The forgotten Van Halen feud that almost ended in a stabbing: “It’s not play time anymore”
Vicious feuds and lasting rivalries are relatively commonplace within the music industry, whether it’s between artists or between members of the same band. Typically, though, those divisions tend to result in – at worst – the break-up of a band. Very rarely do they involve the threat of being stabbed to death.
Then again, Van Halen rarely did things by half measures. The lifestyle adopted by the harbingers of esoteric 1980s hard rock lent itself quite naturally to misunderstandings, confrontations and, in the end, vicious feuds.
Throughout much of their tenure, for instance, vocalist David Lee Roth was engaged in a constant battle with Alex and Eddie Van Halen, perturbed by the idea that the brothers – Eddie, in particular – largely dictated the direction of the band that bore their surname.
Seemingly, though, Roth’s very introduction into Van Halen was pretty violent, so perhaps it is no surprise that that theme continued throughout his tenure with the legendary band – according to Alex Van Halen, speaking in an interview with Guitar World, the first time that the Van Halen brothers laid eyes upon their future frontman ended up in a brawl, an arrest, and an incredibly close shave.
During the pre-Van Halen days, Alex and Eddie were performing in a group called Mammoth, and the story goes that this band was booked to perform an open-air show in a park – when they arrived, though, there was no equipment and a lot of confusion over who exactly was responsible for bringing the equipment, and in the end, Mammoth cancelled their appearance, but somehow, the park quickly sourced a replacement, in the form of the Red Ball Jets.
Rock aficionados will already be well aware of the fact that the Red Ball Jets were fronted by a certain David Lee Roth, but the Van Halen brothers had no idea who he was at the time. What’s more, the brothers were rather annoyed that their gig had been usurped. So, in a haze of what Alex Van Halen labelled “infinite wisdom of having false courage”, they started arguing with their rival band. All of a sudden, the park attendant got involved.
“He starts pushing people around, and then some guy pulls a knife,” the drummer recalled. “Now it’s not play time anymore. ‘Put the knife away, pal,’ and the guy, they arrested him, but that was my introduction to Dave’s band.”
Luckily, nobody found themselves on the other end of that blade, but the rather frightening experience seemed to form a bond between those two rival adolescent groups. In the months that followed, Mammoth began to hire out Red Ball Jets’ PA, presumably in an effort to prevent themselves from losing any more gigs, and Roth grew quite close to the outfit.
So close, in fact, that he eventually joined Mammoth as a vocalist and, what’s more, convinced the band to change their name to Van Halen in 1974. From there, of course, the band became the Van Halen that we all know to this day, and although the inter-band feuding never really subsided, it was at least less intense than the original meeting between David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers.
