David Lee Roth’s road rules that Eddie Van Halen hated
No matter what your rock and roll fantasies might have you believe, life on the road is far from being a glamorous affair, even for globally successful rock stars like Van Halen. From their formation in 1973, the band quickly rose to the top of the American rock scene, establishing Eddie Van Halen among the greatest guitarists of all time in the process. They had it all: quality songwriting, commercial success, and thousands of adoring fans. Do not be fooled, though: life in Van Halen was far from being a harmonious affair.
Although Eddie Van Halen was, as the band name suggests, the star of the show, that did not mean he necessarily called the shots within the Van Halen camp. In fact, it was lead vocalist David Lee Roth who made many of the decisions during the early days of the group. Inevitably, this led to various arguments, disagreements, and ego clashes within the band. Admittedly, this in-fighting and ego battle made for some truly groundbreaking compositions by the group, although it was never going to last forever.
Tensions between Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth reached a boiling point during the production of the band’s fourth studio album, Fair Warning, in 1981. Roth was convinced that the band should stick to commercially viable, pop-centric rock tracks, while Van Halen himself yearned for something a little darker and more experimental. As a result of these disagreements, Fair Warning itself was far from being Van Halen’s most convincing record, and it largely signalled the beginning of the end of Roth’s time with the band.
Eventually, Roth left the group in 1985 after years of not seeing eye-to-eye with Eddie Van Halen. Although he would reunite with the band on a number of occasions throughout the decades, the conflict and anger of that Fair Warning period never particularly left the mind of Eddie Van Halen. In fact, the period proved detrimental to Van Halen’s physical health, with the guitarist once recalling, “I started getting a peptic ulcer, man.”
Speaking to Steve Rosen in the book Tonechaser, Van Halen thought back to that difficult period within the band. “Two yeas ago – or no, fuck – it was a little over four years ago during Fair Warning, when I met Valerie and the shit Dave [Roth] gave me.” Seemingly, Roth had certain rules for the rest of the band to follow while on the road, and these did not go down well with Van Halen.
“’Hey, tell your old lady,’ man,” Van Halen recalled, imitating Roth’s commands, “‘Don’t fuckin’ say this and not do that. No wives on the bus.’ I put up with it all and I can’t believe I did.” These rules do seem fairly strange for the band, as having their wives on the bus might just have helped to cool the rapidly rising tension between the guitarist and the singer.
Upon finding out about the authoritarian stance taken by Roth, and the various rules he sought to implement, it is not all that surprising that the pair parted ways in 1985. After over a decade in the same group, each attempting to have their voices heard, the period around the Fair Warning album seemed too much to handle, for both Roth and Van Halen.
It is not clear how much more relaxed Van Halen became following the departure of Roth, who was then replaced by Sammy Hagar. However, the divide that the Hagar period caused between fans of the group seemed to suggest that the conflict between Van Halen and Roth did, for whatever reason, lead to a better quality of songwriting.
