He continued, “The music industry, we’re not just out of work. It’s going to be amazing.' And of course it went from a banner year to zero income overnight.” “And I thought, 'This will allow me to pay off my house. “It was going to be one of those years where my family wasn’t going to see me, but it was going to be a $200,000 year,” he said. In the same interview he talked about the busy year of work he had lined up in 2020, including tours with Reba McEntire and Poison, that were all cancelled when the pandemic hit. Over the past year, Weber, like many music industry professionals and crew, has been hit hard by the COVID-19 shutdown. In a recent interview with, Weber said, “The last conversation I had with him, we were discussing when we would potentially go out again, and he said, 'Whatever happens, you’ll be my first phone call because I’m not leaving the house without you.’ " And I said, ‘Just sayin’…’ And that’s the last I ever heard about it.”ĭespite the incident, Weber maintained a close working and personal relationship with Van Halen up until the guitar legend’s passing in October. He said, ‘Ah, that wouldn’t make any difference.’"Īccording to Weber, Eddie, who had a guitar around his neck at the time, "proceeded to jam it into the dressing room floor, and in front of a room full of people it comes back up and it’s way out of tune. "So I got called to the dressing room full of people and he said, ‘You handed me an out-of-tune guitar.’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’ I said, ‘If you’ll recall, you banged the headstock of the guitar into the stage that night several times and then you didn’t come off the stage to get the guitar at the end of the show for the encore. "The funniest part about it was, he didn’t know that that had happened until a couple of weeks later when somebody was at the venue and showed him the video of it," Weber said. Ed didn’t have keyboards in his monitor mix so he didn’t hear that he was out of tune. “So now you have Wolfgang on his bass and Ed with his out-of-tune guitar on a keyboard song that is in tune. But they went around the side of that and Ed didn’t come off the stage to get another guitar. "They went around the corner… we had what we call the ‘phone booth’ on stage left, the big ego ramp that went up around to this big cabinet that nobody ever used for anything. That particular night, however, "they didn’t come offstage," Weber said. So they play Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love and Panama and then typically the band, at the end of the show, they come offstage for a minute, I switch guitars with Ed, and they go back on for the encore, which is Jump." "So they’re in tune – you have guitar and bass in tune. Wolfgang starts playing and realizes that he’s not in tune with the guitar so he retunes a little bit so they’re in tune. Well, they go right from that into Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love, that’s the next song on the set list. He’s still playing the solo, he’s fine-tuned, it’s passable. "Having built 5150, it was a very special time in my life, and that shows in the music."įor more on the Van Halen film, and Berry's other work, visit The Tapes Archive's website.Weber continued, “Well, he fine-tunes it some and gets back into playing and I’m holding another guitar over my head so that he can see it and he’s waving it off. "And I also had to build the studio during that period, too! I don’t know how I pulled all of that off." "We did the US Festival in the middle of recording the 1984 album, and before that we toured the U.S., Canada, and South America and played about 120 shows," Van Halen said. In a 2014 interview with Guitar World, Eddie Van Halen himself reflected on the importance, and hectic pace, of that time period. The first two parts of the film premiere this Wednesday, May 24, with the third, fourth, and fifth segments set to be released on June 7, 14, and 21, respectively.Īll five parts of the documentary will be free to watch on The Tapes Archive YouTube channel. The documentary will be split into five parts, which will focus, in order, on: the construction of 5150 Studios, the lead-up to, and aftermath of, the band's performance at the US Festival, the making of 1984, the 1984 tour, and what led to frontman David Lee Roth's departure from Van Halen. You can see a trailer for the film below. This crucial period for Van Halen is the focus of an upcoming documentary by Alan Berry, the man who made the 2022 film, Steve Vai: His First 30 Years.
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