Wolfgang Van Halen isn’t shy about acknowledging the musical legacy left to him by his father, the late Eddie Van Halen. Wolfgang was, after all, the bassist in Van Halen starting in 2006, when he was just 15 years old. (He’s 32 now.) And he may have picked up a few guitar licks from his dad, who passed away in 2020.
Wolfgang named his band, Mammoth WVH, in honor of his father. Mammoth was Eddie and his brother Alex’s band before David Lee Roth joined and it became Van Halen.
“It’s important to recognize where I came from,” Wolfgang says by phone, taking time out from preparing for his upcoming tour and working on new material at 5150, the recording studio his dad created. “Because it was a pre-Van Halen project my dad had where he was the singer, I feel even closer to that.”
Wolfgang wrote his own material, sang and played every instrument on his two albums, 2021’s “Mammoth WVH” and last year’s “Mammoth II.”
“Mammoth has sort of been my artistic expression from its inception,” he says. “So it’s really just a means to realize that I had been writing stuff on my own for a few years, and I could play everything. So it was like, ‘Why don’t I see if I can do this?’”
Wolfgang Van Halen named his band after an early band his famous father, Eddie Van Halen, started.
After he proved that he could with his debut album, he figured he could “not just do it (again), but enjoy it” for the second one.
And while Mammoth WVH shares some of Van Halen’s pop-metal sensibilities, there are grunge, industrial and speed-metal elements in the mix as well. And Wolfgang’s guitar work shows that, though he is his father’s son, he’s not a carbon copy.
“Being under the shadow cast by my father, all I’m really trying to do is be my own person,” he says; “just trying to find and show that individuality.”
“People love to make comparisons, but overall, I think I’m a very different musician,” he adds. “I do a lot of things my dad didn’t, and he did a lot of things that I don’t. I’m an extension of what he did, but I kind of turned it into my own thing.”
Like every recording artist, Wolfgang had his entire life prior to his debut to prepare for that album and then just a year or so to come up with another one.
“That’s exactly what happened,” he says. “We only had a certain amount of time in between touring and all kinds of stuff. It was certainly stressful. The only thing I wanted to do was to keep the quality up and avoid any kind of sophomore slump. I’m happy with how it turned out.”
Having recorded his albums by himself, Wolfgang had to find musicians with whom to perform live. He’s joined in the band by guitarist/vocalists Frank Sidoris and Jon Jourdan, bassist/vocalist Ronnie Ficarro and drummer Garrett Whitlock. (Sidoris is temporarily away from Mammoth WVH as he’s currently on tour with Slash.)
“They’re just my friends and friends of friends,” Wolfgang says. “I wanted to find a group of guys that could be in the live band for the long haul, and in Ronnie, Garrett, Frank and John I think I’ve found the perfect band to do that.
“It’s fun to have that duality where in the studio, I can do my own thing, but then live, we kind of recontextualize the music and it lives and breathes in a parallel way.”
In putting together his own band, he was able to draw on his experiences — some positive, but yeah, some negative — from Van Halen.
“A big thing with Van Halen or, you know, those bigger bands is that there can be a lot of unnecessary drama,” he says. He decided that, “Whenever I do my own thing, it’s going to be the happiest, most fun, drama-free thing you can think of. And so far it has been that.”
