“He kept asking Eddie to play fewer solos”

In his new memoir, ‘Brothers’, Alex Van Halen revealed, among other things, that the singer David Lee Roth he had asked his brother, the guitarist Eddie Van Halen failed in October 2020, to play fewer guitar solos. According to the former drummer of Van Halen this would be the basis of Roth’s abandonment of the group in 1985. It was the trigger that pushed him to leave the band, nothing other than jealousy for the fact that Eddie was always in the spotlight, at the center of the ‘Attention.

This is the thought reported by

Alex Van Halen in his volume: “He couldn’t stand the fact that Eddie was getting more attention than him. He kept asking Eddie to play fewer guitar solos. Dave was convinced he was going to be a movie star.”

Also in the book, Alex describes the abandonment of David Lee Roth come on Van Halen as “the most disappointing thing I have ever experienced in my life, something that seemed like a great waste as well as unfair. Until I lost my brother.”

‘Brothers’ tells of the career of Van Halen until the exit of David Lee Roth by the band leaving aside the years from 1985 to 1996 when he was behind the microphone Sammy Hagar. Speaking to Billboard Alex Van Halen This is how he explained his decision to write only about the original lineup of Van Halen. “What happened after Dave left isn’t about the band itself. I’m not saying it was better or worse. (…) But the magic was in the early years, when we didn’t know what we were doing, when we were willing to try anything.”

Further on the split from Roth, Alex said: “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 seemed really strange to me, but it’s not my job to figure that out.” The drummer, however, has no resentment towards the singer. “He was one of the three main members of the band. We didn’t admit it at the time because we were constantly fighting.”