Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong has shared the story of meeting one of his heroes, Eddie Van Halen, revealing that the guitar legend “started crying” during their backstage encounter.
During an appearance on The Howard Stern Show on Wednesday (January 17th), 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, and they were my favorite band, and I cried,” began the Green Day singer-guitarist. “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 fucking great.”
When Stern asked if Armstrong ever got to meet Eddie, the punk frontman shared the story of his one and only meeting with the guitar icon. “I [met him] one time,” said Armstrong. “It was right when Van Halen got back together with David Lee Roth. 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 shit show.”
After declaring that the show was “incredible,” Armstrong went on to describe his meeting with with Eddie as “an emotional thing.”
“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!” recalled Armstrong. “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!”
He continued, “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.’ And then, like, this really insane thing happened, where he kind of 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.’”