Wolfgang Van Halen felt he owed Ken Shepherd a sincere “thank you”. After all, without Shepherd, there would be no Wolfgang.
In 1980, Edward Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli met for the first time. Valerie was staying at her parents’ home in Shreveport, Louisiana due to an actors strike and scored backstage passes to see Van Halen perform in the area. Those passes were courtesy of Ken Shepherd, a local radio personality and some-time concert promoter whose then three-year old son Kenny Wayne would go on to become a professional musician and open for Van Halen twice – once in 1998 and again in 2015. It was during that 2015 tour that Wolfgang had the chance to meet the elder Shephard.
“This was actually the very last Van Halen show ever at [the] Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles California,” Kenny Wayne said during a recent appearance on The Paltrocast. “The last day [of the tour] we were all saying our goodbyes and stuff and Wolfgang came up to my dad and introduced himself and shook his hand and he goes, ‘Well I guess I owe you a thank you.’ He was making a joke. I mean obviously, my dad facilitated to a small degree the meeting between Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen. I always had been told that story when I was a kid but I didn’t really know how much that could be embellished
[or] how true was it, you know, but after I did the Van Halen tours [I] found out that it was actually very true.”
Watch Mammoth WVH “Distance”