Dweezil Zappa has previously recounted the wild story of how he met Eddie Van Halen at just 12 years old.
It’s the stuff of a kid guitar player’s dreams – after a sudden phone call, the guitar hero showed up at Zappa’s house, and personally showed the young Dweezil the ins and outs of classics like Eruption and Mean Streetand plenty of other tips, some of which Zappa recently shared on his YouTube channel.
Because all that wasn’t cool enough, obviously, Van Halen would go on to produce Dweezil’s first single, My Mother Is a Space Cadetand also loaned one of his own guitars to the young Zappa when he performed Runnin’ With the Devil at his middle school talent show, though not before he coached Dweezil through a few mistakes.
Finally, to top it all off, when Zappa phoned Van Halen up to return the guitar – a Kramer from the time before EVH publicly revealed his collaboration with the company – the latter told Dweezil he could keep it.
In a recently re-surfaced clip from Dweezil’s episode of Gibson TV’s The Collectionthe guitarist recounts the whole story of how he met Van Halen, and came into possession of one of his Kramers.
Zappa’s middle-school bandmates were sound-checking prior to their talent show slot, and things weren’t going terribly well.
“I’m not only playing one chord wrong – but my guitar’s not staying in tune,” Dweezil recounts.
Van Halen, who had somehow, improbably, showed up to witness the soundcheck, ran home to grab one of his own guitars, the Kramer in question and having spotted a mistake or two, helped lead Dweezil in the right direction.
“Originally it was cream-colored with an orange lightning bolt, like Shazam,” Dweezil explains. “He brings that guitar back and he puts it on me and he says, ‘You’re playing it wrong.’ And he stands behind me, he counts it off with the kids, and he does the pick slides, the whole thing. It was the craziest experience.”
The following day, he continues, “I called him and thanked him and said, ‘Hey, if you want to come grab your guitar…’ And he said, ‘No, you can keep that guitar.’
“So I kept the guitar, I painted it, this was my homage to the Schwinn bicycle-style painting of Van Halen-esque guitars. I painted it when I was 13.”
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