Keyboardist Derek Sherinian recalls playing with house party band one night to meet Eddie Van Halen

Keyboardist Derek Sherinian recalls playing with house party band one night to meet Eddie Van Halen

Sons of Apollo and Black Country Communion keyboardist Derek Sherinian was recently interviewed by long-time Sleaze Roxx contributor Ruben Mosqueda for KNAC.

Sherinian has proven to be a big Van Halen fan over the years given that he has posted multiple videos on his YouTube page of himself playing Van Halen classics via keyboards.

With respect to how he was able to meet Van Halen guitarist Eddie Van Halen, Sherinian indicated (with slight edits):

“Yes, that was a wild situation. Stefan Adika had this band called the Star Fuckers, they’d play at The Cat Club in Hollywood, California. To make a long story short, Van Halen‘s fiance, now his wife, saw this band and knew that they were going to have a party at Van Halen‘s house. He had just done this collaboration for music for this porn director to be used for the film and they were going to do a launch party at Van Halen‘s house. The Star Fuckers were hired to be the party band. My friend Stefan knew how huge of a Van Halen fan that I am, so even though they didn’t use a keyboardist in the band he hired me for the night just so I could meet Van Halen. We arrived at the house and there is Eddie! He wound up taking me and Brian Tichy to his recording studio 5150. It’s really surreal to try to remember the sequence of events but we must have been in the studio for 20-30 minutes. He’s telling us all of these stories and then I looked on the wall and there’s the ‘shark’ guitar from Women And Children First and then there were all the reels of tape with all of the Van Halen masters. I was like “Holy shit!” This was all happening even before the gig, so then we played the gig and he got on stage with us. It was a dream, the dream will be fully realized if I could get that guy on one of my records.

You can read the rest of the interview with Derek Sherinian at KNAC‘s website.

Derek Sherinian performing Van Halen‘s “Spanish Fly”:

Eddie Van Halen performing “Jump” at his house with Star Fuckers including Derek Sherinian: