Vintage Guitar Magazine December 2000

The December 2000 issue of Vintage Guitar Magazine contains an interview with Danny.
This is an excerpt (about Eddie Van Halen):

VG: You're working with Van Halen right now, right?

Kootch: Yeah, I'm producing them. Eddie is the most incredible guitar player you can ever imagine. He's his own effects pedal. He has so many moves and things he does. You think he's tapping, he isn't tapping. You think he's doing slides, well, you never know what he's doing. You think he's using the whammy bar, and he's not. He's doing it with his fingers. Then he'll use the whammy bar for something else. It's constatntly flowing. He has a brass pick he plays with. It's serrated on one side, it's a mess. It's handmade. He does things with it. He scrapes and rubs, he changes positions with it. He holds it between his thumb and his forefinger and then thumb and middle finger. It's constantly switching, changing, and moving. It's ridiculous! I've never seen anyone with the articulation this guy has. He cranks his amp up way up loud, so that if you or I played it, it'd be all over the place. But he just gets such articulation out of it. Every note is clear. It's amazing what this guy can do! Plus, he grooves like mad, which a lot of people don't know about. Eddie has absolutely nothing in common with his imitators, all of whom are a bunch of showoff idiots. He's the only one of those guys who does it with style, and humor, and soul, and with swing. In my opinion, he's just a million miles away from the batch of imitators he has.