The 1966 song that made Eddie Van Halen hate David Lee Roth: “It was terrible”
Nothing that Eddie Van Halen ever played was meant to be nice and pleasant all the time.
There are some genuinely beautiful tunes in Van Halen’s discography, but when looking at their first records, it’s no wonder that they were considered one of the first accessible metal bands compared to the likes of Black Sabbath and Kiss. There was something more than a little bit scary about the genre at first, but Eddie managed to take everything great about heavy music and make it sound like one of the world’s biggest parties whenever he made one of his records.
But that’s only because he never identified as a pure heavy metal band. He certainly loved bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, but he never wanted to be locked into one specific genre whenever he played. There was no way that a pure heavy metal band was going to make a song like ‘Jump’ or ‘Dreams’, but Eddie wanted the freedom to explore everything he could. Still, nothing hit harder for him than locking in with his brother on the right riff whenever they were jamming.
The only problem they usually ran into was the singer of the group. Sammy Hagar was already miles better than David Lee Roth when he joined, but after one too many years, Eddie started finding himself having the same problems trying to get his word in on every single one of their projects. He didn’t want a repeat of ‘Diamond Dave’, but it wasn’t like their first showman knocked it out of the park the first time that he joined.
Before the band members even knew each other, though, Eddie and Alex already hated what Roth stood for in his old band. Nothing was off the table when it came to Roth to put on a show, and while rock and roll was their greatest strength, the idea of turning every one of their concerts into ‘The Roth Variety Hour’ with him twisting swords around wasn’t their idea of a good time. So when he stopped by to jam on the song ‘Crossroads’ with them for the first time, he didn’t exactly pass with the flying hours.
Granted, the Cream rendition of the old blues song is hardly a great first audition for singers. The main draw of Cream in the first place was usually how massive they sounded on the instrumental front, but even when Eddie heard Roth open his mouth for the first time, he figured that he would rather keep looking for a new singer or have a go at the tunes himself than listen to this dirty blonde kid trying to put on his Sammy Davis Jr schtick.
Roth was clearly vying for attention when he played, but in the rehearsal room, Eddie remembered wanting to kick his singer out and even asked Alex to do the dirty work, saying, “I’ll never forget, we asked him to learn a few songs like ‘Crossroads,’ by Cream, and something by Grand Funk Railroad, then come back and see us the next week. And he came back the next week, and it was terrible. He couldn’t sing. So, of course, I put my guitar down and said, Al, I’ll be right back.’ To this day that’s why Roth still has a hair up his butt about Al, because he was the one who told him, ‘Sorry, man. It ain’t working.’ So he kind of hated us from that day and started his own band, Red Ball Jets.”
When you’re a kid trying to drum a following, though, you have to take everything you can get, and since Roth had his own PA system, they weren’t going to spend the rest of their days renting his equipment every show. It would have been cheaper to get him in the band anyway, and even if they had to deal with a few stupid moments every time they went onstage, it was a fair trade-off with a guy who had the same kind of charisma that everyone idolised on the Sunset Strip.
He was born to be a star in every sense of the word, but even if Eddie was content to play his music, he knew that he could wow the audience much better than Roth could any day of the week. It’s hard to ignore someone like Roth if you tried, but the best Van Halen songs ever created are usually the ones where they shut the hell up and let Eddie make his guitar do the talking for him.
