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Van Halen minus Roth and Hagar?
You can tell a lot about a rock star by the way he serves drinks to his fans, and that is especially true of rock’s strange bedfellows of the moment, David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar. The rival voices of Van Halen are touring as an uneasy alliance, and their approaches to music and life are as different as a high- priced strip club and a beach bar where the regulars get a free shot.
Roth’s set is a fast, tight race through the Van Halen hits, presented with his gyrating martial arts kicks and raunchy films looping on a rear screen.
Sweating, bare-chested and wearing skintight cerulean pants, Roth is a rock star always at a distance from the fans _ except when he feigns a mock attack with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and empties the whiskey on two shocked young men in the front row. Shivering, the pair appear uncertain whether they have been christened or humiliated.
The booze in Hagar’s set, on the other hand, is served with a smile. Two bleachers at the rear of the stage are filled with fans who are served margaritas throughout the show. Hagar performs barefoot, chats betweens songs and projects a “man of the people” ethos. While Roth leaves the stage nearly naked, Hagar trudges off weighted down with clothes tossed by fans — a ball cap, a hockey jersey, beads and an American flag that he wraps around himself like a sarong.
The mercurial Roth chuckles at the idea of the tour as a tale of two bars and offers another thought: “If you want to split a bottle with a friend, then Sammy is your guy. But if you want to split your friend with a bottle, then call me.”
No one would be surprised if this tour also ends in broken glass and bruises, but at the UMB Bank Pavilion outside St. Louis, it was only a mildly grumpy affair with no injuries.
The Roth-Hagar tour seems a match made in purgatory. The two have little in common, either personally or musically, other than a grudge against their former bandmate, Eddie Van Halen, for exiling them from the group. For the guitarist, whose band is now in limbo, the Roth-Hagar teaming must be as endearing as an ex- wives club.
“Those guys are sitting there without a record deal and Dave and I out on tour,” Hagar says. “It’s crazy. Ridiculous.”
Roth offers a different description: “The way I make decisions is based on what makes good drinking stories. This is compelling, not competitive. There’s no real rivalry here.”
Rivalry or not, the two can seem like bickering castaways sharing a career raft, each hoping against hope that the good ship Van Halen returns to pick him up. “Where the hell is Dave?” The usually personable Hagar, guitar in hand, is fuming and prowling the backstage corridors in search of Roth.
Hagar wants to do a joint interview and photo session for LAT, but after a long delay, word comes back that Roth won’t emerge from his tour bus. Hagar groans, offers a few choice descriptions of Roth’s personality, then shrugs and plops down on a couch.
“Ah, who needs him?”
At the moment, Hagar and Roth do appear to need each other, if either wants a spotlight remotely as intense as that of their Van Halen days.
The pair have received the most press attention either has enjoyed in years, and the tour has been a strong seller. Reviewers have been generally kind, and their critiques have steadily grown more favorable as the tour has picked up some polish.
Each singer does a 90-minute set with his own band, alternating the closing spot each night. Don’t expect these disparate performers to perform a duet: They have yet to appear on stage together at any show, they travel separately and, if the St. Louis stop is any indication, they never set eyes on each other backstage.
Hagar estimates that he has been in the same room with Roth only four or five times ever, just a few hours’ worth of shared time for singers whose names and fortunes have been linked for years.
Roth’s history with Van Halen began in 1973, when he auditioned for a young Pasadena, Calif., band called Mammoth that featured brothers Eddie and Alex Van Halen on guitar and drums, respectively. Bassist Michael Anthony joined a year later and by the end of the decade Van Halen was a monster success. Eddie’s guitar style changed the template of heavy metal for a generation; Roth’s playful raunch and jungle cat athleticism made him an ideal frontman; and singles such as Runnin’ With the Devil, And the Cradle Will Rock and the No. 1 hit Jump became defining songs.
By the mid-1980s, though, the band’s relationship soured and Roth was out, replaced by Hagar, an arena-rock veteran as a solo performer and with the band Montrose. Many doubted the move, but the first Hagar-era release, 5150, was a hugely successful album, and the music moved to a new place. The Roth lyrical irony was replaced with heartfelt Hagar in singles such as Dreams, Why Can’t This Be Love and Right Now, and the Van Halen fans stayed on while Roth’s solo career floundered.
“I think that really hurt Dave,” Hagar says. “It made him angry. It made him dislike me. When his career wasn’t doing so good — and I’m not dissing him here, that’s a fact — and, well, if I was him I would have been the same way. If Gary Cherone came in and sold 7 million copies with his first Van Halen album, yeah, I would have been mad, too.”
Roth did rejoin Van Halen in 1996, but it was a disaster, culminating in Hagar’s departure (whether he was fired or quit depends on who you ask) and Roth’s second exit from the band.
Cherone was the singer who replaced Hagar, but only long enough to record one album, 1998’s Van Halen III, by far the worst seller of the band’s 13 releases. Cherone was canned and the Van Halen brand name has been on hold ever since. Eddie Van Halen had a bout with cancer but has now been given a clean bill of health, and the band split with its longtime label, Warner Bros., last year.
Hagar and Roth both have sought to get Van Halen back on the road, but other than Anthony’s pitching in as an infrequent guest on this tour, the reunion looks no closer to reality. “I don’t know what’s going on with them,” Hagar says. “I don’t know if they have the heart for it anymore.”
Eddie Van Halen could not be reached for comment, but he has said in recent months that he has a vast storehouse of new material in various stages of completion. Scotty Ross, the band’s tour manager, says he has spent four years waiting for the brothers. “I talk to them all the time; they’re doing good,” Ross says. “They just can’t figure out what they’re doing. They just can’t decide what to do next.”
Could their next incarnation include Roth or Hagar?
“Never say never,” Ross says. —Dawn/Los Angeles Times
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