Cast your mind back to 2022. There was only one subject dominating the news wires for electric guitar and hard rock, and that was the prospect of a blockbuster tribute tour to honour the late Eddie Van Halen.

The biggest question was over who would play guitar. Most Van Halen fans had their own preferences. Joe Satriani sure did. As a Van Halen fan, whose song Nineteen Eighty, from 2020 studio album Shapeshifting, was written in part as a tribute to Eddie Van Halen and the energy and innovation he brought to guitar as the ‘80s dawned.

The thing is, the guys in the band, namely frontman David Lee Roth and drummer Alex Van Halen, had their own preference, and theirs was for Satch.

Speaking to The Weekly Show With David J. Maloney, Satriani opens up about what must have been a surreal phone call, when Roth and Van Halen called enquiring about a tribute tour, and him feeling compelled to make a recommendation of his own, Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt.

“Well, it started really when Dave and Alex had called and they wanted to put together a band, and they were insisting that I was the guy to do it, and I kept saying, ‘I’m not the guy. Like, call Nuno.’ He can really do it, and there’s thousands of kids around the world who dedicated their life to sounding exactly like Ed.”

Satriani had consciously dedicated his life to developing a style that was not like Eddie Van Halen’s. This was presented as evidence that he would not be the one to play the tribute tour, but, of course, he was interested. Who wouldn’t be? And Satriani reveals that got way further than a phone call.

“I said, ‘I’ve always tried not to sound like Ed.’ I’m a huge fan, but like I’ve tried to respect that.’ But they were insistent,” says Satriani. “And we rehearsed, we came really close to doing our first show, but it all kind of started to fall apart.”

By then, Satriani was like the rest of us. Rumours would come and go. No tour would be announced. And it was not as though he had a blank calendar. He was busy. The months went by. Nothing. Then a phone call from another former Van Halen vocalist, his old pal and Chickenfoot bandmate, Sammy Hagar.

“When it seemed like what was going on in the family and the band members was getting really out of hand, Sam called,” says Satriani. “And he surprised me by saying, ‘Look, I know this, you've been going through this thing with those guys, and it’s insane and everything. How about if we did a retrospective tour – not an Eddie Van Halen tribute thing, but where we get to do Montrose, Hagar, Chickenfoot, my stuff… even some David Lee Roth-era Van Halen?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that could [work].’”

And so The Best Of All Worlds Tour was born. Fronted by Hagar, Satch would be accompanied by former Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony and Jason Bonham on drums. Hagar was as good as his word; the setlist took in songs from across his career. They even played Satriani’s signature song, Satch Boogie.

It might not have been the full-on Eddie Van Halen tribute tour that was in the works but Satriani did everything in his power to do EVH justice, even going as far as to partner with 3rd Power for a new guitar amp that landed on the Live Without A Net era tone-wise.

This, says Satch, was a transitional period for Eddie’s tone that served early and latter material alike.

What Dylana Scott at 3rd Power was quite incredible. Phil X was impressed. Satriani was looking for something that would make those Van Halen riffs shine. The difference between this custom tube amp and his signature Marshalls was stark.

The latter was configured to be a little darker, on account of Satriani playing most of his solo shows in higher registers, carrying the melody, the lead guitar being the focal point of the song. He needed more brightness for The Best Of All Worlds Tour.

“My solo rig probably has a little too much gain and is designed to make the high strings really fat sounding – because I play all the melodies,” he said, speaking to Australian Musician in 2024. “I play very little rhythm guitar all night long… I know in my heart, I want to hear that sound in my head.

“That mythical Eddie Van Halen sound that we all hear in our minds, and I want to be able to feel it. So I’ve been getting these clips from Dylana every week and that stuff that she’s building is really amazing.”

When Satriani was tracking Nineteen Eighty, he found that Van Halen secret sauce a lot easier. Of course, he wasn’t trying to emulate the tone exactly. This was a Satch track, a little nostalgic nod to his time in Squares, a fun time when he was making his bones as a recording artist.

