"Eruption was recorded 45 years ago today. In honor of that, here’s a video of me playing part of it on the guitar" wrote Wolfgang Van Halen as he revealed footage of an impromptu shred session last week.
The short video, shot in 2015 during the recording of Mammoth WVH’s debut album, shows an initially hesitant Wolfgang nailing a section of Van Halen's instrumental classic.
"I had used the Frankenstein on a couple tracks on the first @mammothwvh album, and we were just having some fun before we started," Wolfgang recalls, before confirming, "I definitely plan on bringing it out again for the second album."
Moving on to details, he writes, "On Van Halen 1, the guitar was tuned a half step down, but the song I was about to record was a full step down. Hence Eruption being a half step down here."
"You can hear my hesitation before playing, and I almost decided to try and play it up one fret, but I ended up just playing in its normal position. I may have attempted to do that after this video at some point though haha"
Eruption was recorded in 1977, seeing the light of day in 1978 and regularly features in all reputable run-downs of the mostinfouential guitar solos of all time.
In our own run-down of 5 tracks guitar players need to hear by Van Halen, we wrote "Eruption is possibly the most influential piece of solo rock guitar ever recorded and although the familiarity we have with its twists and turns now unavoidably leads some of us to take it for granted, back in 1978 it was all the band could do to persuade critics and fans alike that this was a guitar they were hearing, not a keyboard."
