The one musician Eddie Van Halen didn’t want to talk to: “Different than who he is”
Being a member of a band like Van Halen wasn’t usually as easy as it looked.
As much as people would have let Eddie Van Halen fly off the hinges and play to his heart’s content every single time he performed, there was a lot of baggage that came with turning a few of his riffs into something iconic when they entered the studio. Every single record was meant to be a collaboration of some sort, but there were more than a few times when Eddie felt that he had reached the end of his rope with every member of his band after a while.
But you can’t really blame Eddie for wanting David Lee Roth out of the band when they decided to split in the 1980s. ‘Diamond Dave’ was all about being a rock and roll star when they got started, and since Eddie was more interested in the music, it made a lot more sense for him to carry on with Sammy Hagar than worry about trying to win over the crowd by waving around swords and doing insane dance moves.
Losing Roth did have its fair share of drawbacks as well, but it’s not like their frontman was some off-the-wall party animal all of the time. He was gung-ho about giving the audience a good time, and had he not been able to flesh out the band’s material every time they played, they probably wouldn’t have reached the same peaks that they did when they eventually started making tunes like ‘Jump’.
Then again, Hagar was bound to have his fair share of problems when he came in as well. He fed off of Eddie in a much more natural way than Roth ever did, but after spending time on Balance, the guitarist figured it was time to cut ‘The Red Rocker’ loose. They had reached the end of their time together in a sense, but if Gary Cherone taught the band anything, it was that they shouldn’t have taken their bandmates for granted.
Cherone did what he was told on Van Halen III, but it wasn’t like the rest of the world was ready for a band that sounded like that. Eddie needed to regroup, and while a reunion with Hagar went over horribly, the idea of burying the hatchet with Roth seemed like the next best thing. Eddie was more than happy to put the past behind him and carry on with his son Wolfie, taking over for Michael Anthony, but it’s not like all of those guys were willing to kiss and make up when they got together for press conferences.
Despite Roth being ultra-jazzed about the idea of getting the band back together, Eddie felt that there was no reason for him to claim that he and Roth were close, saying, “He does not want to be my friend. How can I put this: Roth’s perception of himself is different than who he is in reality. We’re not in our 20s anymore. We’re in our 60s. Act like you’re 60. I stopped coloring my hair, because I know I’m not going to be young again.”
And you can definitely hear some of that dysfunction throughout certain parts of A Different Kind of Truth. The record is far from a terrible project or anything, but it was almost entirely made up of spare riffs from their early days. The biggest problem is hearing Roth trying and failing to sound the same way that he did in the 1980s and coming out sounding more than a little bit squawky on those high notes.
Everything may have been strictly business whenever Eddie got onstage, but it’s not like he was ungrateful for Roth at that point in his career. Here was the singer who had been by his side as they were becoming superstars, and he never wanted to take those accolades for granted whenever they crisscrossed the world one last time.
