Fierce alchemy
Despite their differences, Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth made magical music
Nothing about Eddie Van Halen made sense. A heavy metal guitarist whose main influence was the far more sedate Eric Clapton.
A chart- topping virtuoso who didn’t enjoy listening to music, even in his car (“I prefer the sound of the motor,” he once said).
Classically trained but couldn’t read music. Made two albums that were RIAA diamond- certified after selling more than 10 million copies, with neither topping the charts.
And when you think of his band Van Halen, the person who comes to mind might not be one of the Van Halen brothers who founded it. It might be David Lee Roth.
Eddie died on Tuesday after a long battle of throat cancer, and while fans will trade odes to his mind- boggling riffs, they’ll also swap tales of his relationship with Roth. Like Paul Mccartney and John Lennon, Noel and Liam Gallagher, Joey and Johnny Ramone and ( for a time) Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, the tension between the two stars led to both personal disputes and iconic music.
They met when Eddie and his brother Alex, both born in the Netherlands but raised in Pasadena, Calif., were auditioning singers for their band in 1972.
“We were crosstown adversaries, and we hated each other with a vengeance,” Roth said on the podcast WTF with Marc Maron in 2019. “My material was simpler like Johnny B. Goode or simpler Stones songs but really colourful. The Van Halens had craft. Man, did they have artisanal supersmall-batch-scotch craft.”
The brothers did not like Roth all that much, but they liked the sound system he owned — so they invited him to join the band. And, as it turns out, they were a perfect match. A yin and yang. Roth had personality. Eddie had genius.
For a while, it worked, even if it didn’t.
“There were always creative differences,” Roth told Maron. “We never got along. It was a beautiful, beautiful pairing of — you’ve seen cowboy movies where the guys are always sabotaging each other, but they’re working to somehow accomplish something, and I think you’ll see that in a lot of popular bands.”
Much of the difference came down to personality. By all accounts, Eddie cared about making music while Roth cared about being in a band.
“I’ve always been the quiet one in the band — the rest of the guys make up for me,” Eddie told People in 1981. The gregarious Roth did more than his share to “make up for” Eddie. He became the face of Van Halen and enjoyed the hedonistic options available to the lead singer of one of the world’s most famous rock groups. Eddie, meanwhile, said he would retire to his room to spend the night consuming copious amounts of alcohol and cocaine while writing songs until morning. (He became sober in 2008.)
Eventually, Van Halen wasn’t big enough for both of them. Their relationship was fraying by 1983, when Eddie wrote the synth- driven Jump, which would top the Billboard charts and remains a sporting arena favourite to this day. When Eddie presented it to Roth, though, the singer was appalled.
“When I first played Jump for the band, nobody wanted to have anything to do with it. Dave said that I was a guitar hero and I shouldn’t be playing keyboards,” Eddie told Guitar World. “My response was if I want to play a tuba or Bavarian cheese whistle, I will do it.”
That song appeared on 1984, their last record together before Roth ventured out on a solo career and Sammy Hagar replaced him in Van Halen — for a while.
Years later, Roth still seemed to be in Eddie’s corner, despite their differences. When Howard Stern called the guitarist’s personality “dull” in 1996, Roth quickly jumped in: “No, no, no. This is a world of specialization, and what he specializes in, he’s the best at, period.”
At the time, they were flirting with a reunion. It wasn’t until 2007 that Roth rejoined the band, but his relationship with Eddie didn’t seem to have improved. But what seemed to matter most to Eddie — what always seemed to matter most — was the music.
“I think it’s now built into people’s DNA, that it just won’t be Van Halen if it’s not Roth’s voice,” he told writer Chuck Klosterman in 2015. “You make music for people. Otherwise, just play in your closet. And how do you reach the most people? By giving them the band that they know. To do it any other way would be selfish.”
tension between the two stars led to both personal disputes and iconic music.