Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt, and this is Rolling Stone Music Now.

Today we're going to pay tribute to Eddie Van Halen, one of the greatest guitar players who ever lives, who changed everything

about the way people played rock guitar and wrote amazing songs and was the musical core of Van Halen,

and we're gonna play a conversation I had with Eddie.

We're gonna play some other stuff,

but I wanted to start with Greg Renoff,

who's here with me today.

Greg is the author of a great and revelatory book called Van Hill and Rising that

digs into the band's early days in fantastic detail. He also just wrote a book with Ted Templeman, the band's longtime producer, that's Ted's

autobiography and covers his whole career.

Greg, welcome, thanks for being here.

Appreciate you having me on. Thank you.

I think one of the many things that's interesting about his life is that here is a guy who was actually

an immigrant.

He came to America from the Netherlands when he was a little kid and yet he became in people's minds this kind of all-American California icon and when you picture the archetypal fan of Van Hill and

you definitely picture Jeff the Coley in fast times. It's one of those rock and

roll trying of transmutations that he and his brother Alex achieved isn't it?

It's really is interesting. You know the thing that always struck me was you know Eddie and Alex came from a family of a Dutch father, an Indo Dutch mother.

And that was one of the really interesting things when I would talk to people when I wrote Van Halen Rising.

They talk about how they go to the house, and their mother would serve what they would, the kids thought of like his Chinese food or something, like basically Indonesian, Asian food, you know, and there was those marrying of those two cultures. And it for me one of the great immigrant stories of the

20th century I mean there's obviously a ton of them but to have a pair of

brothers who come to the United States who speak no English whatsoever

...