Alex Van Halen Says David Lee Roth Refused to Pay Tribute to Eddie Van Halen On Nixed Tour

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THERE WAS A MOMENT WHEN it seemed like Van Halen, the band, might survive the death of its guitarist. Rumors of a planned post-Eddie tour, with Alex back on drums behind frontman David Lee Roth, were true. Shortly before the shooting-range incident, Alex and Roth began early rehearsals for that tour, with two musicians from the singer’s solo band serving as “seat fillers.” The idea was to eventually bring in Joe Satriani on guitar, and maybe even original bassist Michael Anthony, who hadn’t played with Van Halen since 2004, after which Alex and Eddie replaced him with Eddie’s then-teenage son, Wolfgang Van Halen. But in those early rehearsals, Alex started feeling numbness, peripheral neuropathy, especially in his feet. He wondered if it was an “omen from above,” a warning not to do the tour.

The plans ended up collapsing anyway, even before his vertebrae did. After several phone conversations with Queen’s Brian May about how that band carries on without Freddie Mercury, Alex came away with ideas about how to proceed. “The thing that broke the camel’s back, and I can be honest about this now,” Alex says, “was I said, ‘Dave, at some point, we have to have a very overt — not a bowing — but an acknowledgment of Ed in the gig. If you look at how Queen does it, they show old footage.’ And the moment I said we gotta acknowledge Ed, Dave frickin’ popped a fuse.… The vitriol that came out was unbelievable.”

As Alex tells it, Roth simply refused to pay tribute to his brother, found the very idea offensive, for reasons he can’t comprehend. Alex was … displeased. “I’m from the street,” he says. “‘You talk to me like that, motherfricker, I’m gonna beat your fricking brains out. You got it?’ And I mean that. And that’s how it ended.” Alex remains baffled. “It’s just, my God. It’s like I didn’t know him anymore. I have nothing but the utmost respect for his work ethic and all that. But, Dave, you gotta work as a community, motherfricker. It’s not you alone anymore.” (Roth declined to comment.)

Alex has few regrets about the aborted tour, which he would have been physically unable to do, anyway. “It’s too bad on one hand, but it’s fine on the other,” he says. “Because now, in retrospect, playing the old songs is not really paying tribute to anybody. That’s just like a jukebox, in my opinion.… To find a replacement for Ed? It’s just not the same.” Van Halen’s second singer, Sammy Hagar, recently went on tour with Satriani and Anthony, playing those old songs. Alex won’t even utter Hagar’s name. “The heart and the soul and the creativity and the magic was Dave, Ed, Mike, and me,” he says. He’s at least as cutting in his book: “We had a lot of other singers over the years,” he writes, in his only acknowledgment of the Van Hagar era.

Truth is, Alex got along with David Lee Roth better than anyone else in the band ever did. After Eddie’s death, Alex’s first call was to Roth, and even after that rehearsal blowup, they’re still in touch. Roth recently fired some shots at Wolfgang, Alex’s nephew, calling him “this fricking kid,” but Alex laughs that off. “To me, it’s a sign of respect,” he says, “that he actually thinks that Wolfie’s on the same level as the old master Dave, right? The other thing is that Wolf can easily take care of himself. It’s not a problem.”

He’s well aware Eddie took a major step toward the destruction of the band in 1982 when he agreed to play the guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” which, in turn, led Roth to pursue his own solo ventures. Alex believed creativity was finite, and that they owed all of it to their own band. He told Eddie not to do it — if anything, he would have preferred to have Jackson guest on a Van Halen album. His brother went to the studio anyway, unleashing every fretboard-scorching trick he knew in a solo that became even better known than anything he’d played with the band. Two years later, Thriller blocked Van Halen’s 1984 from the top of the charts.

The brothers argued about Eddie’s musical infidelity for years, and truth be told, Alex is still furious 42 years later. “Why would you lend your talents to Michael Jackson? I just don’t fricking get it,” he says. “And the funny part was that Ed fibbed his way out of it by saying, ‘Oh, who knows that kid anyway?’ You made the mistake! Fess up. Don’t add insult to injury by acting stupid.”

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