How did I manage to live with a famous singer in Los Angeles? A question I tend to get when people find out one of my good friends and former roommate is Jeff Scott Soto.
Getting disappointed living in Boulder Colorado after graduating from music school, I was looking around for places to go. Two things happened. First, I was still friends with a musician named Julie whom I met at school and we would chat on occasion about music and life. Second, I got an offer from a guy who had a teaching situation that he was wanting to give up in Los Angeles.
Item two gave me a good reason to get out of Boulder. Another reason of wanting to leave was I was having a difficult time finding players that were into the music I was into and had a strong sense of musicality. I didn’t fit in there. Despite loving the area.
Back to item one. At the same time Julie and her boyfriend were living in Florida and wanting to move to LA. I had briefly met her boyfriend the winter before at NAMM and again a few months later in New York. Anyway, he was from LA and she knew the area fairly well.
The plan was for me to meet up with Julie in LA to have help looking for a place to live. Timing wise, she flew out and I drove down. For several days we’d go tooling around the Burbank & San Fernando Valley area looking at various apartments. Mainly for her and Jeff, and by proxy, I might get lucky and get an apartment in the same building to have a couple of friends nearby.
There was one moment of frustration when we were driving south on Laurel Canyon. We were coming up on an apartment complex she wanted to check out, but traffic was rough and she got a tad demanding. I ended up turning too sharp to get into a parking spot and popped my front passenger tire on the curb. FUCK!
There’s a whole story behind the adventure of getting the tired replaced. Maybe it will appear in a book about my life.
The apartment complex where I popped my tire ended up being a bust as well.
A day later Julie finds a condo in Burbank. We go check it out. She totally digs it, but the price was beyond what her and Jeff could afford. Jeff at the time was in a u-haul driving across the US with their belongings and was going completely on her word about the place.
She’s so enamored with the condo that talk comes up of asking me to be a roommate. I liked the location and the condo as well. I decided I’d be willing to split the rent 3 ways and live with them. Jeff arrived a day or two later. We signed the lease and moved into the condo overlooking Burbank and the entire valley.
It was weird being the youngest tenants in what seemed like a retirement neighborhood. It was quiet, it was safe, and we all got along.
That’s how I ended up being roommates with Jeff. The rest as the saying goes, is history.
Based on my upbringing, I’ve never been one to freak out over meeting someone with any kind of celebrity status. Gotta thank my parents and their friends for that. Cause they had some super famous friends and to my sister and I, they were just people.
When I first started living in LA, I was living with a singer that fans of the metal genre would worship. To me, he was Jeff. So yeah, I don’t really freak out. Jeff turned me on to a band called Jellyfish in a big way. He wasn’t the first to get me to listen to them, but he was the first to really insist that I pay attention to their music.
That’s how I became aware of a musician by the name of Eric Dover. Eric was a guitar player and background vocalist for some of Jellyfish’s tours. Any student of the Jellyfish knows you had to be a monster musician to be in that band.
There are stories of Eric going home from Jellyfish rehearsals in tears because they were so hard on him.
After Jellyfish, Eric went on to front Slash’s Snake Pit for a while. Fronted Imperial Drag and a band called Sextus. I admire Eric for his voice, and his tenacity. There’s a quality to his musicianship that I really think is special.
There’s the preamble…
My first gig as a solo artist in LA was at a place called The Gig. Located on Melrose Ave. Don’t bother looking it up, it’s closed down now.
The Gig was a super nice club. Good atmosphere and the people booking it were actually nice. The woman that booked me there liked me enough to give me a decent slot on a Friday night for my first chance. Which isn’t how it normally worked in LA.
My band had the second soundcheck as we were the second to last band on the bill, soundchecks always run reverse order of the lineup. Or at least they usually do. Anyway, we were in the process of loading our gear in and about to be called up to the stage when this guy walks by me, and I think to myself – damn he looks an awful lot like Eric Dover.
“Eric!” I say.
The guy stops and turns around.
“You’re Eric Dover!” I blurt out.
He got a look of being flattered that someone would recognize him and suddenly we’re chatting and geeking out about guitars and music. It was really cool to meet someone who’s musical talent I really respected and he was super cool.
