Wolfgang Van Halen recently talked about his experience during the Los Angeles wildfires, and how he saved his father Eddie Van Halen’s guitars. He revealed how he prioritized saving his wife (obviously), and one of his late father Eddie’s most precious belongings, as reported by Premier Guitar.
Wolfgang Van Halen talks about the experience
The musician shared details about the difficult decisions he faced during the emergency evacuation. He explained how the experience influenced his music.
“I thought, I’ll have Frankenstein and my wife, and we’re good,” Wolfgang Van Halen said.
“And then we had a U-Haul filled with whatever else we felt was worth saving, which was very tough. Luckily, it didn’t come to that, but it was a traumatising time we’re still working through.”
Van Halen went on to explain how the stressful experience directly impacted his songwriting process.
“That’s where most of the anxious, doomsday energy in the lyrics [of ‘The End’] comes from,” he continued.
“I couldn’t focus on my things.”
He then referenced the “Frankenstein” guitar, one of Eddie Van Halen’s most iconic instruments. This made it a very meaningful item for him to save.
Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein guitar
Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein guitar isn’t just an instrument — it’s a piece of rock and roll history. Frustrated with what was on the market in the mid-1970s, Eddie famously built the guitar himself from a $50 Stratocaster body and a $75 Gibson PAF humbucker. He stripped it to a single volume knob labeled “tone,” spray-painted it in his backyard, and wired it up until it matched the sound he heard in his head. “I couldn’t get what I wanted, so I had to build it,” Eddie told Guitar World in 1996. “I just wanted my guitar to do what my head told it to do.”
When Van Halen dropped in 1978, Frankenstein became an instant icon. Its red, black, and white stripes were as distinctive as the finger-tapped solos roaring out of it on songs like “Eruption” and “I’m the One.” Eddie later described his bond with the guitar to Smithsonian Magazine in 2015: “That guitar is me. It’s like my best friend. It changed my life, and I guess it changed a few other people’s too.”
For Wolfgang, saving Frankenstein during the wildfires wasn’t about memorabilia — it was about preserving the heartbeat of his father’s musical legacy. This was the guitar Eddie once called his “most famous child,” the six-string blueprint that changed rock forever.
