The one album that completely “fractured” Van Halen
It’s never easy trying to wrangle in a band like Van Halen for anything.
In their prime, they lived to play the best music that they could and not worry about what anyone else had to say, but once they turned their weapons on each other, things were bound to get messy. And while the seeds were planted for when David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar left the fold, there were definitely moments on their records where you could feel those breaks happening in real time.
Then again, the biggest difference between band members tended to come between Eddie and Roth half the time. He didn’t even want him in the group when they first started, but since they were borrowing his PA every single time they performed live, it was probably a better financial decision to get him in the band than having to fork over a fraction of their gig revenue. But it’s not like Eddie didn’t have legitimate concerns.
Roth was far from the best vocalist in the world, but when looking at the way he conducted himself onstage, there was no greater frontman to compete with him. He had all the chops of a retro Vegas entertainer with the same swagger of Robert Plant, and even if that didn’t lead to the most complicated performances, it certainly left the audiences wanting to come back for more.
But when Roth started to overstep his bounds, things were bound to get really ugly. Because the last thing anyone should tell Eddie is to tone down whatever he’s doing. He was the definition of a musical genius, and even if the keyboards were an outlandish idea when they first started using them on Women and Children First, was anyone going to say with a straight face that ‘And the Cradle Will Rock’ was one of their lesser songs?
Absolutely not, but Roth did know when the lines were getting crossed, and 1984 was when Eddie had no time for his antics anymore. The guitarist wanted to get things done his way,and while that involved setting up shop in his home studio, it’s not like he was that off the mark when looking at how well the album is balanced. Tunes like ‘Jump’ could stand alongside ‘Hot for Teacher’ and still sound great, but according to Alex Van Halen, there was no sense of them coming back from that record.
He knew that the original version of the band was dead from the minute they walked out of the studio, and even if they had a tour ahead of them, it was time for them to put that iteration to bed, saying, “This band was so fractured, we barely ever played together anymore. And unfortunately, MTV became the predominant way of conveying all this. And Dave being the visible guy naturally opted for more visual stuff. I don’t blame him for any of it, but it’s just too bad [because] we were on the cusp of something really, really big.”
But that shouldn’t discount what they did during the ‘Van Hagar’ years era, either. The band may have been completely different thanks to the new guy, but when looking at the hits that they made with ‘The Red Rocker’, it was much easier for them to flirt with different ideas like ‘Right Now’ and ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ that would have never been able to see the light of day if Roth was still in the group.
Even if the tour prompted Eddie and Roth to stop speaking to each other for years, the fact that they were able to patch things up afterwards in the 2000s felt like a small miracle. The old version of the band had grown far too old to make an answer to 1984 or anything, but they did at least have enough gas left in the tank to remind everyone why they were so important to begin with.
