Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong shared the story of his encounter with one of his heroes, Eddie Van Halen, revealing that the guitar legend “started crying” during their backstage encounter.
During an appearance at The Howard Stern Show On Wednesday (Jan. 17), Stern brought up the fact that the first concert Armstrong attended was a Van Halen show. “When I saw Van Halen in '84, I was 12 years old, they were my favorite band and I cried,” the Green Day singer and guitarist began. “It's like his guitar playing comes from a different place. He reinvented the way of playing the guitar. But they also wrote great songs, that's the main thing I learned from Van Halen. The songs were fucking great.”
When Stern asked if Armstrong ever met Eddie, the punk leader shared the story of his only meeting with the guitar icon. “YO [met him] once,” Armstrong said. “It was right around the time Van Halen got back together with David Lee Roth. A group of friends and I got on a plane and went to see them in Kansas City. “We didn’t want to do it in California because we knew it was going to be a shit show.”
After declaring that the show was “amazing,” Armstrong described his meeting with Eddie as “kind of emotional.”
“First we came back and I met Wolfie. [Van Halen], which was super cool, and then they were like, 'Do you want to meet Eddie?' and I said, 'Oh my God!' Armstrong recalled. “And then he was there and he had his guitar on, it was plugged in, and it was like he was talking to me and playing at the same time, and I was like, Oh my God!”
He continued: “I don't know if anyone really knows this, but the size of his hands is gigantic, and I grabbed his hands and looked at them, and I thought, Dude, your hands are so… And he said, 'Oh, now I have arthritis and blah , BLA bla'. And then something really crazy happened, where he started crying. He looked at me, put his hand behind my neck and said, 'You're the only one who understands me.'”
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