David Lee Roth told Eddie Van Halen to play fewer solos, Alex Van Halen claims
Alex Van Halen claims Van Halen singer David Lee Roth once asked Eddie Van Halen to play fewer guitar solos.
The drummer, who co-founded Van Halen with Eddie in 1972, makes the claim in his new memoir Brothers.
“He [Roth] couldn’t handle the fact that Eddie was getting more attention than he was,” Alex writes, per Ultimate Classic Rock. “He kept asking Eddie to play fewer guitar solos. Dave was convinced he was going to be a movie star.”
READ MORE: Alex Van Halen says he’s reached out to OpenAI to analyse “the patterns of how Edward would have played something” in hopes of generating new Eddie Van Halen riffs and solos
The statement is one of numerous bombshell revelations Alex has made both in his book, which came out on 22 October via HarperCollins, and during interviews to promote it.
In a recent conversation with Rolling Stone, the drummer said that he asked Queen’s Brian May for advice on how to keep Van Halen going after Eddie died of complications from throat cancer in 2020, aged 65. However, Roth put paid to any reunion plans, allegedly due to him not wanting to pay overt tribute to Eddie during shows.
“The thing that broke the camel’s back, and I can be honest about this now,” Alex remembered, “was I said, ‘Dave, at some point, we have to have a very overt – not a bowing – but an acknowledgement 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 fuckin’ popped a fuse… The vitriol that came out was unbelievable.”
During the same Rolling Stone interview, the drummer also revealed that both Ozzy Osbourne and Chris Cornell were in contention to join Van Halen at certain points. Ozzy confirmed that he was in the running in the early 2000s via an email to the magazine.
“Yes, we were discussing it,” he said. “It is something that if it had come to fruition, would have been phenomenal.”
Ozzy added: “Eddie and Alex were great friends of mine for a very long time and it’s a regret of mine that we never got it together. The Osbournes [the MTV reality series starring Ozzy’s family] got in the way of creating new music at that time, unfortunately.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
