“We made a greatest hits guitar solo”: Dweezil Zappa says he recorded an unreleased Eddie Van Halen solo that incorporated all of EVH’s classic guitar moments

Dweezil Zappa has looked back on the time he recorded Eddie Van Halen playing a “greatest hits guitar solo” at 5150 Studios in the early ’90s.

According to Zappa, the session was a part of an unreleased audio project, What the Hell Was I Thinking?, that he started nearly four decades ago. The ambitious endeavour has attracted contributions from over 40 A-list electric guitarists, including Steve Vai, Brian May, Steve Morse, and Angus and Malcolm Young.

Speaking to LaughingMonkeyMusic about Van Halen’s involvement in the project, Zappa reveals that there are, in fact, two solos from the late guitar legend.

“And the coolest thing was I got to work with him at 5150,” he says [via Guitar World].

“It was like a total role-reversal because the first thing that he did with me, when I was 12, was he was teaching me how to do punch-ins in the studio – like, you gotta play along and he’d press play and record, and record at the right time – so, all these years later, I’m saying, ‘Okay, on this solo, I need you to play…’”

“We made like a greatest hits guitar solo,” Zappa recalls, noting how the track weaves together elements from classic Van Halen tracks into a lead guitar medley.

“[So] it was just a funny thing to say, ‘Okay, I want you to play this lick from Mean Streets, this one from Push Comes to Shove, this one from On Fire…’ and we put it all in one solo over this thing.”

He adds that Van Halen would sometimes forget his own songs, during which he would step in to “show him some things of his own music”.

“[Sometimes] he was like, ‘I don’t remember how that one goes’ and then I would show him the lick,” says Zappa. “He’s like, ‘Why don’t you just fucking play it? You sound just like me, anyway!’”

“So the funny part was I would show him things that he didn’t remember but then he would play the whole thing, and if we had to do a punch-in, I was now punching him in. So it was like this total role-reversal thing – and I was having to show him some things of his own music. I was like, ‘No, no! It goes like this…’”