The one artist Eddie Van Halen said never fit in Van Halen: “I realised it wasn’t going to work”
It takes a certain stripe of musician to even attempt to match the majesty of Van Halen.
Every member of the band might not have had the same degree of chops, but judging by every single one of their records, there’s a chemistry that happened between all of them that couldn’t have been replicated anywhere else, whether that’s in their early days, the ‘Van Hagar’ years, or their countless reunions. But Eddie did seem to have a few ideas for how the music should go, and he would gladly show someone the door if he felt it didn’t work.
When looking at his own track record, though, Eddie would have been asking the impossible if he tried to get someone to play as well as him. You only get so many Eddie Van Halens in the world, and while we have to appreciate the ones that we do get, it’s not like Michael Anthony was going to be expected to play with the same fury on bass as Eddie did during his tapping solos or anything.
That didn’t stop Eddie from dragging Anthony under the bus once he left the band, though. While Sammy Hagar contests Eddie’s claim that he showed Anthony what to play on every single record, that didn’t stop Eddie from taking a few shots at the bassist, even claiming that his vocal range was one of the most annoying aspects of the band. A lot of that was sour grapes at the time, but that might have been due to Anthony’s allegiance to Hagar after a falling-out during their reunion tour.
In all fairness, Anthony did at least stay on when Hagar was asked to leave the first time around. They had dealt with the loss of a singer, and they could do it again, but even if they couldn’t see the massive trainwreck they were about to run into, Gary Cherone at least seemed like a pretty good idea for a replacement when working on Van Halen III. He was used to working with guitar legend Nuno Bettencourt, but it’s clear that there were problems right from the start.
You wouldn’t have known it from the way that Eddie was talking about the project, though. In all the interviews from the time, the guitarist was talking like he met a musical soulmate half the time, but even if Van Halen III was one of the biggest misfires in the band’s catalogue, Eddie couldn’t see all the problems unfolding until they finally decided to take to the road.
This was a post-grunge world, and the idea of anything flashy was a thing of the past, so when Cherone walked out onstage, Eddie saw the writing on the wall, saying, “It was a strange thing with Cherone. We were getting ready to go on tour, and all of a sudden, I see this John Travolta outfit — these big lapels and a crazy jacket. He’s like, ‘This is my stage outfit.’ That’s when I realized it wasn’t going to work. But I don’t dislike Gary at all.”
That last part isn’t a case of Eddie trying to make nice with his previous singers, either. Even up until his passing, the guitarist had the idea of potentially doing a tour with all three singers of Van Halen, and while the audiences probably wouldn’t have been as thrilled to listen to Cherone’s take on the material compared to David Lee Roth or Hagar, it was more than enough to endear him to the audience.
Cherone did have the distinction of etching himself into Van Halen history, but judging by how harsh the critics were on the final record, it’s no wonder that Eddie entered a dark period following the album’s release. There had been a few mistakes in Van Halen’s catalogue before, but once things finally went too far off the rails, he wasn’t equipped to deal with that kind of emotional backlash.