“I needed to somehow express in a song the enthusiasm I had at the beginning of the Squares period, which really was the end of ’79, the beginning of 1980, and it was still a more swing-y, happy guitar moment, and not so shreddy like 1985 or ’88,” he said, speaking to MusicRadar in 2020. “It hadn’t gotten all dark and over the top. It was still Eddie Van Halen and Mark Knopfler. It was still Brian May and AC/DC and it was fun.”

Nineteen Eighty might have been what Squares would have sounded like if Satriani got all his own way, maybe a little less new wave, more rock, maybe Van Halen’s influence in there, too. Anyways, there just so happened to be a guitar effects pedal sitting right in front of him that was inextricably linked to Van Halen, Atomic Punk, Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love, Eruption… any number of classics.

“I was literally in my home studio and there on the floor was an Eddie Van Halen MXR Phase 90, with the special Eddie paint job on it,” said Satriani. “And I said, ‘I have to use this!’ I can’t tell you how happy I was that Eddie came on the scene and just lifted up guitar playing again, and he had that Friday night tone, that Friday night attitude. It was devastatingly perfect; his timing was just so perfect, and he wrote such good songs.”

• “I’m watching this sort of genius develop right in front of me, and he seems he has no physical barriers”: Joe Satriani on what it was like to teach a teenage Steve Vai

BEST OF 2025: Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that topped MusicRadar's charts in 2025.

He was one of the greatest guitar players the world has ever seen, but when Eddie Van Halen offered his services to Kiss in the early ’80s he was told: “Thanks, but no thanks!”

Speaking to MusicRadar, Kiss bassist/vocalist Gene Simmons explains why EVH made his offer – and why that offer was rejected.

“It happened in 1982,” Simmons recalls. “It was when Kiss was doing a record called Creatures Of The Night.”

This was the first album Kiss made following the departure of the band’s original lead guitarist Ace Frehley.

During the recording of Creatures Of The Night, a variety of lead guitar players were utilised – including Robben Ford, Steve Farris (later of Mr. Mister) and the man who eventually joined Kiss as an official member, Vinnie Vincent.

Ace Frehley appeared on the album's cover and in the video for the anthem I Love It Loud – but that track was one of three on the album co-written by Vincent.

The Van Halen album released in 1982 was Diver Down – created amid rising tension between Eddie and the group’s singer David Lee Roth.

Gene Simmons had played an important part in Van Halen’s early career, producing the demo recordings that eventually led to the band’s deal with Warner Brothers.

And in the summer of 1982, as Kiss were cutting tracks for Creatures Of The Night in Los Angeles, Eddie Van Halen reached out to Simmons, complaining about David Lee Roth.

Simmons recalls: “Eddie told me, ‘Roth is driving me nuts. I can't take it. I gotta leave. I know you're looking for a lead guitar player. Do you want me in the band?’

“Where Eddie lived, it wasn’t far away. So he got into his Jeep and came to the studio. Him driving that Jeep was the scariest thing in the world – it had no doors and he’d drive at 100 miles an hour. It was insane.

“So he came down and we had lunch across the street, and then he came into the studio and heard some of the tracks and was like, ‘Oh, I really like that!’”

When Eddie asked if they could discuss him joining Kiss, Simmons explained why this would never work – and why Eddie should focus on keeping his own band together.

“I said, ‘Eddie, a band is worse than a marriage. You're going to have ups and downs and stuff. But with Van Halen, everything begins and ends with you – it’s all about the guitar. And likewise for AC/DC or Led Zeppelin with Jimmy Page – those riffs, that's the backbone of what it is. That’s the sound. It's a point of view which is not necessarily the point of view of Kiss.’”

Simmons now clarifies: “There wouldn't be room for Eddie in Kiss. It would be like putting Jeff Beck or Hendrix in AC/DC.

“Hendrix would suck up all the oxygen. He needed just one bass player and a drummer so he’d got that room without a rhythm guitar player there.

