Eddie Van Halen may be best known for his Frankenstein Strat — a guitar hat married Les Paul tonality with Stratocaster playability and Floyd Rose trickery — but he was always keen to test-drive other guitars. Even if he might not have always treated them with the care their owners would have liked.
Speaking of one memorable night he played with Van Halen, Carl Verheyen says Eddie took a fancy to his Les Paul, and it nearly fell back into his possession, worse for wear.
The versatile Santa Monica-born session musician briefly joined Supertramp in the mid-’80s before pursuing a solo career.
But back in the 1970s, he was a performer in the L.A. area. Which is how he came to meet and befriend Eddie Van Halen.
“My band played opposite Van Halen a few times,” he says during a chat with Jon Stankorb. But it was one gig in particular that he remembers with a mix of fondness and fear for the well-being of his prized electric guitar.
“I remember that Eddie borrowed one of my Les Pauls. We had played a set and then they were going to play a set on a different stage in this sort of L-shaped building,” he details. “We ended our set with ‘I’m Going Home’ by Ten Years After, and they started their set with that, just to one-up us!”
In fact, the two Van Halen brothers were hugely inspired by Ten Years After’s performance of the song in the Woodstock film. “The solo in the movie sounds pretty rough to me these days,” Ed told Guitar World in 2023. “But it had the energy, and that was what Ten Years After were all about at the time.”
Verheyen understood that a little bit of brash one-upmanship was never out of the question with Eddie Van Halen. It’s what happened next that surprised him.
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“They played 45 minutes, and when they were done, he walked over to our stage,” he continues. “And he goes, ‘Hey man, great guitar. Thanks.’ and he dropped the Les Paul from — I don’t know — about three feet into the case, not realizing that these guitars don’t have bolt-on necks and they don’t bounce.
“I said, ‘Ed, what are you doing!?’ but I think he was used to the Frankenstein Strats; you couldn’t hurt them.”
Reflecting on one of his most demanding recording sessions with Guitar Player, Verheyen had the chance to analyze and marvel at another next-level guitar player, and one that Eddie Van Halen was equally impressed by: Allan Holdsworth.
“I was instantly humbled when he showed me the chord voicings he used for the soloing changes in ‘Three Sheets to the Wind,’” Verheyen says of trying to keep up with Holdsworth’s wizardry. “My left hand couldn’t form the shapes quickly and cleanly enough. I limped home with my tail between my legs.”
Luckily, he refused to be beaten by the challenge – “the next morning, I locked myself in a room with a guitar. I refused to come out until I could [do it],” he says – and turned the mind-expanding experience into a fascinating lesson.
Verheyen has also delivered a whammy-bar masterclass for GP, having revisited it after falling in love with Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop.
