Tom Weber, the longtime guitar tech for Eddie Van Halen, needs your help.
With no touring and his guitar repair shop forced out of the building where it had been located for 25 years, a GoFundMe pagehas been established to help save his home in Butler, Kentucky.
"Things are looking pretty bleak at the moment, I won't lie," says Weber. "I have been looking for employment, but am told I am over-qualified for the jobs that are available in the area I live in or that the job is more suited to a younger candidate, and now with the uncertainty about the house, it feels like I am chasing my tail... I'm most worried about how this is affecting my family and the uncertainty each day brings. I just don't know."
Close to $15,000 of the $35,000 goal has been raised.
And, in a Van Halen side note involving Weber, he made an appearance on the Rock Talk with Mitch Lafon and The Jeremy White Podcastand talked about Van Halen doing "Jump" in Greensboro, North Carolina in which Eddie was out of tune.
Weber said, “I haven’t been able to address this because it’s a sore spot for Ed. During the guitar solo, which was a couple of songs before the infamous incident, Ed loves to make noises with the guitar...
“So at one point he took the guitar and literally jammed the headstock of the neck into the stage several times...
“Well, he fine-tunes it some and gets back into playing and I’m holding another guitar over my head so that he can see it and he’s waving it off... Well, they go right from that into 'Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love' ...Wolfgang starts playing and realizes that he’s not in tune with the guitar so he re-tunes a little bit so they’re in tune.
"So they’re in tune [and] they [go into] 'Panama' and then typically the band, at the end of the show, they come offstage for a minute, I switch guitars with Ed, and they go back on for the encore, which is 'Jump'...
"Ed didn’t come off the stage to get another guitar.
“So now you have Wolfgang on his bass and Ed with his out-of-tune guitar on a keyboard song that is in tune. Ed didn’t have keyboards in his monitor mix so he didn’t hear that he was out of tune. So that’s where all that went...
"The funniest part about it was, he didn’t know that that had happened until a couple of weeks later when somebody was at the venue and showed him the video of it.
"So I got called to the dressing room full of people and he said, ‘You handed me an out-of-tune guitar.’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’ I said, ‘If you’ll recall, you banged the headstock of the guitar into the stage that night several times and then you didn’t come off the stage to get the guitar at the end of the show for the encore. He said, ‘Ah, that wouldn’t make any difference.’
"[He then] proceeded to jam [the guitar he was holding] into the dressing room floor, and in front of a room full of people it comes back up and it’s way out of tune. And I said, ‘Just sayin’…’ And that’s the last I ever heard about it.”
Here is the video of the disastrous night...