As it happened, his band was the headliner for the night. They had just finished soundcheck and were leaving.
My band and I were getting shuffled on to the stage to do our soundcheck. We got setup, all set to play. The sound guy is dialing things in when all of a sudden thru the monitors we hear, hold up. Looking over to the sound guy he’s scratching his head and says “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but… Both of you guitar players can turn up!”
So Chris and I turn up and we finish the sound check.
As I’m getting off the stage Eric comes over to me and tells me how much he liked what he heard. I thanked him for sticking around cause in reality he didn’t have to do that. Usually the headliner takes off and goes to relax somewhere else before they come back for the show.
Inside I was jumping up and down in excitement that a musical hero of mine listened, enjoyed and complimented me. That really made my day. The gig itself was icing on the cake.
I was in the middle of working on another post when the news of Eddie Van Halen passing away jumped out at me as a notification on my computer screen. WTF?!?
As a guitar player, that kinda hits pretty hard. Mainly because he was one of the most influential guitarists in the history of guitar. It was common knowledge that he did have throat cancer, but last I had heard he had it beaten back. Apparently that really wasn’t the case, or maybe I misinterpreted the prior news when it was first announced he had gotten it and was dealing with it.
Whatever the case may be, the world of music has been smashed in the face yet again in 2020. I texted a friend immediately on seeing the news asking: can 2020 get any more fuckin worse? People are making “bingo” cards of all the crazy shit that could happen in 2020 – I’m guessing no-one had Eddie Van Halen dying on their playfield. I certainly didn’t.
In the grand scheme of the world, most people may never understand.
What makes it kinda crazy to me is that there was a point early on in my career where I had a parallel to Eddie. While attending music school a buddy of mine, Justin Sayne, wanted one of the pickups out of my first guitar, a Fender Squire Strat. We spent an afternoon in my apartment pulling the strings off, the pick guard off and then he took his drill out with a massive drill bit. See he wanted a fender single coil and was willing to give me a humbucker in exchange. We had to drill out the body of the guitar in order to fit the humbucker into the space where the single coil was previously ensconced.
It was true guitar hackery in its basest form. No measuring tools, no router, just pure human eyeballing of how deep and wide to drill into the wood each time as we removed wood. It looked absolutely awful when we got done. Then we had to hack the pickguard. Again, no router, no means of measuring other than placing the pickup on the pickguard and outlining where the intent was to melt it out with a soldering iron. Yeah, you read that right.
There we were in a studio apartment with a hot soldering iron trying to be delicate with staying on the line to punch out multiple holes to remove the excess plastic to fit the pickup in. It smelled awful and stunk up the place. Once we got done with melting it out, we had to sand it smooth so it didn’t look excessively stupid.
We got it all wried up and reassembled. That was my trial by fire to modify a guitar. Much like Eddie’s infamous frankentstein guitar. He built that from scrap parts and assembled it to be something that he wanted that wasn’t really on the market. Of course when we did this there were plenty of guitars on the market that were Fenders with two single coils and a humbucker. As a starving music student, you don’t have the option of picking up new guitars all the time. So it was born out of a trade of necessity.
Over the years I made additional modifications to the very same guitar.
After music school I opted to give it a custom paint job. This was an undertaking not unlike Eddie’s as well. He was notorious for stripping guitars and spray painting them with various colors. Mostly using tape and making bold shapes. My adventure was a tad different. Having a father that is known as one of the most influential graphic illustrators in art history, I had a bit more of a guided approach. Once I pulled the guitar apart, it took me days to remove the cherry red paint job that Fender had originally given the guitar. Days. Days of hard sanding. It felt like forever getting all the layers of that shit off. Once I got done with removing the paint I ended up thinking I wanted a single humbucker pickup instead of the 3 pickup guitar it was.
Next step was filling in the unneeded pickup holes. That took a few days as well. It took a lot of wood filler and time to dry. Despite taking my time, I still managed to screw it up. The wood filler shrank more after the paint was put on and if one looks closely at the body, the outline of the old pickup holes can be seen.
