Must-Watch: Eddie Van Halen Tours His Home Studio in 1998

In the wake of Eddie Van Halen’s death — which I’m still very much feeling over a week later, and I know I’m not alone — a treasure trove of content from the past has been re-released; various sound bites, videos, plain old word-of-mouth stories and the like.

One of the most fun such pieces I’ve come across is this video of Eddie taking MTV on a tour of his legendary home studio, 5150, edited down into a seven-and-a-half minute clip that aired in 1998 (I can only imagine how much of the footage they shot ended up on the cutting room floor — I’d watch ALL of it if I could).

Among the highlights of the video:

• Eddie explaining how he built a “racquetball court” with two-foot-thick cinder block walls to get around city ordinances that prevented recording studios.
• Eddie talking about how he likes to record in the live room, with the amps blaring so his “arm hairs move” from the sound. And how he’s gotten some of his best riff-writing down while on the shitter.
• Eddie holding his original Frankenstrat and talking about how he first put it together and painted it himself.
• While looking at a massive wall of tapes full of song ideas, explaining he often goes back to them to write new music, Eddie revealing that he rediscovered “Right Now” that way from something he’d recorded back in 1983 (before “Jump,” he notes).
• Talking about young Wolfie getting in trouble for rebelling against his music teacher at school by “improvising.”

And so much more. Like I said in the headline, it’s a must-watch.

[via Metal Injection]