“Eddie was like Hendrix in that sense. He needed a lot of room. With Van Halen it was a lot of room for the guitar player to take up, and there just wasn’t that room unless we wanted to gut what Kiss was all about. And Eddie would have taken over.”

Simmons reflects: “Morally, I think I did the right thing, which is telling Eddie, ‘You've got to stick it out. No matter what the problems are in the band, you’ve got to hang in there.'

“It's never easy. You take a look at Jagger and Richards, who had their ups and downs, or Lennon and McCartney, who were childhood friends.

“But you don’t let the band break up, even if it means switching lead singers. And in the end, that’s exactly what Eddie did.”

After Diver Down, Van Halen made one more album in the '80s with David Lee Roth – their smash hit 1984, featuring classic tracks such as Jump, Hot For Teacher and Panama.

It was in 1985 that Roth exited Van Halen and was replaced by Sammy Hagar.

“I love Roth,” Simmons says. “And that's still my favourite era of Van Halen.

“But you can get another lead singer, and when Hagar joined, it may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but they became a bigger band.

“Likewise, when AC/DC sadly lost Bon Scott, they became one of the biggest bands in the world.

“So that rule: ‘You can't lose the lead singer’. Actually, you can!”

Kiss legend Gene Simmons has named the singer he rates as the greatest frontman of all time — and it’s someone he helped on the road to stardom.

Simmons was an early supporter of Van Halen, and as he now tells MusicRadar, he never saw a better frontman than the original singer of Van Halen, David Lee Roth.

Referring to Roth’s peak years in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Simmons says: “David, in his prime, was the super frontman of all time."

“There was nobody — and I mean nobody, in any form of music — who ever stepped up on that stage and took being a frontman to the heights that he did.

“David had the acrobatics and sexuality — all that stuff. It had never been seen before, and it was so in-your-face."

He continues: “Everybody has their top moments.

“When Elvis was bloated and naked on the floor of a Las Vegas bathroom, that may have been a downer — but once upon a time, when Elvis got up on stage with the sneer and shaking the hips, he was the King.

“And when Van Halen were at their height, David was the finest front guy of anybody.”

Simmons’ long association with Van Halen began in 1976.

At that time, he was enjoying his first taste of major success after the album Kiss Alive! had given his band their breakthrough hit.

During a stay in Los Angeles, Simmons witnessed a Van Halen show at a famous club, the Starwood.

He recalled to Classic Rock magazine: “I’ve been credited as the man that discovered Van Halen. I did no such thing. I just happened to be there and witness their greatness at what was still a very early stage.

“I saw them that night and was left incredulous. I stood at the front of the stage and couldn’t believe my eyes and ears.

“So I signed the band to my production company, Man Of 1,000 Faces, flew them to New York and produced a demo for them at Electric Lady Studios.”

Included on that demo was a song named House Of Pain — with a heavy riff that was later incorporated into a different song with the same title, which featured on Van Halen’s album 1984.

Simmons now performs the original House Of Pain with his current touring group, The Gene Simmons Band.

He tells MusicRadar: “The original House Of Pain is the steamroller of all Van Halen songs that people had never heard. The band never played it live. They never recorded it, not that version. So we do it live and it’s… gangbusters!”

Simmons has always regretted the fact that he could not convince Kiss manager Bill Aucoin to sign Van Halen back in ’76.

As he told Classic Rock: “I had wanted to take Van Halen under the wings of Kiss. We should have signed them and taken them out on tour with us.

“Sadly, nobody else in our organisation saw it and of course months later Warner Brothers came by and scooped them up.”

The announcement came on April Fool’s Day, 1985. But this was no joke.

America’s biggest rock band had lost its superstar singer. David Lee Roth had quit Van Halen.

To everyone outside the band, it was shocking news. At that time, Van Halen were at the very top of their game.

Two years earlier, they had headlined the US Festival in California before an audience of 375,000 – and pocketed a reported $1 million fee.

