“Weren’t acceptable”: The Van Halen member their producer wanted to replace
There are moments in music that a lot of people often find themselves jealous that they missed out on. For many, one of these intrinsic moments is the first time Van Halen ever played together. They weren’t just a new band; they were a complicated amalgamation of musical excellence that, when pieced together right, would contribute towards changing music for the better.
The biggest standout in Van Halen’s sound was unquestionably Eddie Van Halen’s exciting guitar playing ability. The tapping technique he used would become popularised by lovers of rock worldwide, but he was one of the very first to champion it. It wasn’t just this style of playing that was great, though; it was the fact that he could utilise it while still keeping melody at the heart of everything he did. Van Halen’s songs didn’t sound messy; they sounded as beautiful as any other rock numbers out there, but they used this unique style of playing, which people weren’t used to.
Ted Templeman, the band’s original producer, knew that the band were onto something special. “I had a great band with an incredible guitar player,” he said when talking about how excited he was to be working with Van Halen. However, his excitement didn’t come without hints of trepidation, as he wasn’t sure Van Halen had the best choice of lead singer.
Dave Lee Roth was working with the band, and while he had undeniable qualities as a lead and as a frontman, Templeman wasn’t sure he could sing well enough. There were too many cracks in his voice that Templeman believed would likely contribute to problems with the record.
“Some of his vocal performances, to be frank, just weren’t acceptable,” he said, “To be sure, he was distinctive as a singer; his train-whistle screams were identifiable in a good way. But every time I heard him get pitchy or completely miss a note, I worried that the public was going to be turned off by his band because of his limitations.”
Years later, when Lee Roth left Van Halen because of creative differences and friction, he was replaced with Sammy Hagar, but Templeman wanted to do that before they had even finished recording the first album. Templeman had worked with Hagar already and knew how powerful a singer he was, so he thought he would be perfect for Van Halen.
While Templeman might have originally thought like this, his mind changed when he got to know Lee Roth a bit more. As he said, while he might have been pitchy at times, there was a distinctive sound to his voice that other singers would kill for. Equally, he was a natural-born entertainer and had an intelligence that allowed him to write some of the most dynamic lyrics in rock.
“When we took breaks I’d talk at length with him. That’s when I came to appreciate his astounding intellect; he’d quote a line from Tom Sawyer and then a comic book. I still don’t know anybody who can keep those kinds of stream-of-consciousness raps going like he can,” wrote Templeman, “Captain Beefheart used to try to do that; all the guys around Frank Zappa thought they could do that. But Dave naturally is that way. His intelligence came through in his writing, too.”
Templeman continued, “He also had a tremendous sense of humour and dead-on comic timing. I thought that aspect of his personality, in particular, made for something unique within the heavy metal realm. Most bands of that genre were so strident and serious to the point of cliché. Dave had a unique way of laughing through the daily events of life that was infectious.”
