In a great surprise to the guitar world, Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford has revealed he secretly recorded several songs with Eddie Van Halen while the late virtuoso was at the height of his powers.
The news comes after former Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony said Eddie’s son, Wolfgang, is sitting on a vast archive of demos, explaining, “We recorded every idea we had”.
Earlier this year, Alex Van Halen released the final song he worked on with his brother, before his passing in 2020. That’s been the only posthumous EVH release to date, but Rutherford’s disclosure means there are more Ed recordings out there than anyone previously knew.
Explaining his work with the virtuoso, Rutherford told My Planet Rocks that it wasn’t his guitar playing that caught Eddie’s attention.
“I think Eddie heard a song from my second solo album [1982’s Acting Very Strange], which I sang,” Rutherford explains. “He rang me up and said, ‘Will you do some writing?’ I mean, my voice, for god’s sake!”
The pair met in Los Angeles, but Rutherford struggled to acclimate to Eddie’s nocturnal writing process.
“I get to LA, I bring some gear with me, and go into his studio,” Rutherford recalls. “And he says, ‘Hey Mike, come over about 1.30.’ And I thought, ‘Well, that’s going to work for me, a little lunch.’”
Eddie promptly clarified that he meant a.m., not p.m.
“He starts at nighttime,” Rutherford continues, “and works through the night. I just couldn’t really do that.”
Not one to complain, Rutherford took Eddie up on his offer. The result? “We had some sessions. We wrote some songs. Bits,” he reveals.
Yet, remarkably, Rutherford is in no hurry to locate the tape from those sessions. “I’ve got two boxes of cassettes,” he says. “I’m not sure I’m mad enough to go through them!”
“I mean, he was a great player,” he continues. “We had a good time, but starting at 1.30 in the morning is not my mode.”
Rutherford is currently prepping for a UK tour with Mike + The Mechanics. He says that in his work both with that band and Genesis late-night sessions rarely yielded solid results. “You would turn up the next day and go ‘What was all that about?’” he says.
Rutherford is, of course, not the only artist with whom Ed attempted to create new work. Alex Van Halen, who wants to wants to make AI-aided EVH solos a possibility, revealed earlier this year that the Van Halen brothers had tried to start a project with Chris Cornell and that an Ozzy-fronted Van Halen would have happened, were it not for one specific pitfall.
