I-95 Drive Home Mystery Artist [VIDEO]

Tonight’s mystery artist would stay in the hotel room after performing on tour to drink alone and write songs.   Think you can guess who he might be or what band mates he didn’t want to go out with?? 

This interesting on the road life style was found in a Billboard Magazine article and although he did drink alone it was not George Thorogood but Eddie Van Halen who along with vodka would consume cocaine to loose his creative juices. He says of the process:

“I have no memory of coming up with any of those riffs,” he says. “Even the stuff I wrote for the last record, I don’t remember. It just comes to me. I never sit down and decide to write a song. I’ve never done that.”

This sentiment becomes more explicable when you hear the explanation for how Eddie used to work. For most of his career, he wrote on tour. After every show, the other three members of the band would hit the town and carouse (“My brother was the biggest horndog of them all,” he says). But not Eddie. Eddie would remain alone in his hotel room, where he’d spend the entire night drinking vodka, snorting cocaine and noodling into a tape recorder.

“I didn’t drink to party,” he says now, sober since 2008. “Alcohol and cocaine were private things to me. I would use them for work. The blow keeps you awake and the alcohol lowers your inhibitions. I’m sure there were musical things I would not have attempted were I not in that mental state.

Here is Van Halen with tonight's featured song.