My dad tried to research what type of paint he should use for the images that were going on the guitar. We didn’t really have a direct line to any guitar manufacturers at that time, remember I was still learning how to play. Even though I knew this is what I wanted to do with my life, I was a total unknown from a small town. Eventually someone told him to use auto body paint for its durability. He bought some different colors that were needed for the paint job and started to make his stencils for the scene depicted on the guitar. Once he started painting with his airbrush, he got a bit agitated. What the problem was is, auto body paint is super thick, not very viscous. He clogged his super expensive airbrush meant for much more delicate work. It took time to clean it out and then figure out how to thin out the paint and stop it from clogging the apparatus.
He got the image done and we took it somewhere to put a clear coat on it. I’m guessing it was auto body clear coat. Not the kind of clear coat that guitars would normally get. Something in the clear coat process muffed up the image of the snake in a spot or two. My dad had to paint over it a bit more to fix it, then we sent it out for more clear coat. Again, something that you wouldn’t see from a distance but up close you can see a bit of the layers in the paint job, which kinda gives it a bit of 3D effect up close.
I call it my Desert Guitar. You can see why.
That wasn’t the end of the modifications. While Eddie eventually had multiple guitar makers fanning all over him to be his next guitar maker, I had my friend Justin. Eddie’s Frankenstein guitar got laser measured to be able to match the feel of his well worn neck. Modern tech allowed Ernie Ball to computer cut new guitars to feel like his monster. For me, I haven’t reached that point. However, at one point in an airport while hanging with the boys from The Boogie Knights, the guitar player John was playing on my Desert Guitar. He loved the feel then took one look at the headstock and said: That looks so 80’s metal.
I had a moment. A moment of like, fuck I don’t represent that and I don’t want my guitar to scream that either. I got on the phone with Justin as he was making guitars for a living (still does). The neck I had was a “Jackson” style Warmoth replacement neck for Fenders. I said, can we do something about the headstock to make it look less 80’s metal. Justin asked me to send the neck to him. Once home I whipped that neck off the guitar and shipped it out to Justin. He asked if I had any ideas and I said: just make it look not metal. I didn’t have a plan and modifying something like a headstock isn’t really the easiest thing. Justin did what he could and sent it back to me.
At first I was like WTF happened?!? Justin lopped off the pointy end and put some strange grooves in the front of it, which meant a need to put the machine head for the high E string somewhere else. I didn’t want to buy a new neck because much like Eddie’s main axe, I had this neck broken in to feel great when playing. So I had to learn to enjoy the new look. I also had to get used to the fact that the machine head for the high E operates backwards from how most bottom of the headstock machine heads work because it was originally on the top. I still use it this way now.
I’m not sure if Eddie ever loaned his guitars to friends. He probably did. Wolfie, Alex, Valerie, Ted, any of you know? Due to my living arrangements, meaning that I lived with Jeff Scott Soto, I had multiple musicians in my orbit and lot of them were awesome guitar players. Because I was the resident guitar player and had quite a few guitars in the condo, my axes would give picked up and played by more players than I. Lots of guitar players aren’t very good with this, but it never bothered me.
The Desert Guitar was always the one people tended to gravitate towards. I can think of a couple of reasons for this. One, the paint job. Two, the headstock. Three, the simplicity of it, it had a single humbucker and one volume knob. Four, it sounded really damn good. Whatever it was, guitarists that played always wanted to borrow it for recordings. I was happy to oblige if I wasn’t using it. Thus my Desert Guitar has been on even more recordings than I used it for.
The weird thing is, nothing about the guitar screams well built, accurate measure, etc. What I mean is, it should sound awful and feel like shit. The exact opposite is true. It feels great and sounds great. We all know Eddie’s guitars sounded great and people that buy the worn in versions from his template say they feel great too. Which goes to show, you don’t always need a perfect instrument to be a great player or to sound amazing.
Now that I’ve spewed all that out while listening to Van Halen for the past couple of hours. I’m going to leave you with this…
We’ll always have the legacy that Ed left, but its highly unlikely there will ever be a guitarist as mind-blowing as Ed was. He took the instrument places most people will never go. For that we should all be grateful. There are those of us who will really miss you Eddie Van Halen. Thank you for doing what you did and how you did it.
