(Credits: Far Out / TIDAL)
Every band makes mistakes when settling on the right lineup for a group. Everyone’s dreams of stardom might start off with them playing a tennis racket like it’s a guitar, but the minute that they graduate to playing music with their friends, a lot of broken friendships can come about when they have to let go of some musical dead weight. And even when bands get more professional, Eddie Van Halen realised that working with the wrong musicians can result in some of the worst moments of his career.
Then again, did anyone really need to worry about anything else onstage whenever Van Halen played? Most people weren’t going to listen to a band that was only one guitar player and a rhythm section, but if there was one person who could get away with that, it was probably Eddie, especially considering his tapping licks could have been a sideshow attraction back in the late 1970s.
While Eddie soaked up a lot of attention, David Lee Roth was the real main attraction whenever they played. As much as the band loved to have a good time on the road, Roth presented himself like everyone’s best friend onstage, usually throwing in anything that could draw a response, whether that was swinging around a sword or wearing the most ridiculous outfits he could think of.
When someone that eye-catching is out front, though, it’s no wonder that the rest of the band started to get agitated. It was always about the music for Eddie, and right up until their eventual reunion, he felt that Roth was more concerned with playing up the rockstar angle than trying to make his own music.
After going through their own struggles with Sammy Hagar in the late 1990s, Eddie already considered Roth’s reunion at the MTV Awards one of the biggest misfires of his career, saying, “[That was] a total embarrassment; what happened backstage between Roth and I, I won’t get into, but the first thing that went out the window was the friendship.” And since Hagar either quit or was fired, depending on which side you ask, it’s not like Eddie was itching to bring in ‘The Red Rocker’ again.
“That’s where I made the mistake over a year ago–when both Roth and Sammy were just slinging shit at us.”
Eddie Van Halen
And since both frontmen decided to have a go at Eddie when he hired Gary Cherone to sing on Van Halen III, he had no problem firing right back at them about how much he regretted the past few years with both of them, saying, “That’s where I made the mistake over a year ago–when both Roth and Sammy were just slinging shit at us. I just had to get on MTV and say, ‘I’II take a lie detector test. Both these guys are lying. They’re both full of shit.’”
But the sad fact is that the band always worked better with either Roth or Hagar behind the microphone. Because while Cherone is a more-than-capable vocalist in his own band, Extreme, he was extremely mismatched with Van Halen, especially in the meat of the album where he sounds like someone trying to someone do an impression of both Roth, Hagar, and a dying cat all at the same time and getting absolutely nowhere.
Although Eddie never lost his touch on guitar, one of the biggest tragedies of Van Halen’s career was not being able to make amends with Hagar towards the end of his life. He never stopped recording throughout his career, so there’s no limit to the endless amount of riffs he had in the vaults that could have been turned into rock and roll classics.
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