The following year, their single Jump topped the US chart and its parent album, 1984, was well on its way to selling 10 million copies.

Eddie Van Halen was the most famous guitar player in the world, yet even he wasn’t the biggest star in his own band.

That was Roth, aka Diamond Dave.

A fast-talking, high-kicking showman with a huge ego and a seemingly endless supply of comic one-liners.

To fans and media alike, the band would be sunk without him.

There had always been conflict within Van Halen, and it reached critical mass months before Roth left. “The band had disintegrated into a spiteful bunch of bleary-eyed, argumentative, procrastinating individuals,” the singer later explained.

Roth’s exit had been carefully planned – he had been rehearsing in secret with a new band closely modelled on Van Halen, right down to virtuoso guitarist Steve Vai.

Roth had already tested the water at the start of 1985 with Crazy From The Heat, a four-track covers E.P. which reached No.15 in the Billboard chart.

In the battle between Van Halen and their newly departed singer, the smart money was on Diamond Dave…

But if Roth had a head start on his ex-bandmates, the guys he’d left behind weren’t about to just roll over and die.

And what they found in Sammy Hagar was a new singer with the charisma, the force of personality and the brass balls to replace Diamond Dave.

Hagar was always cocky, and in 1985, at the age of 37, he had every right to be.

The California native had first come to prominence in the early '70s as the singer for Montrose, a band that had a profound influence on American hard rock in general and Van Halen in particular.

After being fired from Montrose, Hagar forged a successful solo career that reached a pinnacle with 1984’s VOA and the single I Can’t Drive 55, an all-American protest song from a fast car enthusiast.

After Roth’s exit, Van Halen had considered several other singers, among them Cold Chisel frontman Jimmy Barnes, future Mr. Big vocalist Eric Martin and even a female singer, Patty Smyth.

But Hagar was in a different league. Moreover, he knew and liked Eddie Van Halen.

“I’d met Eddie twice at festivals,” he said. “He was a Montrose freak, and I thought he was the nicest guy in the world. He was very naïve, innocent, humble. He was like a kid.”

When Van Halen reached out to Hagar in 1985, they were, in his words, “high and dry”. But he retained the mindset of a solo artist. “I’d come off three platinum albums,” he said. “I said, ’I’m gonna get Eddie to play on my record.’”

That plan was quickly forgotten. As Hagar recalled: “Eddie was insistent. He was like, ‘You gotta come tomorrow!’ I said, ‘I just got home from a tour. I ain’t gonna do nothing tomorrow.’” But within a few days, Hagar was at Eddie’s home in LA’s Coldwater Canyon.

The house was modest, described by Hagar as “a two-bedroom county-style place, small – not a badass house whatsoever”.

In an adjacent garage was Eddie’s recording studio, 5150.

Named after the Californian police term for a mentally disturbed person, the studio had been designed by Donn Landee, the engineer who had assisted producer Ted Templeman on every Van Halen album, and also the two albums Hagar recorded with Montrose.

In the weeks prior to Hagar’s arrival, the band – Eddie and his brother, drummer Alex Van Halen, plus bassist Michael Anthony – had begun work on some new songs, recorded by Landee.

Hagar admitted he was a little nervous on the day.

“It wasn’t like I was auditioning,” he said, “but if you walk in and start singing with a band, you can feel pretty fucking uncomfortable.”

Eddie walked him into the studio to meet the other guys. Also present were Donn Landee and the brothers’ jazz-musician dad, Jan Van Halen. Hagar noticed that the band were frazzled from a lack of sleep. “They’d been up all night,” he said. “I was impressed with the work ethic. But I was thinking, these guys are fuckin’ crazy…”

He was also astonished at the conditions inside the studio. “It was a mess,” he said. “There must have been 300 beer bottles and cans laying around. Half of them had beer in them and old cigarettes. Every ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts. There were butts left burnt on the floor. That place stunk like a fucking bar that hadn’t been cleaned for a hundred years. Eddie’s guitars were everywhere – maybe 30 guitars, laying against walls, on the floor, just knocked over.”

