Until the point Eddie Van Halen burst on the scene with Van Halen’s self-titled debut in 1978, most rock guitarists enjoyed soloing and riffing on expensive, pristine-looking instruments, most of which seemed to be comprised of stock parts, straight off the music store shelf. But Eddie changed all that with such self-created and always-being-modified instruments as his Frankenstrat.
During an interview with Get on the Bus, long-time Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony recalled that Eddie had been tinkering with instruments for as long as he could remember. He was always in search of obtaining the ever-elusive guitar sound he heard in his head, “the brown sound.”
“I’d go over to Eddie and Alex’s house in Pasadena,” Anthony recalled. “They had a little tiny garage out in the back, behind their house.”
“I’d go walking in there, and I’d see the soldering iron freaking smoking. That was just one thing about him — it wasn’t anything to do with looks, he was always looking for a different sound or whatever.”
But it gets even crazier. You know that legendary black-and-white striped Strat? The one that became the Frankenstrat? That wasn’t some planned-out design. Eddie just taped it up, spray-painted it, and said “cool.”
Because again—he didn’t care about polish. He cared about power. Anthony also remembered when he witnessed his bandmate ruining a particular Gibson guitar, which nowadays would have been worth mucho dinero. But in the eyes of Eddie Van Halen, it was tone or nothing. He continued:
“I remember one time he had a beautiful Gibson ES-335, and frickin’ butchered it because he didn’t like the way it sounded. ‘If I move this pickup here and do that there,’ whatever.”
“And at one point, when he had the Strat, which would become the Frankenstrat, his first one that he had was black and white. I remember when he did that, he just taped it up and painted it. He just wanted to do something crazy that didn’t look like anybody else’s guitar.”
“And somewhere along the way, he figured out that you just wires your pickup straight to the one freaking volume knob, and you don’t have a tone knob. He goes, ‘That is all I need. I don’t need the selector switch or any of that stuff.’ And he was just chasing the sound that he heard in his head, that he wanted to get.”
