Van Halen singer David Lee Roth did an initial tryout with Eddie and Alex Van Halen, but it didn’t pan out. After a second attempt, however, the band would go on to hire him and eventually become one of the biggest rock bands in the world.
In a recent interview with Ariel Levy, Alex Van Halen talked about why the band ultimately ended up hiring Roth. “It was no mystery to me, and I had to do some arm twisting with Ed,” Alex said. “But the way Ed and I made decisions is that if one of us wanted to do it and the other one didn’t, then we wouldn’t do it. If both of us were in agreement, then we would do it. For no other reason than just to be equitable in how we approached what we did.”
“Like I said, everybody was leaving town, and the people who were serious about music were very few left. Ed and I went to Dave’s house to try it one more time.”
What tipped the job in Roth’s favor wasn’t his charisma or rock star looks. It was his PA system.
“We’d been gigging, and we were paying a lot of money to (use his) PA, and it just didn’t make any sense to me. ‘Ed, why do we pay him 20 bucks a night for PA? If he’s in the band, we can save 20 bucks.’ You gotta combine everything, man. You gotta make things work, stretch.”
“So we went to this house,” Alex continued. “And we, long story short, we drank a few shots of this, that, and he was very entertaining and very articulate and very convincing in that he should be in the band. And so at the end of the night, Ed and I are going all over all the things that our dad has said, and we said, ‘Yes,’ just like that, ‘You’re in.'”
