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!”
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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.
