Alex Van Halen has been in rock headlines lately as he promotes his new book, “Brothers,” which came out on Tuesday. Earlier this week, he shared that he didn’t think former singer Sammy Hagar was doing the band justice with his “Best Of All Worlds” tour. He also told Rolling Stone: “The heart and the soul and the creativity and the magic was Dave, Ed, Mike and me.”
In his book, Alex shared the circumstances surrounding original singer David Lee Roth’s highly publicized departure from the group in 1985. Alex writes that Roth asked Eddie Van Halen to play fewer solos in the period just prior to his departure and that the singer “couldn’t handle” Eddie Van Halen’s growing popularity.
“He couldn’t handle the fact that Eddie was getting more attention than he was,” Alex wrote. “He kept asking Eddie to play fewer guitar solos. Dave was convinced he was going to be a movie star.”
Still, despite the split, Alex recently told Billboard that he holds no ill will for the band’s original singer. “He was one of the three main components of the band,” Alex said. “At the time we didn’t recognize it because we were constantly battling things out. That’s why I mentioned (in the book) that the first person I called when Ed died was Dave because I felt like I owed him that, to the work we had done together and the fact that our families knew each other and the fact that everybody was sort of on the same level, if you will, when we first started.”
“I don’t know where things went wrong…I have nothing but the utmost respect for Dave and his work ethic. I just think some of his choices were really strange to me, but that’s not my job to figure it out.”
