Broken Friendship: The reunion Eddie Van Halen called “a total embarassment”
Band reunions tend to be a bit tricky. Although it’s easy to get a handful of people in the room for a hefty payday in the hopes that they will play music together, it also comes down to whether or not the artists in question even have anything more to say after years away from the spotlight. As it turns out, David Lee Roth had his fair share of opinions about a Van Halen reunion, and Eddie Van Halen wished he had kept them all to himself when appearing at the MTV Music Awards.
Considering how the group unravelled in the mid-1980s, though, one wouldn’t fault Eddie for never wanting to be mentioned in the same sentence as Roth ever again. The entire rollout for 1984 had started getting ugly before the tour kicked off, and once Roth started making amateur inroads to a solo career on Crazy from the Heat, it wasn’t shocking to see him out the door a few months later and hyping up his solo career to the moon.
Although Sammy Hagar was just the breath of fresh air that Eddie needed, the accompanying tour for Balance in the mid-1990s left him creatively stifled for the first time since the Roth years. He had always wanted to stretch, but once Hagar wasn’t writing the melodies that he heard in his head, he was ready to cut him loose and start over again.
Who knows? Maybe those years away may have given Roth some perspective, right? Time does heal all wounds, but looking at the group’s appearance at the MTV Music Awards is the visual equivalent of watching someone pick at an emotional scab.
From the moment the group walked onstage, Roth was dominating the conversation, ad-libbing as much as he could while his bandmates looked on as if they were watching him in a professional clown outfit. Despite giving out an award, Roth was still aching for the camera’s attention, even being seen in the background doing whatever eye-catching thing he can think of.
By the time they went backstage, the supposed reunion was over before it even got started for Eddie, telling Rolling Stone, “MTV and everybody else — including him — thought it was a reunion. I told him every fucking day, ‘Dave, cut the crap. You’re not in the fucking band.’ Then we presented at the MTV Awards — 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.”
But in trying to axe Roth again, Eddie shot himself in the foot by getting together with Extreme’s Gary Cherone, who possessed a strange form of anti-charisma when working on Van Halen III. He had a lot of potential working next to Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, but Cherone seemed to trade in his signature pipes and trying to sound like Roth and Hagar simultaneously and coming off like a parody of a rock vocalist.
Then again, can you really blame Eddie? He had already tried to make it work with two different vocalists, so even if Cherone wasn’t quite what the group needed, he at least had the chance to call his own shots for one album.
