I wouldn't mind meeting Eddie Van Halen. That would be great. We need to invite him to a race.
Al Unser
The Beatles will never get back together and David Lee Roth will never again sing with Van Halen.
Alex Van Halen
Van Halen is a work in progress.
I think a lot of modern day guitarists start off playing like Eddie van Halen, and they don't take the time to learn the basics.
Alvin Lee
I can't deny that Eric Clapton's and Eddie Van Halen's lead stuff has influenced a stack of people, but for me, it's the rhythm thing that's way more impressive and important to a band.
Angus Young
So everybody is trying to play like Eddie Van Halen. I think it's rubbish. I think Eddie's great, but everyone's trying to do what he does and it doesn't make for a lot of interesting music.
Billy Squier
I've heard my share of Van Halen. I never liked rock.
Brad Paisley
Greg Ginn was certainly a huge influence on my guitar playing. I put him up there with people like Eddie Van Halen. Eddie Van Halen changed everything; I don't necessarily like everything he did, but he definitely changed everything.
Buzz Osborne
Few bands in hard rock history have been so adept at balancing the awesome and trivial as Van Halen in their prime.
Chuck Eddy
Van Halen can keep providing the rain and I'll keep providing the parade.
David Lee Roth
When I was 13, I was just figuring out how to play 'Eruption,' poorly, by Eddie Van Halen.
Dierks Bentley
I got into rock music at thirteen, listening to Van Halen, learned how to play the electric guitar.
Van Halen was a huge influence on me, and 'Eruption' was the song that really leaped off that first Van Halen album.
Dimebag Darrell
I was more influenced by players like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen than by the guys in southern rock bands.
My heroes were Eddie Van Halen - especially after Van Halen I, II, III, and IV - Randy Rhoads, Ace Frehley and dudes like that. My brother played drums and we jammed in the garage and started writing our own stuff.
I liked a lot of the things other people liked - Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Van Halen, AC/DC - but if I compared it to my dad's music, there just seemed to be elements missing.
Dweezil Zappa
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.
Eddie Van Halen
On 'Van Halen,' I was a young punk, and everything revolved around the fastest kid in town, gunslinger attitude. But I'd say that at the time of 'Fair Warning,' I started concentrating more on songwriting. But I guess in most people's minds I'm just a gunslinger.
The name Van Halen, the family legacy, is going to go on long after I'm gone.
When Van Halen started out, there was no path to fame. We just played what we liked. Even today it always comes down to the simplicity of rock and roll.
It comes back to the same old question people are always asking me: 'When are you going to do a solo record?' Well, if I did, it would probably be similar to 'Baluchitherium,' meaning it would be Van Halen music - which I write anyway - but without singing.
You know, most people, they want to go to Hollywood. They want to be a star. They want to be a rock star. That thought never entered any of our minds, the Van Halen family.
I love players like Thurston Moore. I mean, you can put notes down on a sheet of paper, and if you practice and get your chops up, you can play like an Eddie Van Halen or a Steve Vai. But nobody can do what Thurston Moore does; he's his own guy. He talks through his instrument in a language that's all his own.
It was fun while it lasted, but it never seemed real to me. I could not believe I was in Van Halen.
Spitfire asked me if I had a problem talking about Van Halen or Extreme. I really don't. There are people who are just going to want to know what it was like to play with Eddie.
I did some research and tried to pull out some old, classic Van Halen that they had not played in 10 or 15 years. I think that was Sammy's mistake. I he didn't want to do the Dave stuff.
You have Extreme and Van Halen and the history that I have with other people I played with. There are some effects that will hopefully break that stereotype.
When I was in Van Halen I was hitting notes that were out of my range. I never went for those registers before until Eddie pulled it out of me.
If I had had a chance to tour with Van Halen before the record, I think it would have been a different record.
Dave thought he was bigger than Van Halen the band. So there was this catfight going on for 10 years.
However you feel about Dimebag, this is one of the most influential metal guitar players of the '90s. I was just talking to someone that I am hiring to bring on the tour who said that, when he was at the funeral, that Eddie Van Halen came and put his striped guitar in the coffin. That's a pretty big deal.
I was in school with Dweezil Zappa, Frank Zappa's son, and we had a band. Only in L.A. could stuff like that happen. We would hang out in Frank Zappa's studio, and we released a single in 1982 on his label. I was 12, and that was the first recording experience I had. To top it off, Eddie Van Halen produced it.
The first Van Halen album makes Johnny Rotten out to be what he really was and still is: a hairdresser.
For a long time, when I was very young, I went to go see arena rock bands. I was 16, and it was all I could get in to see, legally. And I saw Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent and Van Halen and all that.
I have gotten nothing but love since I was diagnosed from the whole metal community. I guess that is true about both David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen. David was very kind to me especially when I was limping and falling and when my hands started getting weak.
I never imagined in my wildest dreams when I was 17 watching Van Halen at a Donington Park rock festival and seeing Sammy Hagar later on when I was in the United States playing that I would end up with a band of guys I bought albums of.
Nothing's changed from when I'm seven years old to now. Nothing's changed at all. I like the same stuff that I did - Kiss, Van Halen, 'Happy Days,' 'Laverne & Shirley,' 'The Brady Bunch,' monsters and all that stuff.
I was such a big Kiss and Van Halen fan, Yngwie Malmsteen, Racer X... all that stuff. I loved everybody.
I'm still obsessed with Kiss. I'm still obsessed with Van Halen. I guess we don't change that much from being kids. Either we don't change that much, or we just have really good taste.
More and more, I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice. In death metal, a lot of guys are Eddie Van Halen disciples, but they take his style to really expressionistic places. It's a real pleasure for me to hear people pushing their craft.
Punk was key to the early part of me playing guitar. I was really into melodic punk-rock. I related to punk more than Lynyrd Skynyrd or Yes or Van Halen.
In my world, before I knew about Eddie Van Halen, I was playing piano, and at that point in my teenage life, I thought he was just a guitar player.
I grew up on Michael Jackson, Pat Benetar, and Van Halen - all the things coming out of the television.
The band changes one guy, sometimes the whole damn thing changes - look what happened when I joined Van Halen.
It wasn't until the fourth or fifth Van Halen record that people would go, 'Wow! You're singing backgrounds on those records. That's not David Lee Roth.' And I go, 'Hell, no! That's not David Lee Roth.'
People tend to forget you. I didn't want people to go, 'That is that guy that used to play in Van Halen. What's his name again?'
Why would I have quit Van Halen? It never happened.
Well, everybody used to joke that I saved the first dollar that I ever made in Van Halen. I probably did somewhere.
As far as people saying, 'Do you miss Van Halen?' or any of that kind of stuff, I've totally moved on.
I loved Van Halen; I loved everything we did.
