When Geddy Lee banned Van Halen from a show over a spilt beer
You don’t have to look very far to find positive stories about Eddie Van Halen. The innovative guitar player turned heads with his shredding style, unique tone, and ability to write riffs that were equal parts melodic and upbeat. When you look for comments about the guitarist, the majority of people highlight the positive aspects of his playing.
Tony Iommi once spoke about Van Halen, recalling how shocked he was when they took the band on tour and he heard Eddie play the guitar for the first time. “Eddie was playing things I’d never seen before,” he said, “We’re still friends, and we became friends then. Of course, he set off a whole new load of players playing like that, and now I can’t believe some of them. I can’t follow it. I certainly couldn’t do it.”
While general positivity surrounds the guitar player, there was always a bit of tension between Van Halen and Rush. Geddy Lee was never a big fan of Eddie, and it all stemmed back to a gig the two were doing in the same city.
“We gonna go back in time now – back a year’s time to Leicester, England,” said David Lee Roth, recalling the incident, “We’d just finished playing; great show, everybody’s very up, it was Michael [Anthony’s] birthday, and we’d come back to the bar, and Rush was staying at the same hotel.”
Van Halen wasn’t aware that Rush was also staying at the same hotel, and that’s where the tension started: “They’d rented the bar with all the booze in it. And our guys didn’t know that, and they came in and said, ‘What, free booze?! Whoa!!’ And they cleaned the place out, which put their guys on edge a little bit.”
The real friction came when Rush returned to the bar. While they were happy to share the alcohol with the band, when Geddy Lee started showing some Rush tapes to Eddie, in his drunken state, he ended up ruining the records. “Geddy was playing some Rush tapes on a tape-recorded. He said something to Ed, and Ed’s beer got into the tape-recorder… Well, that caused a little friction.”
While the Van Halen boys believed that mistakes are made, Lee never got over the stolen alcohol and destroyed tape recorder. The band found out about this the next time they met in Las Vegas and realised that Rush had banned all of them, including the road crew, from attending their party after the show.
“Rush is playing before Van Halen in Las Vegas, and word goes out that nobody from Van Halen is allowed into the show at all. Nobody. No road crew, nobody,” said Roth. Lee tried to find Eddie after the show to clear the air, and when approaching, the guitarist ended up getting rugby tackled by one of his bodyguards. There was ongoing tension between the two bands ever since, and it all started with a spilt beer.
