Wolfgang Van Halen says he was “Nervous as hell” during his performance at last year’s Taylor Hawkins tribute concert.
Wolfgang joined Dave Grohl, new Foo Fighters drummer Josh Freese, and singer Justin Hawkins to cover three Van Halen classics: “On Fire”, “Hot For Teacher”, and “Panama”.
“Taking away any emotional weight to it all, just performing with three musicians who I’ve loved my entire life and looked up to was crazy enough, but then you add the emotional weight of it all for Taylor.” Wolfgang explained, “[It was] probably one of the only few times I’d ever really play any songs like that for Pop and for Taylor. Yeah, just an insane thing that I’ll never forget.”
Wolfgang says he got a text from Grohl about taking part in the tribute – and initially thought it was a prank.
Speaking of pranks, Wolfgang recently revealed a joke he included in his solo debut ‘Mammoth WVH’.
While he records all of the music himself, he did call on one of his family members to contribute to the new project.
He said, “The one thing that I did do was like a fun little joke. The song ‘I’m Alright’, for that solo with the wah, I kind of got bored with the operation of it, so I had my uncle Patrick do it. You’ll see on the back of the album, ‘All songs written and performed by Wolfgang Van Halen, except for wah operation on solo of I’m Alright by Patrick Bertinelli.’”
The joke ended up being a pain as Wolfie said, “While I thought it was a funny joke, it actually held back the approval process for the album cover by one day because we had to sign a work-for-hire and pay him $1. So my manager was a bit upset at me for that dumb joke. But I thought it was pretty funny.”
Time will tell if he includes any more jokes on his second Mammoth WVH album.