This week, Wolfgang Van Halen released his debut single under the Mammoth WVH banner, and gave a wide-ranging interview with The Howard Stern Show where he divulged Van Halen’s plans for a huge reunion tour, as well as a variety of other topics – including the first guitar his father, Eddie Van Halen, gave to him.
As it turns out, that guitar is Eddie’s Kramer 1984 – the back-up to the 5150 played in the Panama video.
As he relates in the video above, Wolfgang received the guitar as a Christmas present, accompanied by a Playboy card – which was his father’s way of saying, “Play, boy!”
Elsewhere in the video, Wolfgang reveals that his dad may have been one of the greatest guitarists of all time, but he wasn’t much of a guitar teacher.
“I’d ask him how to play something and then he just proceeds to be Eddie Van Halen,” he laughs. “That’s a very tough bar to reach as a beginner, so it’s like, ‘Oh, OK…’”
In another extract from the full interview, Wolfgang revealed Van Halen were planning a “kitchen-sink” reunion tour with Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony and David Lee Roth, prior to his father’s lung cancer diagnosis.
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