The singer Eddie Van Halen said lied through his teeth: “That’s him painting a picture”
No one on this Earth can properly put into words what it’s like listening to Eddie Van Halen for the first time.
There are countless artists who have tried to copy his tapping style, but the melodies that he would create whenever he played were the kind of thing that Eddie was blessed with from the moment he started putting together ‘Eruption’. It took a lot of hard work for him to get to that point, but that didn’t come without a few people trying to make a mockery out of his style over the years.
Then again, not every one of Van Halen’s enemies was necessarily someone that he knew. It drove him up the wall to see a bunch of kids trying to do the same thing that he did every single time they made a new record, but even if you could understand it when every hair metal guitarist started their own tapping licks, it’s another matter entirely when he saw his heroes like Rick Derringer blatantly ripping him off.
But if there was one sparring partner that he always walked on eggshells around, it was David Lee Roth. Despite the guitarist’s name literally being on every single banner before they played, ‘Diamond Dave’ seemed to be everything that the band wasn’t. They didn’t want to be a teenybopper band and certainly didn’t want to be a showbiz type of act, and yet whenever Roth got up onstage, he seemed like a cartoon character compared to everyone else playing their hearts out.
So, really, getting Sammy Hagar should have been the best thing that ever happened to them. You couldn’t have found a more easygoing guy in rock and roll at the time, and even though his style was drastically different from Roth’s, it gave them a whole lot more range when they started working on new music. But even with the love affair brewing pretty early, it only took a few albums before they ran into the same old problems.
‘The Red Rocker’ may have been blindsided when he found out he’d been asked to leave the group, but even when they put their differences aside, the frontman was shellshocked to see the state Eddie was in. In his book Red, Hagar recalls the guitar genius being a shadow of what he once was, but for all of the horror stories in the book, Eddie insisted that Hagar was only blowing smoke during those days.
Sure, the band might not have been getting along famously, but Eddie thought his old bandmate was blowing things out of proportion to hurt him, saying, “I was an alcoholic, and I needed alcohol to function. I guess it didn’t affect my work, either. Around 2004, I suppose I became a very angry drunk. But [the stuff in Hagar’s book] was definitely embellished. That’s him painting a picture of something that never happened.”
While there are a few pieces of footage that show Eddie not in the best shape, the idea of him walking around like a zombie throughout the entire tour was far from the truth. His son, Wolfie, doesn’t shy away from the gory details of what happened, but to his credit, he was able to help his old man get back up on his feet half the time, even if it meant bringing back Roth to work on A Different Kind of Truth later down the line.
So while Hagar might have his own version of events, the fact that he publicly apologised for airing out his grievances might be the closest thing to an admission that we are going to get. There were still a lot of raw wounds around that time, but it’s clear that Wolfie and Hagar are only going to want to remember the good times from the musician that never failed to make everyone smile back in the day.
