What went wrong for Gary Cherone and Van Halen?
When talking about the greatest career resurrections of all time, Van Halen were pretty much indestructible.
Any other band would have been working on filling half-empty clubs for the rest of their lives if they lost a frontman like David Lee Roth, but the minute Sammy Hagar was brought in, everyone realised that they were working with more than a band with a gimmick. Eddie had the potential to make any music he wanted sound good with the right singer, so what happened when ‘The Red Rocker’ decided that he had had enough?
Well, to understand that, you first have to realise that Hagar didn’t really want to leave. Eddie figured that the frustration between him and the frontman on Balance had fractured their relationship, and even if Hagar figured that they had at least one more great record to make, Eddie knew it was best to sever ties before they started looking like musical dinosaurs whenever they came on the radio.
And it’s not like Gary Cherone was that bad of a pick for them to go with. Extreme may not have been at their peak when Eddie chose the vocalist, but Nuno Bettencourt was a guitarist easily on Van Halen’s level, so Cherone’s ability to play off of one of his musical idols would have been a lot easier.
He knew when to add more to every song, and he also knew when to shut the hell up, but when Van Halen III came out, things felt different. This wasn’t the same kind of fun-time group that had put out tracks like ‘Panama’ or even ‘Right Now’. They had a wealth of material to draw from, but no matter how hard they tried to sell the idea of being completely evolved as a group, it was never going to work with Cherone’s voice.
It’s not even his fault, either. Go back and listen to any Extreme song and you’ll hear that he has a great voice, but for whatever reason, the insistence that he had on sounding like a strange amalgamation of Roth’s swagger and Hagar’s show-stopping voice led to him compromising both and sounding ear-grating whenever listening to tunes like ‘Year to the Day’ and ‘Fire in the Hole’.
Eddie took all the criticism with a grain of salt and knew that he had found one of his musical soulmates, but it didn’t take long for things to unravel, either. Cherone remembered complaining about the tension between him and Eddie in the years to follow, and while there were never any harsh bustups like the old days, the fact that the record bombed made the guitar maestro start to rethink what he got himself into.
And after one too many sessions without anything getting done, Cherone remembered Alex Van Halen calling him over and deciding to part ways, saying, “We sat down, me and Alex. He was like, ‘We sense that you’re unhappy and a little bit frustrated.’ I was playing the diplomat. It wasn’t crazy dysfunctional because we all could talk, but there was an unhappiness and they wanted to move in a different direction.”
But while Van Halen were able to get together for a reunion with Hagar for a while, this would lead to one of the scariest periods for Eddie, with him not taking care of himself, continuing to drink while on tour and becoming more and more erratic before finally cleaning up in the late 2000s to go on a tour with Roth and even make one final record, A Different Kind of Truth.
Although the door was firmly closed on Cherone’s involvement with the band, it’s not like he was ever going to harbour any harsh feelings about his time with them. He and Eddie started off as friends and ended as friends, and while we’ll never know what another record of theirs would have sounded like, Cherone can take solace in knowing he was the only singer in the group who never had to leave with a middle finger in the air.
