cool Eddie interview from 1985 The Guitar Show

[Northern Girl]

Tough to sit through the whole thing, 'cos I just feel embarrassed for him.

But it looks like the same old nervous energy he always had. Just completely uncomfortable socially. Some people aren't made for that. If it were me, I would have six feet in my mouth too!

[Coyote]

Shouldn't have watched that clip. Made me reassess my guitar heroes...

[Seshmeister]

Eddie screens his phone calls and if you sound black he shouts fucking asshole at you?

Does anyone actually know what his Dad did during the war?

[Terry]

I just thought to myself...Maybe Ed "now" in this time of 2011 wouldn't want to be at a meet and greet with you or me as we were back in 1985.

Do you think Ed is the same young guy that you see in that vid ? Perhaps, you /me/us/fans.. would be the drunken ass with no real "comedy" one liners to throw on cue at any situation. Ed would be the completely together persons we know that we, must be, looking at us all confused.

I am not bagging on you Terry as a singular person, you are one of the best posters here at The RA,, it is just the constant berating of Ed as if he isn't human and great googilie moogilie, I would love to sit in the room with this musician and talk about the times here and gone.

I understand being pissed at the past ...but how can this shit spoken here enable anyone of you all to buy the next album .....,I'd would have found a new band to folow the exploits of long ago, if I ended up thinking they were exaclty the same every day as the worst I had seen of them.

No Harsh Terry.

It probably isn't fair, or accurate, to draw a conclusion about the whole of someone's life based on a half hour or so worth of filmed interviews. Maybe Eddie isn't comfortable in interview situations. It could just be the illusion of fandom, whereby one reads a few interviews, looks at a bunch of pictures and then thinks they know a person. It wouldn't be a surprise if the reality doesn't necessarily match up to the fantasy.

It's like Kristy often says, "[while I think Led Zeppelin is brilliant and Jimmy Page was a compositional genius, it's hard to reconcile the fact that Jimmy Page wrote the music for Stairway To Heaven with the fact that] Jimmy Page was a junkie pedophile warlock."

I mean, these rock stars are just people, you know? Like, if I had a nickel for every junkie pedophile warlock I run into during the course of a typical day...well, I wouldn't have any nickels...but there is a broader point to be made here, although I'll be fucked as to what that point is...

[Seshmeister]

Eddie was around 30 at this interview not some teenage kid just out of high school doing his first interview.

As far as Page goes Eddie gets criticised a lot but yeah at least he wasn't a pedo.

[Seshmeister]

Used to love his comedy sketch show in the early 80s.

It hasn't aged well has it, poor man's Benny Hill?

[ZahZoo]

Maybe guitar gods shouldn't do interviews...

[DLR Bridge]

You Racist!

Me?! Uh, no.

[VHscraps]

Maybe booze is a 'truth serum' for Eddie, and he IS a racist twat.

I am not trying to forgive what on that video clip seems like pretty damning evidence. But, I am also a scholar, so my first impulse in a situation like this if I was doing some historical research on some person, would be to think, 'okay, do we have more evidence of character than a badly told story by a drunk guy who thinks he is being funny before we hang him' ...

I don't actually think Ed is as inarticulate as some people do - he is known to be socially inept and to get drunk to get over it, and he is pretty drunk in this clip . I've heard / read this story many times before - he is trying to figure out who was bugging him with these calls:

'I used to have this old phone system in the studio. Phone rang, I picked it up and there's this voice saying, 'Yo, Eddie? That Eddie?' There was lots of crackling and stuff. And I said, 'Yeah, who's this?' But he obviously couldn't hear me. So I hung up, figuring it was a fan. Phone rings again, and the same voice says, 'Hey, Eddie.' So this time I shout 'Asshole' and hang up. Phone rings a third time. 'Hey, Eddie, Eddie, it's Quincy Jones.' Have I ever felt small.

That quote is from a story about EVH in London in 1993 (LINK HERE), which begins with an impression of him stumbling around drunk with Jeff Beck and getting into trouble of sorts. Quelle surprise. He's a fucking pisshead who does and says stupid things when he's drunk.

If we were being kind to Eddie, and I'm enough of an an admirer of him to hope that he is not really a racist asshole, you might argue that in the drunk version of his telling of this story in that excruciating video clip, he is trying to convey - after the fact - that he didn't know who was calling him. So, he adds in some post-hoc detail about the identity of the caller that sort of jumbles up the sequence of his own identification of who it was. i.e., he didn't know it was 'a black guy', until after he knew it was Quincy Jones, but he puts the former before the latter, and tells it so clumsily that instead of it coming out as, something like, 'I was wondering who the fuck this is', it comes out sounding like he's a racist asshole.

