It hasn't been good times all the time for Van Halen.
They've endured lineup changes, the consequences of a rock 'n' roll lifestyle, and plenty of
health scares.
Here are some of the most tragic moments in Van Halen's history.
While Van Halen was named after brothers Eddie and Alex Van Halen, their breakout star was
colorful lead singer David Lee Roth.
He was always good for a quippy quote, bouncing around on stage, and mugging for the cameras.
But then in 1985, he left the band, a year after the release of their most successful
album, 1984.
"Why'd you leave?"
"Why did I bail?
I'm a workaholic.
I like to travel.
I like to go on the road."
That left the rest of Van Halen scrambling to find a new lead singer to keep the gravy
train rolling.
Several of the band's initial choices turned down the gig, which eventually went to hard
rock solo artist Sammy Hagar.
Patty Smyth of the band Scandal was one of those choices.
She told Delaware's News Journal in 2014,
"They had asked me not to talk about in interviews at the time, because they didn't want Sammy
Hagar to feel like he was the second choice."
Another interesting selection that could've been was the honey-voiced Daryl Hall of blue-eyed
soul duo Hall and Oates.
When Hagar was a guest on Hall's show Live at Daryl's House, he asked Hall about the
rumor that he'd been asked to join his old band, which Hall confirmed.
Not long after the stressful departure of Roth in 1985, Eddie and Alex Van Halen endured
a far more taxing ordeal.
Their father, Jan Van Halen, suffered a heart attack in May 1986, and then died in December
of that year at the age of 66.
In a 1988 profile in Rolling Stone, Eddie indicated that a problem with alcohol contributed
to his father's death.
His passing, as well as the time that Eddie was forced to stay in the hospital for a tropical
fever, made him take a long, hard look at himself.
As he put it,
"That kinda made me look at things a little different, imagining being in there for an
OD or alcohol, like my dad died from.
It kinda wised me up."
Their father's death shook Alex as well, who enjoyed a reputation as the hardest partier
of anyone in the band.
He also quit drinking around 1986, and admitted that he didn't want to end up like The Who's
Keith Moon or Led Zeppelin's John Bonham, two other legendary rock drummers who died
from complications of excessive alcohol consumption.
Bassist Michael Anthony's relationship with Eddie Van Halen started to suffer in the late
90s when the band parted with Sammy Hagar and briefly reunited with David Lee Roth.
Hagar had started a new band called Planet Us and had asked Anthony if he'd like to join.
Van Halen took that to mean that Anthony had quit.
Flash forward to 2004 when Van Halen wanted to tour with Hagar, and they asked Anthony
to get the jilted singer to sign on.
However, if Anthony wanted to be a part of it, he'd have to sign away his legal rights
to Van Halen's band name and take a pay cut.
"It's really irritating to see them go after Mikey.
Mikey didn't do anything ever to Van Halen.
Mikey was the most loyal guy in the band."
Three years later, Van Halen hit the road again, this time with Roth, but without Anthony,
who found out about the tour when it was reported in the press.
The band's newest bassist was Wolfgang Van Halen, Eddie's teenage son.
On top of that, Eddie refuted Anthony's version of the events to Rolling Stone, saying,
"When Hagar left the band, Mike went with him.
Then when we get back together with Dave, and all of a sudden, he wants back in.
It's like, 'No dude, you quit the band.'"
But that wasn't how Anthony saw it.
He told Music Radar in 2009 that he simply never quit Van Halen.
This is one rock 'n' roll feud we don't expect to be settled quickly and easily.
Van Halen has a reputation for being a nightmare on tour, and with that in mind, perhaps the
most famous bit of Van Halen lore is the "no brown M&M's" rule.
The band's 1982 rider included a stipulation that their backstage bowl of M&M's must be
totally free of any brown candies.
This wasn't Van Halen acting like a bunch of divas, however.
In 2012, David Lee Roth explained that the band's touring show was difficult to set up
in a timely manner because the crews in each town were inexperienced with assembling a
massive rock 'n' roll setup.
So Roth asked his managers to place a clause in the rider banning brown M&Ms.
If he spotted the candies in the bowl, it provided proof that the promoter hadn't read
the rider, and the band would have to do a serious line check to make sure all of the
stage equipment had been installed safely and correctly.
If people didn't pay attention to the contract, that led to some bad consequences.
For example, at Van Halen's 1980 show in Pueblo, Colorado, when Roth went backstage and found
brown M&Ms, he absolutely destroyed the dressing room.
As it turns out, he had every right to be mad that the promoters hadn't carefully read
the contract.
In addition to the M&Ms, the arena's shock-absorbent floor couldn't handle the weight of Van Halen's
gear.
Even though the floor requirements were laid out in the rider, organizers ignored that
section, too, and tens of thousands of dollars' worth of damage was done to the area floor.
In their 70s and 80s heyday, the members of Van Halen would play a concert in the evening,
and then they'd go out and party afterward.
Everyone, that is, except Eddie Van Halen, who would stay back in his hotel room to write
songs, work on guitar riffs, and ingest copious amounts of vodka and cocaine.
In 2015, he told Billboard,
"I would use them for work.
