David Lee Roth Reveals How Eric Clapton Influenced Eddie Van Halen

David Lee Roth’s The Roth Show has served us with some of the most interesting details of the singer’s life, especially during his Van Halen era. In the recent episode, Roth discusses Eric Clapton’s impact on Eddie Van Halen.

Recalling the band’s early history, Roth said: “Eddie Van Halen was an Eric Clapton acolyte; he followed him like a disciple. Eddie barely could afford shoelaces when he was learning to play guitar…he had one gold top Les Paul. I used to sit right across from him in his little room, almost knee-to-knee touching.”

“[We] slept on crates with a mattress on it. He would sit on the mattress, and I’d sit on the amp right in front of him on the Marshall stack bottom right in front of him, our knees almost touching, and writing the songs we became famous for.”

“And there was one poster who was Eric Clapton, who is the mirror image of 24 other folks that he was a disciple of, who is a mirror image, and [Eddie] started off as a mirror image of Eric Clapton and took it way beyond the curtain of space across the trackless void,” the singer added.

In the early days of Van Halen’s career, before they made a name for themselves, the band frequently played music from Clapton’s work with Cream on the Southern California party circuit.