Watch footage from the final concert of the original Van Halen line-up in 1984
1984 was a major breakthrough year for American hard rockers Van Halen. After a decade of building up their reputation through club gigs and popular albums, the band was now headlining stadiums around the world. Their most recent album, also called 1984, would eventually be certified diamond and become the band’s highest seller. Things couldn’t have been better, at least from a business standpoint.
When it came to camaraderie, Van Halen were in shambles. Their massive success had taken its toll, with rampant drug and alcohol use becoming a frequent staple of their on and offstage lives. The creative partnership between Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth was beginning to sour. Van Halen wanted to push the band in a more serious and contemporary direction, underscored by more synthesisers. Roth wanted guitar-focused party songs like the ones that had made Van Halen famous, plus the occasional nod to vaudeville and barbershop quartets.
Van Halen were still firing on all cylinders as a live unit. Now outfitted with the latest technology that the 1980s could buy, all of the instrumentalists would take solos that heavily featured synthesised instruments. Alex Van Halen had electronic drums, Michael Anthony had bass pedals and sequencers, and Eddie Van Halen had a full array of effects and synthesisers that brought his signature guitar solos to another level.
Even better was the fact that the band had six studio albums worth of material to pull from. While the 1984 tour mostly focused on that album’s songs, classic cuts like ‘Everybody Wants Some!!’, ‘Unchained’ and ‘Runnin’ with the Devil’ were still prominently featured in the band’s setlists. Around those tracks were the new hits like ‘Hot for Teacher’, ‘Panama’ and the band’s only number one song, ‘Jump’.
Setlists didn’t change much on the 1984 tour. The song ‘1984’ always went into ‘Jump’, and most setlists remained static until the band hopped on the Monsters of Rock festival that travelled around Europe. Due to having a more restricted time slot, songs like ‘Jamie’s Cryin’ and ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love’ were dropped from the show.
After the band played their final shows on the Monsters of Rock tour in September of 1984, Van Halen returned to the US with an eye on starting their next album. Roth began recording a solo EP, Crazy From the Heat, but had expected to return to the band after its completion. When creative tensions once again came to the fore, Roth decided to quit Van Halen just a few weeks after the release of Crazy From the Heat in January 1985.
With Roth’s departure, Van Halen began looking for replacement singers. Eddie Van Halen had approached both Scandal’s Patty Smyth and Hall & Oates’ Daryl Hall with offers to join the band, but both declined. While getting work done on his Ferrari, Van Halen’s mechanic offered to put him in touch with another one of his clients: former Montrose singer Sammy Hagar.
Check out footage from the Germany leg of the Monsters of Rock tour, featuring some of the last footage of the original Van Halen line-up.