The blow keeps you awake, and the alcohol lowers your inhibitions...I was an alcoholic,
and I needed alcohol to function."
Of course, this sometimes backfired, as Eddie once got so wasted that he couldn't even play.
His descent into addiction began at a very young age.
He started drinking and smoking when he was 12.
During his high school years, he would even get drunk before showing up to class.
In 1988, he told Rolling Stone about the alcohol-related death of his father led to him kicking booze,
but the sobriety didn't last.
By 2004, he'd turned into, as he told Billboard, "an angry drunk."
Three years later, he checked himself into a rehabilitation center, which precluded him
from attending Van Halen's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
He's reportedly stayed sober since 2008.
So many rock stars have married famous actresses that it feels like it must just be the natural
order of things.
In 1980, 20-year-old Valerie Bertinelli, at the time one of the stars of the popular sitcom
One Day at a Time, met guitar master Eddie Van Halen backstage at one of his shows.
The pair then married in April 1981, just eight months after they became a couple.
"Why did that feel like the right move for you back then to get married at the age of
20 to a rock 'n' roll star?"
"I was madly in love.
Madly in love!
I just adored him."
Unfortunately, drugs go hand in hand with rock 'n' roll, and they were also a part of
this rock 'n' roll marriage before it even started.
Bertinelli revealed in her memoir Losing It and Gaining My Life Back that as she and Van
Halen filled out a pre-marriage questionnaire sent by their wedding officiant, they were
holding vials of cocaine.
Not too long into the marriage, both spouses started to stray.
Bertinelli discovered evidence of Van Halen's infidelity when she heard him on the phone,
talking about how he wanted out of the marriage.
She filed for divorce in 2005, four years after the two of them had separated.
In March 1995, Van Halen hit the road for a long stretch of concerts in support of their
album Balance.
Eddie Van Halen nicknamed it the "Ambulance Tour" because both he and his brother were
playing through significant pain.
While Alex Van Halen ruptured three vertebrae in his neck and had to wear a not-very-rock-'n'-roll
neck brace for the duration of many shows, Eddie was dealing with tremendous pain in
his hip due to avascular necrosis.
The guitarist delayed hip replacement surgery for years, until he finally went under the
knife in November 1999 when he was just 44.
He got his brand new bionic from Dr. John R. Moreland, orthopedic surgeon to the stars,
who performed similar operations for Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor.
Clearly, there's almost always a painful price to being an aging rock star.
Eddie Van Halen was once a habitual chain smoker, and all the cigarettes he went through
during recording sessions weren't exactly pleasant for his bandmates.
Sammy Hagar described the situation to Ultimate Classic Rock:
"I would come home, midnight, one o’clock in the morning, and I would stink so bad with
all my long hair, hair just absorbs cigarettes, and my clothes."
Van Halen eventually gave up smoking in favor of vaping, a necessary concession considering
that a third of his tongue was surgically removed in 2000.
The cancer also spread to his throat, and while he was declared healthy in 2002, he's
been travelling to Germany for years to receive special treatments.
In November 2019, he was briefly hospitalized for a health issue relating to the cancer,
as he was suffering from abdominal pain, an adverse reaction to some of his cancer drugs.
Van Halen has an interesting theory about the cause of this ongoing health crisis.
Years of smoking aren't to blame.
Instead, it's work-related.
He told Billboard in 2019,
"I used metal picks, they're brass and copper, which I always held in my mouth, in the exact
place where I got the tongue cancer.
Plus, I basically live in a recording studio that's filled with electromagnetic energy."
Eddie Van Halen has survived cancer, bone necrosis, and decades of heavy drinking.
After slaying those potentially deadly demons, he faced another major health scare in 2012.
On August 29th, a message posted to the Van Halen Facebook page read,
"Eddie Van Halen underwent an emergency surgery for a severe bout of diverticulitis.
No further surgeries are needed, and a full recovery is expected within 4-6 months."
Symptoms like constant abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, fever, and constipation plagued
Eddie, and severe cases require corrective surgery.
That's what happened to Van Halen.
Sadly, the condition got even worse for the "Eruption" guitarist.
He spent an extra three weeks in the hospital after his surgery because of a few blown stitches,
leading to an infection in his intestine, a portion of which had to be removed by doctors.
Van Halen spent months recovering at home, forcing the cancellation of the rest of his
band's 2012 tour dates.
In the early 1980s, Alex Van Halen was briefly married to a woman named Valeri Kendall.
Eventually, the two broke up, but that wouldn't be his only divorce.
In 1984, he married Kelly Carter.
Their union ended in 1996, but there were even more legal headaches yet to come.
In 2013, ELVH Inc., the band's intellectual property company, sued Kelly Carter...or more
accurately, Kelly Van Halen.
Over a decade after her divorce, she was still using "Van Halen" as her professional last
name.
She started a construction, fashion, and interior design company named "Kelly Van Halen," which,
according to ELVH, constituted trademark infringement.
The company also complained that putting the name "Kelly Van Halen" on a line of blankets,
bathing suits, and armoires was "confusingly similar" to the "sound, appearance, and commercial
impression" of Van Halen the rock band.
After years of legal battles, all parties settled the matter out of court.
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