The singer who “sucked the life” out of Van Halen: “We’re from different planets”
Eddie Van Halen always wanted to come from a place of fun whenever he made one of his records.
The minute that it stopped being fun was normally when it was time to throw in the towel, and there were more than a few times where Eddie felt like the rest of the band weren’t matching the same energy that he had whenever he worked on a record. He and his brother may have been joined at the hip, but whenever you’re talking about the drama in the band, it normally comes down to who was singing for them at any given point.
Granted, anyone would have been able to tell you that Eddie and David Lee Roth probably weren’t going to be getting along whenever they got offstage. They were completely different kinds of musicians, and even if they did complement each other perfectly when they were onstage, it’s a bit more difficult to contain a natural ham like Roth when Eddie was making some of the most insane instrumental leaps that anyone had ever done up until that point whenever he played.
And when Sammy Hagar joined the group, it seemed like a far more natural fit. ‘The Red Rocker’ had the kind of range that Eddie could work with, and even if the band were questioned for bringing keyboards into the mix, it all worked out great whenever Hagar sang on tunes like ‘Dreams’. There was much more to play with, but Eddie felt that there was an expiration date on Hagar as well.
They had simply grown apart after working together for too long, and while getting Gary Cherone in the mix wouldn’t have been anyone’s first choice, chances are it wasn’t Eddie’s, either. The entire point of them cutting things off with Hagar was the possibility of them doing a few songs with ‘Diamond Dave’ all over again, but that pretty much ended before it even began when they showed up at the MTV Awards.
Roth seemed to see the entire show as his big moment to shine, and when all of them were onstage together, all of those problems seemed to show up immediately. Roth was playing up his hammy persona to the max while the rest of them were trying their best to hold things together, and even though they did get a few songs out of the frontman for a greatest hits album, it was never going to work out in the long term once they started to see what he was like behind the scenes.
Eddie could still be cordial with him in public, but he felt that any chance of being collaborative was much too draining for him, saying, “We’re just from different planets. We just don’t communicate, or we just don’t see things the same way. And I’m not saying that he’s a bad person at all, I actually fuckin’ love the guy. I really thought that we were becoming friends, and I feel for the guy. But I just don’t need that kind of negative energy around me. I don’t know how to explain, but he kind of sucks the life out of me.”
Which is probably why the same problems ended up turning up during the recording of A Different Kind of Truth. It’s nice that the band could close the door on their legacy properly, but Eddie remembered having more than a few issues with the songs Roth wanted on the record and what he felt the modern incarnation of the band should have been now that his son was in the group.
So while Roth can keep playing the hits and keep the memory of his time with the band alive, Eddie felt that there was a clear difference between his performance and what Van Halen did. They were more than the sum of their parts, and when someone is out there trying their best to ape Eddie’s lines, they’re missing a fundamental part of what made the chemistry of that band work so well.
