The time I got to hang with the Van Halen brothers
 

About 3 years ago my company was doing some small business with this dude who happened to know Van Halen's long time guitar tech Matt Bruck. He calls us one day and says that Eddie and Alex would like to drive down from LA to check us out and talk about maybe developing a bluetooth stereo speaker system that they would brand and sell online:

Van Halen Store - Huge Selection of Official Merchandise & Memorabilia

A meeting is set up and the only demand made is NO PICTURES whatsoever. Our entire staff is briefed on this. The day comes and BAM, Eddie, Alex, Matt, and the dude are in the lobby. Me, another engineer, my boss, and the owner give them a tour of the company, including our anechoic chamber and lab, then did a demo of some of our products in our listening room, and then we head upstairs to the conference room for the meeting.

Discussed a bunch of stuff for about 2 hours. Got to talk directly with Eddie a number of times about stuff like transformers and their affect on tone, the quality of China components compared to made in USA, and some general music chat. I had the chance to tell him about the impact that VH1 had on me as a 17 year old guitarist - which made him smile that famous smile.

Impressions?

1. I always though Alex was a big guy cause he always looked so much bigger than Eddie in pictures. Nope. Eddie is just a pretty small dude.

2. Alex is 100% the dominant of the two. I got the sense that he's extremely protective of Eddie and is very cautious that no-one tries to **** with him.

3. Eddie is pretty burned out. I mean he definitely had a very large presence but he had trouble articulating at times and would go off on weird tangents.

4. After a couple of hours the star factor wears off and you realize that they are just a couple of very cool guys to hang out with.

All in all a very awesome afternoon.

Even if I don't care much for Van Halen bar a few tracks, this is still a great story.

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Did you get trashed with them?

Just in sharing their rarified air.

Pictures or it didn't ... oh, wait.

Seriously though, cool story and I reckon you were very fortunate. Gonna put that in your memoirs? ;)

You know who's gonna hate you/be so jealous? Plankton.

Where's Plank been at lately?????

Burned out as in hippie stereotype? That's hilarious. I'm not hating btw. I'm not a Van Halen fanboy or anything, but I still definitely dig Roth-era Van Halen quite a bit.

I can't find it because I'm at work right now, but I remember seeing a video of him at NAMM or something playing one of the exclusive (at the time) Frankenstrat replicas and the dude was not even a little bit coherent. Maybe not as incoherent as Ozzy when it comes to speaking, but more blatantly drunk and less functional.

Busy on a secret project. I did not intimate that it has anything to do with a wall, people of Mexican extraction, or an ex-host of The Apprentice. Remember that.

His decades long alcoholism has definitely taken a toll. He was 100% straight that day but the wear and tear was totally evident.