Recently, singer Don Dokken talked to Full in Bloom about guitarist Eddie Van Halen, as well as about David Lee Roth.

Asked about Eddie, Don said:

“I remember playing with Van Halen in a place on the beach – before the Dokken days before I got signed – and I just remember, I was a guitar player and a lead singer, we were a three-piece, basically.

“And the first time I saw Van Halen, I just looked at Eddie and I just thought, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing, I’ll never be that good.’

“And I started thinking, ‘I’ll just switch to singing,’ because I just knew that I couldn’t compete.

“That night afterward, really late, I think he was driving a van, and everybody left and he’s packing up his gear, and he had a flat tire, and we’re on the beach – the club was on the beach basically across the street from the marina.

“And I remember I said, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ So I had two rolls of duct tape, and I duct-taped his tire like six times around, and he called me on my phone, and I was like, ‘Wow, he made it…’

“Losing Eddie was like losing Hendrix, it was horrible.”

Also asked about David Lee Roth, the singer said:

“What I remember about David Lee is that David Lee was famous before he was famous. His persona was like that from day one.

“Very animated, the ringleader and the circus leader, the guy with the tigers – that’s the way he was.

“He’s very flamboyant, and I remember – that was like 1979, and then exactly 10 or nine years later, I’m playing with Van Halen with Dokken on Monsters of Rock tour.

“So, Eddie and I used to sit up late at night because by then he had Wolfgang and I had my son Tyler, and we smoked and we drank on the stairwells because we couldn’t be in the room with the kids.

“And we’d just sit up and talk guitars and amps, and, ‘How the hell did we get from Whiskey to here?’ – stadiums.”