But, you know, in terms of whether that is 'the real Ed', I don't know. Because I also remember Quincy Jones saying in an interview - and there'll be a quote that can be sourced somewhere - something like: "I love Eddie, every time I hear his voice on the phone, I get a nice warm feeling." "... every time I hear his voice" ... in other words, they must've developed a friendly relationship of some kind around that time (although, this might have amounted to Jones fielding late-night calls from a sozzled Ed).

'Course, he could still be a racist and maintain a friendship. In the telling, and in the re-telling, there have been a couple of other cases I can think of where drunk / stoned / out-of-it musicians have said worse and claimed that they were not racist - just look up 'Eric Clapton and Enoch Powell' (an incident that led to the formation of 'Rock Against Racism') and 'Elvis Costello and Ray Charles'.

[DLR Bridge]

Well said Scraps. I still think Ed's an ignoramous rather than a racist. At the end of his response to the question, he says of Quincy, "I love the guy" not "too bad he's black, I'd really like to say I'd love the guy". The twisted mentallity of a racist is that they are steadfast in making you aware that they actually hate you and your kind, so to speak.

This isn't the only off color remark he's been known to make. There was the "let me play the Mexican's guitar" to Kurt Cobain back stage at a Nirvana show about a man who isn't even Mexican. There's another I know I read of, but gotta get ready for work.

I also think as an immigrant to the USA, he's labeling others no differently than he had been labeled as a Dutch Indonesian, probably with some slangatude as he was growing up.

I'm not apologizing for him. This is just how I see it. I've known of actual racists and they're a terrifying sort. Those who wear that kind of hate out on their sleeve are pretty damn scary.

[ZahZoo]

I wouldn't get all caught up in labeling people racists based on the Quincy Jones quotes... First off, you're applying 2011 standards to something stated in the mid-80's.

Today any label used much beyond "human being" to describe a person can be twisted into some kind of racist statement. Back in the 80's political correctness was in it's infancy...

I think a lot of you forget the members of VH as kids grew up during the height of the civil rights movement. By the time they were young adults... US culture was just shifting from negro to black... to african-american. Point is... we're not that far removed from the 60's and there's a bit of racist in all of us on all sides of the equation. Let's not forget the members of VH are Baby-Boomers who grew up in a very different world than today's...

[jhale667]

Well said Scraps. I still think Ed's an ignoramous rather than a racist. At the end of his response to the question, he says of Quincy, "I love the guy" not "too bad he's black, I'd really like to say I'd love the guy". The twisted mentallity of a racist is that they are steadfast in making you aware that they actually hate you and your kind, so to speak.

This isn't the only off color remark he's been known to make. There was the "let me play the Mexican's guitar" to Kurt Cobain back stage at a Nirvana show about a man who isn't even Mexican. There's another I know I read of, but gotta get ready for work.

I also think as an immigrant to the USA, he's labeling others no differently than he had been labeled as a Dutch Indonesian, probably with some slangatude as he was growing up.

I'm not apologizing for him. This is just how I see it. I've known of actual racists and they're a terrifying sort. Those who wear that kind of hate out on their sleeve are pretty damn scary.

Actually, (having dealt with many in my day) most true racists are more pathetic than anything else (if you have any doubt, re-read some of the avowed "racists'" posts here - not the sharpest tools, but TOOLS to be sure). Sure, they're occassionally violent, and usually stupid, but not scary in the slightest. They're just ignorant fucktards who mostly deserve your pity - and your brutal, scathingly sarcastic scorn.

Having said that, I've heard those stories too, but no matter how influential the dude's playing was to me, had I gotten the slightest hint of that vibe from EVH I would have let someone else deal with him; I've got no time for that shit these days - it's THEIR issue, not mine. Never once did I think he was trying to decide whether to hate me or not - he was just the cool celebrity customer who seemingly liked that I didn't ask the usual bonehead gear questions.

[DLR Bridge]

I mean scary as in frighteningly stupid, which on occasion, leads to the pointless violence. I like your outlook jhale667. I think I'm ready to step away from the topic at hand. In a nutshell, Ed was a great player, we hope he still is and he's said some stupid things in his day. Sounds like a human to me.

[Nitro Express]

Eddie screens his phone calls and if you sound black he shouts fucking asshole at you?

Does anyone actually know what his Dad did during the war?

He played in a Dutch army band.

[vanhalen1r2]

Here's the link to it. Eddie is obviously fucked up judging by his sketchy behavior. Fidgety and off-color comments and all. He is ADD'd the fuck out kinda. Talking out of his ass. Plus his stupid pointless "black guy on the phone" comment. But hell God loves him too. Jeez!

"Check it out Clapton would like this"

LOL

"Its actually for paraplegics"

Wow

He is pretty wasted