The one album that made Eddie Van Halen hate David Lee Roth: “Spit in my face”
With every band, there are eras. Usually, for a group that has some serious years behind it, those eras are defined by the comings and goings of band members. The entire story of Van Halen tends to centre around a tale of two singers.
David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar are often seen as the pivotal characters in Van Halen, but the narrator of the whole saga is Eddie Van Halen himself.
While we will diplomatically disqualify Gary Cherone from the discussion since he had less time with the group, both the David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar eras of the group were among the two most celebrated lineups of the entire 1980s, featuring Eddie working both sides of his musical personality with each frontman. When he finally bothered to reunite with Roth after years apart, he couldn’t help but think of it as a huge mistake.
For anyone who saw the fallout of the first iteration of Van Halen, though, it would be understandable if Roth and Eddie never wanted to talk to each other again as long as they lived. It might have been easy to pin all of the asshole tendencies on Roth, but the genuine creative tension going into the making of 1984 is probably what sealed the deal for them not working together anymore.
Eddie knew that there was life after death when working with Sammy Hagar, but around the same length of time, the band started running into problems in terms of what they were getting on tape. Whereas most artists would try to regroup, Hagar would be told that he was fired after things failed to work out after the recording of songs like ‘Humans Being’ for the film Twister.
Cherone may not have gotten his fair shake, all things considered, especially since the band was being pressured into releasing a greatest hits album that featured Roth on vocals for songs like ‘Me Wise Magic’. Then again, their one TV appearance was enough to tell everyone that things were getting out of hand.
When showing up on MTV, Roth did everything he could to hog the spotlight, including taking the glory away from Eddie and spinning every sentence to be about himself. As Eddie would later find out, that kind of attitude wasn’t exactly limited to when the cameras were in play once he started working.
Throughout the sessions, Eddie believed that Roth was working with him purely out of spite, telling Eruption, “I just wanted to give him another shot on those songs on the ‘best of’ album.” What might have seemed like a generous moment between old friends soon became a chapter of a bitter story.
The truth is, Eddie wasn’t looking to bring in Roth in any real way, his story had finished with Van Halen in his eyes. The guitarist was just looking to bring back a returning character to have a go at telling the same old stories again. “The idea was not for him to be in the band again, but to try to help him get out of the Vegas trip he was in. Then he basically spit in my face. And I said, ‘Okay, I thought we were friends. Forget it.’”
You can hear it in the songs as well. Despite some decent performances from Roth, a song like ‘Me Wise Magic’ is one of the biggest stitched-together jobs in history, almost like you can hear that the band are playing in completely different rooms and creatively might as well be on different planets.
Since Van Halen was at a low point after the failed attempt with Cherone, Eddie eventually gave Roth another chance in the 2000s. After years away from the limelight, the band signed on for a major tour around the world with Roth back in the group, almost like all of that cold demeanour they had suddenly melted away. Still, that doesn’t diminish the fact that we have recorded proof of one of their darkest times together.
