Wow, I read this story, and didn't realize that Eddie Van Halen lost a 1/3 of his tongue to cancer.
Anyway, I know I blogged about them getting back together a few months ago, but their album is released today. Not sure this reunion is wise, or will be a success.
PASADENA, Calif. — It’s an old joke, but, when David Lee Roth delivers the punch line, it sounds more like a mission statement.
“How many lead singers does it take to put in a light bulb? One. You hold the bulb and wait for the world to revolve around you.”
Missing from the joke is how the singer is left standing there in the dark waiting for his proper wattage.
The world is turning again for Roth. A Different Kind of Truth comes out today, and it will represent the first Van Halen studio album featuring Roth as lead singer since 1984 — which was released 28 years ago.
Roth rejoined the band “five summers and a million years ago” for the 2007-08 reunion tour, but it has taken this long for the still-volatile collective to finish an album that satisfies all of the members’ agendas.
Van Halen’s brawny brand of music has sold more than 80 million albums, but offstage the group has been a fragile alliance that has fallen apart again and again because of creative clashes, drugs, grudges and — more recently — health issues.
“We accused each other of betrayal and thievery and lies and treachery,” Roth, 57, said. “And it was all true. We were all guilty. Dig up the past, and it’s going to get all over everybody. And, man, do we have a past.”
The history traces to 1972, when the Van Halen brothers — guitarist Eddie and drummer Alex, classically trained teen musicians born in the Netherlands but raised in Pasadena — auditioned singers for a band. Roth didn’t make much of an impression at his tryout, but the brothers wanted to use his sound system. To them, letting him in the band was better than renting the gear.
Fame and fortune would follow, but again and again the brothers Van Halen decided who should hold the microphone.
Fans are eager to see the reunited “frenemies” share a spotlight when the reconstituted band — with Eddie’s son, 20-year-old Wolfgang Van Halen, who replaced longtime member Michael Anthony on bass — starts a 46-date arena tour on Feb. 18 in Louisville, Ky. (No Ohio dates are listed.)
The music industry, meanwhile, is watching and wondering whether the wheels will fly off. The worry also centers on the state of Eddie Van Halen, a rehab veteran who has also lost a third of his tongue to cancer and undergone hip replacement.
“He’s doing really well,” Roth said. “He’s lucid; he’s sober; he’s playing.”
(All Van Halen family members, through their representatives, declined to be interviewed for this story.)
During a recent New York show, the band played the vamping, boogie-
propelled She’s the Woman from the new album. The song has considerable history; a version of it was on the demo record that landed Van Halen a deal with Warner Bros. in the 1970s.
The band excavated pieces of unrecorded songs, lyrics from old notebooks and half-pursued concepts to build the 13-track collection.
“It’s material that Eddie and I generated — literally — in 1975, 1976 and 1977,” Roth said.
Fan reaction to the album’s first single, Tattoo, has been mixed.
What drives Roth isn’t easy to glean.
“You’re asking for a lot of introspection here,” Roth said. “Nobody well-adjusted ever got my job, much less kept it this long. There’s some grasping drive, and it precludes self-satisfaction. .?.?. You’re always questioning.”
The Columbus Dispatch
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| David Lee Roth and Van Halen Back: Release first album together since 1984 |
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