“It wasn’t a band anymore”: the tour that made Eddie Van Halen hate David Lee Roth
No one is really questioning who calls the shots in Van Halen. Although every member is responsible for turning them into a hard rock institution, it’s hard to discount what Eddie brought to the table the minute he started laying down those tasty tapping licks on every one of their classic songs. David Lee Roth may have been the group’s main cheerleader throughout their first era together, but it only took one tour for Eddie to realise that he and ‘Diamond Dave’ were never going to go the distance.
It’s not like they were the best of friends from the beginning, either. Looking at how each of their careers shaped up, Eddie and his brother Alex had been playing in their outfit Mammoth while Roth was playing in the band Red Ball Jet. And as Eddie told it, it was much cheaper to get him to join the band in the first place, considering they were renting his PA system every time they played one of their shows.
Then again, Eddie didn’t know what he had on his hands with Roth. Before they got out of the club circuit, Roth was every bit the rock star that he would become, always playing with the crowd and acting like the emcee in one of the greatest parties that the Los Angeles area had ever seen.
But for Roth, it was never about only the music. There had been times when they could hunker down a deliver something stunning on albums like Women and Children First, but once they got to the stadium circuit, Roth knew that it was time to play to the back of the crowd, which normally meant him hamming it up onstage or twirling around a samurai sword when the band could just as easily play another song.
That’s before getting into the wild tangents that Roth wanted to do before, during, and after the show. Outside of the idea of being flown in and mock skydiving into the venue, Roth seemed to treat the stage more like a variety show that happened to feature some of the best musicians he could think of around him.
But at the end of the day, the band’s name belonged to Eddie, and the tour for 1984 became the point where Eddie couldn’t take the sideshow aspect of the show anymore, saying, “Between all our solo segments and Dave’s stage rap, we were never out onstage together for more than ten minutes at a time. It wasn’t a band anymore. I couldn’t have gone on like that, so it was a good thing that Dave quit.”
That said, it’s still impossible to look at footage from around that time and not see them having the time of their lives. Their performance at the US Festival may have gone down in legend for how Roth botched all of the lines of the songs, but even if he was trashed beyond recognition, it didn’t matter, knowing that Eddie could still put together the solo to offset everything.
Going forward, though, the band really needed someone like Sammy Hagar to kick things back into high gear. Roth was essential for the band in the early stages, but once they had a taste for the glorified cartoon character version of the frontman live, it was better to have someone who sounded like they had their head screwed on.
