Eddie Van Halen Is Guitar World's June 2015 Cover Star

I won’t see the mag for a few months…
Found some parts of the interview.
Does anyone want any more of the interview or wait until they get the mag??

From Ed in GW…
Ah, to be young…. As you get older you get so many more things to deal with in life. I just turned 60, and my main priority now is to maintain my health. I’ve beaten cancer four times and dealt with other health issues. Now it’s all about working out every day and doing Pilates.
I used to spend all day playing guitar, but now some of that time is spent in the gym. I’ve lost 10 pounds since people saw me at the Smithsonian and dropped a lot of body fat. You’ve only got one body. When I turned 60 something clicked inside me, and I thought that I’d better get my shit together. Being 60 sounds old, but I don’t feel any different in my head, which is scary in its own way, you know what I mean? [laughs] I feel like I should be smarter, but sometimes I feel like I’m still 12. But music keeps you young.

EVH: “The Tokyo show was also one of our longer shows because we had no opening act. It pushed about two and a half hours.”

Uh, no, that was Nagoya.
http://www.vhnd.com/2013/06/18/van-halen-kicks-off-japan-tour-in-nagoya/
:…we’re sure the fans in Japan were quite satisfied, as the show clocked in at two hours, twenty mintes(!), which is possibly the longest show the band has ever performed!”

You can see the entire Tokyo Dome show here which clocks in at about two hours and six minutes total, with Dave’s movie clip.

EVH: “Since we were in Japan, we decided to play “Smoke on the Water.” (at the end of “…And the Cradle Will Rock”) Deep Purple’s Made in Japan album blew that song out of the water, so we thought it would be fun to play that song there.”

They played that at the end of almost every show since ’07, didn’t they? It wasn’t special to Japan?

EVH: “People ask why we’ve never released the rest of the 1981 Oakland show that we recorded on video. The reason is because we only recorded three songs—“Unchained,” “Hear About it Later” and “So This Is Love.” We actually filmed those three songs for two nights. On “Unchained” I broke a string the first night, and if you watch the video you can see my guitars change just for a few seconds then switch back. We used the second night of audio, so you can’t hear it, but we used video from both nights. The bottom line is we can’t ever release the whole Oakland show because we didn’t film or record the whole show. ”

The evidence proves this and I believe this to be true.

EVH: “Everybody is always screaming for my old Marshall sound. Well, we’re working on it, and it’s in the pipeline! It’s a new amp head. We’re not sure what we’re going to call it yet, but I’m thinking of calling it the 5150-34, because it has EL34 tubes. It gets the exact tone of my Marshall plexi in the early days. When I plug into it I go, holy shit! It’s like my old Marshall on steroids.”

This sounds FUCKIN’ AMAZING!!!

EVH: “I think we’re going to do seven songs on Kimmel, and they’re going to show four of those songs over two nights. When Dave first heard us at rehearsal he was surprised how good it already sounded. When he started singing it all fell together. It was exciting. It was our first time playing together since Japan—almost two years.”

…and two more shows in the US…;)

voodoo

EVH: “Everybody is always screaming for my old Marshall sound. Well, we’re working on it, and it’s in the pipeline! It’s a new amp head. We’re not sure what we’re going to call it yet, but I’m thinking of calling it the 5150-34, because it has EL34 tubes. It gets the exact tone of my Marshall plexi in the early days. When I plug into it I go, holy shit! It’s like my old Marshall on steroids.”

This sounds FUCKIN’ AMAZING!!!

Yeah this is actually something exciting.. I’m not a fan of Ed’s buzzsaw tone of late.. it’s so saturated and thin to my ears.

VAiN: Yeah this is actually something exciting.. I’m not a fan of Ed’s buzzsaw tone of late.. it’s so saturated and thin to my ears.

i agree.

vhrob: its funny because everyone screams for the old marshall sound….damnit!!!

I want the freakin “FUCK / Balance” sound again with the heavy harmonized, chorusy, d-tuned effect to it….dammnit come on lets get that sound back again for crying out loud.He has been with this damn sound since 98.I wish his tone chasing, DNA drive would take him back in that direction.

Rob

That can come back at any time, the amp really has nothing to do with it. My guess is Ed got over the heavily processed sound and came back to basics. I prefer a tone without a lot of processing for sure.

vhrob: still no freakin mag in the mail….. WTF!!!!!

I hear ya. Me either. Fuckin’ Michigan.

voodoo: I agree. I didn’t care for the Hagar era sound other than a handful of songs from FUCK and Balance. I thought all of 5150 was thin and chorusy. Didn’t care for that sound. OU812 was thin over the entire album, but there was still that over processed tone. I like Judgement Day and The Dream is Over on FUCK, even though the tone is still kinda thin. I liked the tone and writing on Seventh Seal, Amsterdam, Don’t Tell Me and Big Fat Money from Balance. A bit more diversity than we had been used to since Hagar joined. Humans Being started shifting toward that glassy, sustainer sound and then CGTSNM and MWM came along which led into the III era. All kinds of shit going on there. I liked the crunch on “It’s About Time” but hated the song itself. “Learning to See” was probably my favorite track from that little threesome of new songs in ’04, but I still didn’t like the glassy tone.

Spot-on, I’m with you on this.. I think curing cancer fucked with his hearing.. just my working theory.