First, they talked. They knew Sammy could sing. What they needed was a sense of whether he would fit the band as a personality. The last thing they wanted was another Roth.

As the talk turned to business, Hagar was struck by their naïveté.

“I asked these questions,” he said. “Like, ‘How much did you net on the last tour?’ I realised I was making three times more money than any one of those guys. They’d been spending most of it, splitting it four ways. I’m thinking, ‘Do I really wanna be in a band like this and take a pay cut?’”

But as soon as they started jamming, everything changed.

The band played a grooving, mid-tempo riff and Hagar jumped on it. “I started singing to it, making up words,” he recalled. “And right off the bat I sang, ‘Summer nights and my radio…’

“They all got excited. ‘Oh man, this guy can sing!’ And Jan was diggin’ that I could scat like a jazz singer.”

The jam session lasted from noon ’til midnight, without a break.

They went through all the song ideas the band had, including the punchy riff that would form the basis for the track Good Enough. Donn Landee got it all down on tape.

The following day, after Hagar had gone back to his home in Mill Valley, California, he listened again to what they had recorded.

It sounded good – so good that Hagar made his decision there and then.

He called Eddie and told him: “I wanna do it.” Eddie was ecstatic.

Then Hagar called his manager, Ed Leffler: “I’m doing it.”

Leffler’s first reaction was disbelief: “You’re fucking crazy.” After a moment’s thought, he added: “Let me talk to David Geffen…”

For Hagar to join Van Halen, an agreement would have to be negotiated between his label, Geffen Records, and the band’s own label, Warner Bros.

Hagar knew this would not come easily – he was Geffen’s biggest artist, and owner David Geffen was not just going to let him go.

But Hagar was not inclined to wait. He celebrated with his new bandmates at a Mexican restaurant in Hollywood. “We ate tacos and drank margaritas and laughed all night,” he recalled.

A period of intensive rehearsals began as Hagar moved into a rented house in LA. They had five new songs written and partly recorded before Geffen shook hands on a deal with Warners president Mo Ostin.

“Sammy, you have no fucking idea what you cost me,” Ostin later told the singer, though the mogul knew it was a price worth paying after he heard the song that would become Van Halen’s comeback single.

The band had already recorded a demo of Why Can’t This Be Love, but when Ostin visited 5150 they chose to perform the track live off the studio floor, with Eddie playing keyboards and Hagar on guitar.

“That freaked him out to begin with,” Hagar said. “But when we finished playing it, Mo had the biggest grin on his face. He put his finger in the air and said, ‘I smell money!’”

From this defining moment, another important decision was reached. Such was the stature of Dave Lee Roth that one Warners exec, in all seriousness, suggested that the band be renamed ‘Van Hagar’. According to Hagar, this idea was considered for one day.

“At first I was flattered,” he admitted. “But then I thought, fuck that – this is Van Halen! I’m joining them. We’re not starting another band.”

More importantly, Hagar had total self-belief. In his mind, he was better qualified than Roth to be the singer in Van Halen.

“I was a fan of the band,” he said, “but Roth always bugged me. He was fake and contrived.

“If anything, Dave had been mimicking me. He started wearing bandanas after I did. He started drinking Jack Daniel’s on stage after I did. I didn’t have enough respect for him to fear that job.”

As Van Halen continued working on the new album at 5150, there was one notable absentee.

For the first time in the band’s career, they were making an album without producer Ted Templeman.

Worse, Templeman was producing Roth’s first full-length solo record.

Van Halen viewed this as an act of betrayal.

“We were the anti-Roth camp,” Hagar said. “He was the enemy of all enemies. Not to me – I didn’t even know the fucker. But I’m a team player, and he’s the enemy, right? So Ted Templeman was too.”

