Billie Joe Armstrong Recalls Emotional Meeting With Eddie Van Halen

Eddie Van Halen was a huge inspiration for many contemporary rockstars, including Billie Joe Armstrong. During a recent interview, the Green Day frontman recalled the first (and only) time he met the late Van Halen guitarist, describing it as “an emotional thing.”

He prefaced the story by explaining how Van Halen was the first band he ever saw live. “When I saw Van Halen in ’84, I was 12, and they were my favorite band, and I cried,” Armstrong began. “It’s like his guitar playing came from a different place. He reinvented how to play guitar. But they also wrote great songs, that’s the main thing that I took away from Van Halen. The songs were just so f***ing great.”

As for the meeting, “it was right when Van Halen got back together with David Lee Roth,” he recalled. “Me and a bunch of friends got on a plane and we went to go see them in Kansas City. We didn’t want to do it in California because we knew it was going to be a s*** show.”

“First we went back and I met Wolfie [Van Halen], who was super cool, and then they were like, ‘Do you want to meet Eddie?’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God!” Armstrong continued. “And so he’s back there and he’s got his guitar on, he’s plugged in, and it’s like he’s talking to me and shredding at the same time, and I was just like, Oh my God!”

“I don’t know if anybody really knows this, but the size of his hands are gigantic, and I grabbed his hands and I looked at them, and I was like, ‘Dude your hands are so…’ And he’s like: ‘Oh I got arthritis now and blah blah blah,'" he added. "Then this really insane thing happened, where he started crying. He looked at me and he put his hand behind my neck, and he goes: ‘You’re the only one that understands me.’”

“He had tears coming down his eyes and I didn’t really know what to say. I was like, ‘Man you have no idea how much you’ve meant to me as a musician and as a songwriter,’" Armstrong shared. "He’s like, ‘People think I’m an alien because of the way I play,’ and I’m like, ‘It’s all about your songs,’ and he goes, ‘Exactly, exactly.’ It was this really kind of heavy experience.”

Armstrong will be bonding with his own fans later this year on Green Day's Saviors tour, which will include full-album performances of Dookie and American Idiot. Saviors drops on Friday (January 19). The band previewed the album with four singles—"One Eyed Bastard," "Dilemma," "The American Dream Is Killing Me" and "Look Ma, No Brains!"—and surprised fans with a performance in an NYC subway station.