Nirvana producer and Garbage drummer Butch Vig has revealed he turned down the chance to work with “nightmare” Van Halen.
Speaking on The Paltrocast (via Ultimate Guitar), Vig said he was contacted to work with Van Halen around ten years ago while recording Wasting Light by the Foo Fighters.
“I think they’ve been working on a record for a long time – if this story holds right, they found a bunch of jams that they had done back in the day that Ted Templeman produced,” he began.
He continued: “they had all these reel-to-reels in and they were working on it… I don’t even remember who the singer was – if it was David Lee Roth who would have gone back to sing.”
“But, I was curious and interested, and then I called a couple of people and they said, ‘you don’t want to go down that path. It’s a nightmare trying to get them to focus, trying to get Eddie [Van Halen] to focus and it’s going to be a thankless job… you do not want to do that’.”
After turning down the offer, Vig said it was some Foo Fighters bandmembers who almost made him have a change of heart.
“I passed on it, but Dave [Grohl] and Taylor [Hawkins] were kind of like, maybe you should dude, maybe you should do it!’ And then they’re like, ‘ah, maybe you shouldn’t, just let them do their thing’.”
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Vig also expressed his sadness over the recent passing of Eddie Van Halen, describing him as a “brilliant musician [and] brilliant guitar player.”
Vig’s comments come off the back of the release of Divine Accidents, the latest album by his band 5 Billion In Diamonds.
Check out Butch Vig discussing working with Van Halen on The Paltrocast:
