Last month, Extreme marked their long-awaited return with Rise – their first single in 15 years, and the first to be lifted from their upcoming album, Six, which saw Nuno Bettencourt scale six-string heights that set the guitar world alight.
It was a monumental electric guitar effort from the virtuoso, who was able to tap into an otherworldly level of playing after setting himself a pretty lofty task: to carry Eddie Van Halen’s guitar fire.
Well, it turns out that Rise’s links to Van Halen go far beyond this renewed sense of six-string responsibility from Bettencourt, with it now transpiring that Eddie actually visited Nuno while the latter was in the studio working on the very song that became a de facto tribute for the late virtuoso.
Speaking to Total Guitar, Bettencourt recalled the extraordinary occasion when he crossed paths with Van Halen while in the depths of Rise’s recording process, revealing that it turned out to be one of the last times they ever saw each other.
“I never record with anybody in the room. I need to black out when I play,” Bettencourt said. “Gary [Cherone] was in town and we were about to do some vocals. He went to lunch and I go, ‘Yeah, come back around one or two and I should be done with this solo.’
“During recording the Rise solo, my phone is blowing up, and it’s pissing me off because Gary knows not to bother me while I’m recording guitars,” he went on. “He keeps calling me then he’s texting me, ‘Come downstairs, I’m in the front.’ After the third time I’m like, ‘I’m gonna punch this dude out! Something must be going on.’ I go down, open the door and it’s Edward Van Halen.”
However, as fate would have it, Bettencourt didn’t let Van Halen listen to what he was working on.
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“So we started talking,” Bettencourt continues. “He’s like, ‘You guys working on an album?’ I'm like, ‘Yeah, I’m up in the studio, but I don’t want you to come up and hear it yet. When it’s done will you come back and hear me?’ Stupid now in retrospect, not letting him come up and listen, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
Unsurprisingly, Rise didn’t just leave fans in awe – it also struck a chord among Bettencourt’s guitar-playing peers, with the Extreme virtuoso telling Metal Edge that he received personal messages from some of the biggest names in the game to congratulate him.
“A lot of my peers and heroes, like Steve Lukather, Steve Vai and Brian May, sent me personal texts and emails after sharing the song, which was amazing.”
Though at the time of Rise’s release Bettencourt admitted he “felt some responsibility to keep guitar playing alive” following Van Halen’s death, he clarified to Metal Edge that he had no desire to take EVH’s throne because, well, “there is no heir to the throne of Eddie Van Halen”.
“Nobody sits on that throne. Nobody takes that throne,” he asserted. “Here's why it's different with Eddie: when a great guitar player passes, you just move on to another, right? But in this case, Eddie wasn't just a 'guitar player.'
“We're talking about a guy who changed culture and how we play guitar. He was like an alien coming in and fucking everything up so much that even the legends beforehand are like, ‘Okay… what is happening here? What sorcery is this?’”
Total Guitar's full interview with Nuno Bettencourt will appear in issue 372, on sale 2 June.
