Quotes About Music

You have Extreme and Van Halen and the history that I have with other people I played with. There are some effects that will hopefully break that stereotype.

If I had had a chance to tour with Van Halen before the record, I think it would have been a different record.

Dave thought he was bigger than Van Halen the band. So there was this catfight going on for 10 years.

When we were on the road, I found out that my greatest hits album went Gold. They freaked out. Things really came to a head when we started arguing about a Van Halen greatest hits package.

When I was 13, I was just figuring out how to play 'Eruption,' poorly, by Eddie Van Halen.

You know, most people, they want to go to Hollywood. They want to be a star. They want to be a rock star. That thought never entered any of our minds, the Van Halen family.

I do remember being a kid and hearing Van Halen. My dad was always playing Van Halen in the car.

In my world, before I knew about Eddie Van Halen, I was playing piano, and at that point in my teenage life, I thought he was just a guitar player.

I've heard my share of Van Halen. I never liked rock.

I love players like Thurston Moore. I mean, you can put notes down on a sheet of paper, and if you practice and get your chops up, you can play like an Eddie Van Halen or a Steve Vai. But nobody can do what Thurston Moore does; he's his own guy. He talks through his instrument in a language that's all his own.

You can never deny the immense talent, rock credibility and iconic historical contribution that Van Halen made.

Greg Ginn was certainly a huge influence on my guitar playing. I put him up there with people like Eddie Van Halen. Eddie Van Halen changed everything; I don't necessarily like everything he did, but he definitely changed everything.

If you really stop to think about it, the last really big guitar hero was Eddie Van Halen, and that was back in the '80s - early '80s, you know what I mean? That's a long time ago.

I was in a party band in the early '80s, and we played Sabbath and Ozzy songs as well as Rush and Van Halen... all that kinds of stuff.

Nothing's changed from when I'm seven years old to now. Nothing's changed at all. I like the same stuff that I did - Kiss, Van Halen, 'Happy Days,' 'Laverne & Shirley,' 'The Brady Bunch,' monsters and all that stuff.

Alex Van Halen... I loved his playing because he had so much energy; he made those songs exciting, along with everything else that went with him.

So everybody is trying to play like Eddie Van Halen. I think it's rubbish. I think Eddie's great, but everyone's trying to do what he does and it doesn't make for a lot of interesting music.

Just about every rock band and every guitar player from 1964 to 1984. To me, that's the golden period of rock. From the first Beatles album hitting America to the last Van Halen album with David Lee Roth. That's where all my favorite rock exists.

To me, the secret of Eddie Van Halen was Alex Van Halen, because the way Alex played was so loose and the way the two of them locked together... Those two are connected so thoroughly they might as well be one person.

Well, everybody used to joke that I saved the first dollar that I ever made in Van Halen. I probably did somewhere.

I loved Van Halen; I loved everything we did.

I think all my albums have concentrated on songs, I've never taken the typical Van Halen route to try and become a guitar hero.

On every album I've put out, I've put diverse Canadian songs on it. They're not provincial album; my albums are national albums. There'll be a song about Saskatchewan and Vancouver and Nova Scotia on there.

My grade 3 teacher put on a kids' Christmas concert, and I played the kazoo, so my mother bought me a trumpet. I took lessons for eight years, was in the Kitsilano Boys Band, and I played in the Vancouver Junior Symphony for two years.