Relative to the tape, the CD sounded like it was recorded underwater.
EVH:
And I just gave you a regular fucking cassette. The spatial sounds
that come from behind and around the instruments are not on the CD because
they have nothing at these pressing plants that measures sonic quality.
They have nothing to analyze the full frequency range on the disk; they
can only tell if there’s a scratch error or if the disc skips. So
when I went down to the pressing plant I raised a stink. Well, you’re
talking about fighting Time-Warner, and I came away feeling like I’d stuck
my nose where it doesn’t belong. I couldn’t change that.
GW:
But we know that the technology for better audio reproduction is there.
Mobile Fidelity and DCC use it all the time, and Sony’s reissues with 20-bit
supermapping sound incredibly good. The rule is that technology goes
down in price as time passes. Walkmans that cost $200 in 1980 are
$29.95. Yet CD’s have stayed at roughly the same price, and the quality
generally sucks compared to what they could achieve with today’s technology.
EVH:
Yeah, but you’re talking about a fucking conglomerate. What do they
care, as long as people are still buying it? I have a gut feeling
that a lot of people in the business think I’m a prick for having opened
this can of worms, because they don’t want to hear about those problems.
To change it would cost a lot of money. The day will come when it
will sound better, but it will still be digital. To me, it just isn’t
musical. And when it comes to music, I’m the Unabomber of digital
technology. I hate it.
GW:
Let’s talk about Van Halen III. Many critics agreed that your
guitar playing was astonishing, but didn’t like the overall record.
And a lot of the public seemed to agree. Was it too radical of a
change of direction? I have to say, when we’ve talked in the past,
I never heard you get upset about how the album was received.
EVH:
Well, thanks for saying that. I’m not hurt or angry that the record
didn’t do as well as we thought it would. I’m still very proud of
it, just every other record. It’s another child of ours. And
it is different. As for the change in direction – I think there were
too many different emotions there for some people. It was over the
top. This might sound arrogant, and I really hope people won’t take
it that way, but I had to play what I felt moved by and enjoyed.
I can’t contrive that. It’s funny about guitar playing, because that’s
the stuff I can’t remember doing at all. That came from my real self,
which my ego can’t take credit for.
GW:
Do you think five years from now people may rediscover it?
EVH:
It’s happened to us before. Fair Warning stiffed. Now
a lot of people tell me it’s one of their favorite records. If that
record was released next year, it would be different. It just wasn’t
the right time.
GW:
A lot of people also thought Gary Cherone sounded a bit stiff, like he
was nervous and trying too hard. In retrospect, is there some truth
to that?
EVH:
Yeah, he might have been a bit nervous. But if you feel there was
any stiffness, then you really should blame me. Because he sang just
about everything the way I asked him to. The fact that I was writing
all the music and it wasn’t his own, and he had to learn it so quickly,
probably made a difference, sure. Now we know each other a lot better.
Gary’s working with me and writing some of the music himself, rather than
just handing in lyrics. We’re all a lot looser, and the new record
will reflect that. But I’m very proud of that record. When
we moved on with Sammy [Hagar], I never looked back. And I’m
not looking back now, because there ain’t no “back” to go to. [laughs]
GW:
If they were sending a millenium time capsule into space and wanted to
include one Van Halen song, which one would you choose and why?
EVH:
Well, I don’t have to pick it right now, do I? We still have a few
months to go.
GW:
Sorry, but we’re launching the probe in 10 minutes. Choose now.
EVH:
I’ve got 10 minutes? [starts to play guitar] Let me
write something real quick!
GW:
Come on, off the top of your head!
EVH:
I guess it would have to be “Jump.” Musically, it was a real departure
for us. We had the challenge of using the synth and keyboards for
the first time and integrating that with the guitar and melody line.
It was also our biggest hit. And “pop” comes from the word popular,
which means a lot of people liked it. Now, 99 percent of the reason
that I make music is to hopefully try and touch people with it. And
that one touched the most people. So far.
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Interview © 1999 Guitar World Magazine
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