David Lee Roth Details Eric Clapton Influence On Eddie Van Halen

Bruce Henne | 03-27-2023

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(hennemusic) David Lee Roth shares some of the history of Eric Clapton's influence on Eddie Van Halen in the latest episode of The Roth Show. Van Halen - who cited Clapton as a hero during interviews throughout his lifetime - regularly performed tracks from his work with Cream during the band's early years on the Southern California party circuit.

"Eddie Van Halen was an Eric Clapton acolyte; he followed him like a disciple," recalls Roth about that era in the band's history. "Eddie barely could afford shoelaces when he was learning to play guitar...he had one gold top Les Paul. I used to sit right across from him in his little room, almost knee-to-knee touching. [We] slept on crates with a mattress on it. He would sit on the mattress, and I'd sit on the amp right in front of him on the Marshall stack bottom right in front of him, our knees almost touching, and writing the songs we became famous for."

"And there was one poster who was Eric Clapton, who is the mirror image of 24 other folks that he was a disciple of, who is a mirror image, and [Eddie] started off as a mirror image of Eric Clapton and took it way beyond the curtain of space across the trackless void."

Read more and stream the latest episode of The Roth Show here.