Everything I did is because I wanted to do it. If I weren't playing this arena, if I were playing a club, I'd still be doing it because that's what I want to do. I love playing the guitar.
— Eddie Van Halen
It makes me feel kind of weird, but obviously the Man Upstairs gave me something and it touches people, and I'm just so blessed.
We're musicians. We make music for a living. It's that simple. Nothing else matters.
I'm the one in the band that said I'm not going on tour unless we do a record.
I was trying to take the band in a direction that I thought was appropriate, and Roth was trying to take the band in more of a Las Vegas direction. And there he is.
I grew up on a lot of early Beatles, DC5, Cream, Clapton, Page, Beck and Hendrix.
I started doing all kinds of weird stuff on the guitar, which became part of my playing. I started doing harmonics and tapping on the guitar and pulling off strings and doing all this weird stuff that no one had ever done before.
It's always about the music, never about anything else.
Music is for people. The word 'pop' is simply short for popular. It means that people like it. I'm just a normal jerk who happens to make music. As long as my brain and fingers work, I'm cool.
David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.
It's funny, when bands or younger musicians ask me: 'So, what does it take to make it?' Well, first explain to me what you mean by 'making it': Do you want to be a rock star or do you want music to be your livelihood?
I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. And when we moved to America, it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it; so was my brother.
Every song is like a kid. How can you have that many kids and have a favorite? Which one do I like to hang most with?
There's a plaque on our wall that says we've sold over 65 million albums, and I don't feel I've accomplished anything. I feel like I'm just getting started.
It's always a Catch-22 situation. They hate you if you're the same, and they hate you if you're different.
