Originally Posted by
Terry
Seems a bit odd that the source wouldn't go on record as to who they were. Perhaps the person had signed a confidentiality agreement back then, and is possibly concerned about a potential libel lawsuit?
Even if the person was in a position to have a firsthand perspective on some or all of the Van Halen related events from the 1985 breakup to the ADKOT album - a not insubstantial span of time - a lot of those happenings took place 20 + years ago. The passage of that amount of time can potentially alter perspectives, sometimes making events clearer in hindsight, other times casting a shadow of vagueness over happenings long gone.
I couldn't say Roth would have been amiss to believe that maybe the Van Halens wouldn't be able to get their act together when he left the band in 1985. I never got the sense from what Roth said publicly during that period that he hoped they wouldn't, and [Roth] wouldn't have been the only person to think that Van Halen wasn't necessarily going to have the level of commercial success they did when he left. Then again, I never got the sense that Dave wanted to leave Van Halen in 1985, but for a variety of reasons the band just wasn't able to function anymore.
I hadn't heard about Dave turning down the 2004 tour before, but it would make sense that touring must have been a consideration in light of the rehearsals and recordings Dave made with the band in...was it 2001? I think it was 2001 that Dave got back with the band again and they worked up some new material. I may be wrong about the year...was it 2000? I used to have better command of the narrative in terms of having the dates committed to memory. Anyway, whenever it was, I'd be sort of interested in hearing about that attempt at reuniting. Mostly because what little info has surfaced has been just a few brief and vague utterances, as opposed to the 1996 thing which was more fleshed out re: behind the scenes in comparison. There again, though, I hadn't heard about the Mitch Malloy 1996 thing until a decade or so after it happened.
It seems to me that Dave was cautious enough in 2007 to make sure that Ed was in a condition to play reasonably well. Cautious enough to agree delaying the tour until Ed sobered up. I can't say if Ed's 2007 rehab was spearheaded by Roth insisting Ed sober up, or Ed wanting to sober up, or Ed's son urging Ed to sober up, or maybe Azoff getting pressure from promoters to demonstrate that Ed had sobered up before the tour would be booked. Or the combination of all those factors. It wouldn't be unreasonable to conclude that since Dave was upping his game in 2007 in terms of preparation and rehearsal he would want to be assured that Ed was doing the same. Sure, Dave wanted a reunion, but I'd imagine he wouldn't want to willingly go into a reunion if Ed was a mess. I don't think Hagar particularly wanted to front a reunion with Ed in an underperforming condition, either. The difference was that by his own admission Hagar saw all the warning signs and went ahead anyway. Maybe Dave saw some of those same warning signs in 2000/2001, realized that the entire band wouldn't be firing on all cylinders and made the call that it would be better not to have a reunion at all if it wasn't going to live up to expectations.
Who knows? With so much of what the band undertook from 2000 onward, it was done with a comparatively minimal amount of public disclosure from the band themselves in terms of updating the fanbase as to what was happening. Mike Anthony hasn't said much about 2000-2004 in interviews, which overall is fine with me. Partly because what what one was able to glimpse and learn about those years was saddening to hear, Hagar's book being a case in point. Yeah, in a car crash rubbernecking way Hagar's stories about Ed's behavior were of interest, but ultimately it was pretty sad to see Ed going down the tubes like that.
Which is kind of my overall take on the insider accounts of Van Halen that have surfaced over the years, in that there is this juxtaposition between how listening to the music made me feel vs. the backstage accounts of how the music was made. It reminds me of the metaphor of the little boy who runs off to join the circus, in that it's one thing to sit in the audience and marvel at the spectacle and an eye-opener when you get a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes, elephant shit and all. As a teen in the 1980s, I had an understandably naive view about how rock bands interacted. The image is that of a group of guys unified and united in harmony to make great music, so I figured it just must be that way with the members of a band all the time. That probably was never the case even with bands that stayed together for decades like, say, Rush: that band had periods of creative tension between Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson over the amount of keyboards used on their albums in the mid to late 1980s. And those were two guys who seemingly enjoyed one another's company far more than Dave and Eddie did. Then you throw in drugs, alcohol, egos, wrangling over publishing rights, commercial pressures, lifestyle differences, disagreements over image...kind of more surprising to me that the Roth-fronted Van Halen lasted as long as they did than them breaking up in 1985.