Rock

The long-standing animus between former Van Halen singer David Lee Roth and band’s late guitar legend Eddie Van Halen was legendary, and apparently permanent. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the band’s retired drummer, Alex Van Halen, revealed that after Eddie’s death in 2020 at 65 due to complications from throat cancer, he approached Roth about a reunion tour that would pay tribute to his younger brother.
Following some rehearsals in 2022, Alex said the project fell apart over what he described as Roth’s refusal to include a segment paying homage to the rocker some consider the greatest guitarist of all time.

Trending on Billboard

“The thing that broke the camel’s back, and I can be honest about this now, 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,” he said of his get-back plans that began to go south when he felt numbness from peripheral neuropathy that he took as an “omen from above” that maybe things were not meant to be.

“If you look at how Queen does it, they show old footage,’” Alex said of that band’s hat-tipping to late singer Freddie Mercury on their recent tours with replacement singer Adam Lambert. “And the moment I said we gotta acknowledge Ed, Dave f–kin’ popped a fuse.… The vitriol that came out was unbelievable.”

Alex, in his first interview since Eddie’s death, said Roth adamantly refused the idea, finding it “offensive,” for reasons he still cannot understand and which raised his ire. “I’m from the street,” he told the magazine. “‘You talk to me like that, motherf–ker, I’m gonna beat your f–king brains out. You got it?’ And I mean that. And that’s how it ended… 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, motherf–ker. It’s not you alone anymore”; RS said Roth declined to comment for the story.

The profile also runs down the other A-list rock icons who were discussed as potential frontmen for the band that has had three lead singers over the years. Founding vocalist Roth held the seat from 1974-1985, then again for a brief time in 1996 and once more from 2007-2020, while Sammy Hagar took over from 1985-1996 during the band’s chart peak, and again from 2003-2005, while Extreme’s Gary Cherone briefly kept the mic warm from 1996-1999 between the other two vocalist’s stints.

Around 2001, following Cherone’s exit and Hagar’s return, the Van Halens had a chat with Ozzy Osbourne and his wife, manager Sharon Osbourne, as they contemplated a plan to have the metal god take over as vocalist. “When you get a dog, you don’t expect it to be a cat,” Alex explained. “When you get an Ozzy, you get Ozzy. Play the music, he’ll sing, and it’s gonna be great.”

But, right before they were slated to get to in the studio, the Osbourne’s began working on their MTV reality show The Osbournes, which scotched the plan; Ozzy confirmed the talks and said if it had come to pass it would have been “phenomenal.”

Van Halen also noted that the brothers jammed with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell at one point — he couldn’t remember when — and when Eddie stepped out of the room for a bit Alex jammed alone with the singer. “Chris was in a very fragile part of his life, so to speak,” he said of the singer who died in 2017 at age 52. “I got behind the drums, and he started playing bass. We played for 45 minutes. This motherf–ker got so into it he started bleeding. I said, ‘This is the man you want.’ And then he died.”

Saying the demise of the original lineup was the “most disappointing thing” he’d experienced in his life until Eddie’s death, Alex said, for him, another brick in the wall of their demise was Eddie’s decision in 1982 to play his infamously spiraling guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” That led to Roth deciding to strike out on his own as a solo act which began what Alex said was a death spiral for the group. After asking his brother not to take the gig — suggesting that Jackson guest on a VH album instead — Eddie did it anyway and in 1984, Jackson’s monumental album Thriller blocked VH’s 1984 album from the No. 1 position on the Billboard 200 album chart.

“Why would you lend your talents to Michael Jackson? I just don’t f–king get it,” Alex told RS about the feud that went on for years. “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.”

Alex Van Halen’s memoir, Brothers, is slated for release on Oct. 22.

Darius Rucker isn’t exactly feeling like a spring chicken after a recent onstage mishap at a Hootie & the Blowfish concert. As captured on video by a fan, the 58-year-old singer/songwriter took a tumble while performing with his band at Riverfront Revival in Charleston, South Carolina, on Saturday. In the middle of singing the opening […]

Robert’s Smith’s songwriting in The Cure has long focused squarely on melancholy and dark themes. But on the band’s long-awaited upcoming album, Songs of a Lost World (Nov. 1), he takes on a bit of real-life heartache that he said inspired him to pay tribute to his late brother. In a nearly two-hour interview with British journalist Matt Everitt — which can be unlocked by flipping to the album’s release date in Roman numerals here — Smith explains the origins of “I Can Never Say Goodbye.”
“I wrote this song a lot of different ways, until I hit on a very simple narrative of what actually happened on the night he died,” he said of the song dedicated to his late older brother, Richard, while also copping to the Cure’s songs always having an edge of the “fear of morality” in them. “It went all around the houses and I went everywhere with this song to sum up how I felt. In the end, it turned into a reasonably bleak little vignette.”

Trending on Billboard

The singer said he struggled to balance the “outpouring” of emotion he felt at the time with the need to write a coherent song, admitting that some earlier versions of the tune were “too overwrought” for general consumption. For the record, he loved them, but other people suggested they night be “too much.” In fact, when Smith, 65, performed “Goodbye” live on the Cure’s 2023 tour, he said he had trouble not going over the top and being overcome by emotion in concert.

Smith continued, “I wrote the song about it, and the music itself was what I wanted to breathe. I didn’t want the words to dominate the song, in a way that the music can become a backdrop to what you’re singing. In this, I think the music is more important than what I’m singing in a way. It’s a very difficult song to sing. People say ‘cathartic’ too much, but it was. It allowed me to deal with it, and I think it’s helped me enormously.”

Realizing he hasn’t got “that many more albums” in his future, Smith said he wanted his new songs to “mean something,” as opposed to some older Cure songs he said were not as personal. “On this album they all matter [to me],” he said of songs such as “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” which finds him singing, “Something wicked this way comes/ To steal away my brother’s life/ Something wicked this way comes/ I could never say goodbye.”

“When you’re younger, you romanticize [death], even without knowing it. Then it starts happening to your immediate family and friends and suddenly it’s a different thing. It’s something that I struggled with lyrically: how to put this into the songs? I feel like I am different person than I was when we last made an album. I wanted that to come through.”

Songs of a Lost World is the Cure’s long-awaited follow-up to 2008’s 4:13 Dream; so far the group has previewed the LP with the songs “A Fragile Thing,” as well as “Alone.”