Eddie Van Halen and Chris Cornell got here tantalizingly shut to collaborating on considered one of Cornell’s songs, in accordance to the late singer’s former guitarist Pete Thorn.
Thorn — whose in depth resume additionally contains working with Don Henley and Melissa Etheridge — mentioned the almost-collaboration throughout a current look on The Mitch Lafon and Jeremy White Show.
“They were buddies back around the late, I believe it’s like kind of the late ’90s, early 2000s, and Eddie always wanted to do something with Chris, musically,” Thorn stated. “He loved his voice and he used to be like, ‘Man, I love him. We were always talking about doing something together.'”
The Van Halen legend practically acquired his likelihood when Cornell was engaged on his 2009 solo album Scream, which was produced by Timbaland and notable for its pop and digital parts.
“I produced up a couple of versions of a song called ‘Long Gone’ and ‘Scream,’ the title track from the album, in a very stripped-down kind of acoustic way, with brushes on the snare drum and upright bass and stuff, and me playing acoustic guitar,” Thorn defined. “So Chris listened to them he’s like, ‘I love this, man.’ … And he looked at me and he said, ‘What do you think if we got Eddie to work on this, if we would ask him to play on it?'” Thorn prolonged the invitation by way of Dave Friedman, the Friedman Amplification guru who labored on a few of Van Halen’s gear. “And 45 minutes later, he texted me,” Thorn recalled. “He said, ‘Ed wants you to call him. Here’s his cellphone number.'”
The guitarist met Van Halen at his 5150 Studios and confirmed him the Scream tracks. Van Halen was a fan and even recorded some guitar elements for the title observe, however a correct collaboration by no means noticed the sunshine of day.
“I don’t want to get anybody excited thinking that this ever got finished, because it didn’t. But he did work on it,” Thorn stated. “And, you know, I would go up there over the next couple of weeks, and he had played on it. I would listen to it and just be like, ‘I can’t believe this is happening. This is myself and Eddie on a track.’ And then, it’s a long story, but it never got a vocal on it by Chris. You know, that was what it was. And Ed got busy doing the next Van Halen record right around then and producing things up and … it just never ended up getting finished.”
Thorn added that Cornell did play the alternate model of “Scream,” with out Van Halen’s guitar elements, throughout his 2011-2012 Songbook tour. “He kind of wanted it to look to like a living room onstage, like he was just jamming at home, so he’d drop the needle on an album,” he defined. “He had the version put on an LP, but that’s not the version with Ed on it.”
The model with Van Halen stays ostensibly locked up tight on the guitar hero’s studio, the place he recorded his elements to tape as a substitute of a digital audio workstation. “So somewhere at 5150,” Thorn stated, “there’s a 24-track reel with that on it.”
Eddie Van Halen Year by Year: 1977-2017 Photos
You’ll see him with lengthy hair, brief hair, a wide range of his most well-known guitars and all three of his band’s lead singers.
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