Wolfgang Van Halen will have to peruse his father's vault of unreleased music at some point, but the time to do that is not now.
Wolfgang acknowledged to Howard Stern on Monday that his late-father, Eddie Van Halen, did indeed leave behind a "s--t ton of tapes" at his 5150 home recording studio.
But Eddie was eagerly anticipating his son's solo career taking off and wouldn't want Wolfie spending his days underground listening to old tapes when he could be sharing his own music with the world.
"My dad would be pissed off at me, really. He's be like, 'What the f--k are you doing?' Go do your [music]!' Don't go through my old s--t,'" Wolfgang said. "Mark my words: there will be a time when we go through [the vault]. It's just not right now. And we want to do it right, whenever the time is. But I think it'd be a little shameless to do it right now. It'd be milking dad and everything with ideas that probably aren't out there for good reason. He put out the good s--t! ...I'm sure there's amazing s--t in [the vault]... At some point we'll go through it, but not now and not for a while."
Eddie himself once said he had "millions" of CDs and tapes of never-before-heard compositions spanning a myriad of styles in his studio. There's no question that it would take a very long time to sift through it all, and Wolfgang and Alex Van Halen are likely the only people Eddie would have trusted to make decisions about releasing the material.
Van Halen's manager Irving Azoff confirmed as much in an interview last month with Pollstar.
"The stuff is gonna come out," Eddie said of the vault music in a 2008 interview with Rolling Stone. "Hopefully people will enjoy the many sides of me. I trip on it myself."
Wolfgang just launched his solo career Monday with his debut single, "Distance," a song he wrote for his father amid the rock legend's battle with cancer.
Photo: Getty Images