The 1981 Van Halen album that made Eddie hate David Lee Roth: “A guy that wanted everything”
There’s a good chance that anyone would have realised that the early version of Van Halen was never going to go the distance.
As much as we all wanted to see the band keep delivering the same party atmosphere on every single record, the fact that they managed to make a nearly-spotless run of albums before 1984 is a feat in and of itself when they finally decided to let go of David Lee Roth. But if you were to have asked Eddie back in the day, the idea to go their separate ways wasn’t exactly an overnight decision when they finally decided to cut him loose after ‘Jump’.
Eddie was the consummate musician every single time he went onstage, and while ‘Diamond Dave’ could respect that, listening to him live ended up sounding like you were in for a completely different show. Roth’s idols were people like Sammy Davis Jr, and when you look at the way that he carried himself onstage, it was becoming apparent that he was more into the idea of being a rock and roll star instead of actually caring about those pesky duties that singers have to deal with like hitting notes.
And since Roth is typically that kind of guy 24/7, I imagine that it could probably get more than a little bit irritating whenever Eddie wanted to make his own songs. Roth was the one that helped organize everything whenever they played, but the idea of continuing on with him was already becoming an issue right after making Women and Children First. That record was a damn masterpiece, but Fair Warning was the first time that Eddie felt like the band had started to abandon him a little bit.
A lot of the songs on there are an absolute treasure trove for anyone interested in guitar, but that’s only due to Eddie being by himself in the studio most of the time. Everyone in the band was fried to a certain degree, but Eddie felt that Roth’s behaviour outside the studio and talking with everyone behind his back was getting to become a bit too much for him to take when he got finished with the record.
The songs still sounded great, but Eddie remembered that Roth would be complaining about how his star power wasn’t as high as Eddie’s was after he had married Valleri Bertinelli, saying, “It was kind of a dark period in my life. I was getting married, which flipped Roth out to the bone. I actually overheard him say, ‘That fucking little prick, not only is he winning all the guitar awards, but he’s also the first to marry a movie star.’ So that’s what I was up against. A guy that wanted everything that was going my way.”
There’s no rule that said that Roth couldn’t try and go the distance like Eddie did, but the fact that the record sounded so dark was probably the result of them going back and forth. A lot of Roth’s lyrics this time around were about the seedier sides of Los Angeles, but in a weird way, that actually works well when listening to some of the strange sounds that Eddie concocted for the record, like on the beginning of ‘Mean Street’ where he plays drums on guitar, effectively.
On the other hand, a lot of that animosity may have been because the band really needed a break. They had been run like mad throughout the past few years, and even if they had time to recharge their batteries, their label putting pressure on them to make a new album only a few months later on Diver Down wasn’t going to exactly boost morale when no one really wanted to be there.
Fair Warning was when it became noticeable, but Eddie felt that everything was bound to come to a head eventually. He had a rocky relationship with Roth even before the band got together, and he wasn’t about to roll over when he had a lead singer that kept talking behind his back about how jealous he was of him.
