In a new conversation with Classic Rock, Creed’s Mark Tremonti remembered Eddie Van Halen giving him a special item.
“I remember Eddie going, ‘Hey, who’s the guitar player?’ and I raised my hand,” the guitarist said. “He’s like, ‘Come here,’ and he showed me his whole guitar rig and how everything worked. He’s like, ‘What color do you like?’ I said: ‘Black.’ The next day, he brings me a black guitar, the Wolfgang guitar. It’s one of my prized possessions.”
In a 2021 Guitar World interview, Tremonti said Eddie also stopped him on the way out of the venue to give setup tips for his new guitar. “Eddie saw me out of the corner of his eye and walked through hundreds of people to come over and say, ‘Hey I forgot to tell you – you need to take out two springs to make it play right – sorry I forgot to tell you that earlier!’” Tremonti recalled.
The musician continued, “Then he gave me a kiss on the cheek and walked right through all the people clamouring for him again. He did that for me?! He had his kid and his wife with him and knew he’d get caught up by everybody, but he took his time out because he gave a sh*t about his products and passing on knowledge.”
“You’ll play a show and you’ll just kind of see him sitting there smiling,” Mark also previously noted about playing in front of Eddie. “When you’re on stage though, a light switch kinda turns and you kind of become this other persona, so it’s hard to shake your nerves. It felt good, him being there.”
The rocker added, “We went to go see [Van Halen] practice. We were at 5150 studios and they were playing [‘A Different Kind of Truth’]. They had finished a song and I was like, ‘Wolfie, that was a killer bass line.’ And Eddie’s like, ‘Were my parts good?’ [laughs] Like, dude, you’re Eddie Van Halen. All your parts are good.”
Creed played with Van Halen for two nights in 1998.