By default, Donn Landee assumed the role of producer. Hagar had doubts about this, but the others were happy enough. The music was flowing out of them, and for Eddie, the band’s primary songwriter, working with Hagar was a revelation.

“From the first second, Sammy could do anything I threw at him,” Eddie told Rolling Stone. “It just opened up a whole new door. Finally, we felt like we were four people with a common vision. All of a sudden everything felt complete.”

Synth-heavy ballad Love Walks In was the best example of how Eddie’s writing was developing. It wasn’t the first Van Halen song based around synthesisers, nor was it their first ballad. But it had something new: a deep emotional quality.

“The first time Eddie played me that song, late one night, I got goose-bumps,” Hagar said. “It was so beautiful. I wrote the lyrics on the spot, and I sang it live with a hand-held mic. If you listen closely, it ain’t the best vocal sound in the world, but the performance is slammin’.”

More typical of Van Halen was the hard rock anthem Best Of Both Worlds. “It’s such a funky song,” Hagar said. “That’s R&B played full volume.”

There was also a goofy throwaway track, Inside, on which the new Van Halen made jokes at the expense of their former singer. If they sounded drunk on that track, it was, according to Hagar, a fairly accurate representation of the way these guys operated.

“I wasn’t a big drinker,” he said, “but the whole time we were making that record, everybody had a beer, constantly, except me. Ed would say, ‘I gotta take a piss.’ He’d come back with two beers – one for him and one for Al. And Al would do the same, only sometimes he’d bring two or three beers for himself and one for Ed. Ed would drink all day and night. I just wished I could play that great sober.”

Hagar could tolerate the drinking. What he couldn’t do was let the band finish the album without the aid of a recognised producer. It was too important for that.

“I felt that Donn Landee was just an engineer,” Hagar said. “And Ed wasn’t a strong leader who would produce a record. So I said, ‘We need a producer. How about Mick Jones?’ The guys said, ‘Sure.’ We were a very diplomatic band.”

Mick Jones, the guitarist and founding member of Foreigner, had known Hagar since the ’70s, when Montrose had toured with Jones’ former band, Spooky Tooth.

Jones had co-produced many of Foreigner’s biggest albums, including the multi-million seller 4.

“I thought Mick was a great songwriter, and would help us hone our songs,” Hagar said.

Jones was in LA when Hagar contacted him. Immediately, he agreed to go up to 5150 to hear some music and talk with the band.

“Sammy picked me up,” Jones recalled, “and as we were driving up to the studio I said, ‘What should I expect up there?’ He said, ‘Mick, you and I have been around awhile. But let me tell you, this is something else. Hold tight and enjoy the ride!’”

The first track the band played for Jones was a frenetic heavy-metal blowout, called Get Up. That was all it took for him to sign up as producer.

“I’ve never heard anything like that I my life,” he told them. “It sounds like four guys fighting inside the speaker cabinets, beating the shit out of each other. I’m in!”

Hagar’s instinct was right. A proven hitmaker, Jones bought his wisdom to bear on Van Halen’s new songs.

He helped turn Why Can’t This Be Love from a lengthy jam into a bona fide hit-in-waiting, and he encouraged the band to develop an Eddie Van Halen keyboard riff into the barrelling Dreams, coaxing out one of Hagar’s greatest ever vocal performances in the process.

“I was able to push Sammy to new heights,” says Jones. “Literally. He was singing so high that he was hyperventilating. He almost passed out.”

Jones took a different approach with Eddie Van Halen, just letting him do his thing.

“There’s not much I could have done to improve Eddie’s performances,” he said. “He was completely out there – not drug-wise, he just went into this trance state as he played.”

In these moments, Jones was reminded of the times he spent with Jimi Hendrix in the late ’60s, when Jones was the guitarist for French superstar Johnny Hallyday and Hendrix was the opening act on a European tour.

“When I worked with Eddie, it was the first time I’d met a guitar player who had a similar gift, who had that thing running through him from up above,” Jones said.

As work on the Van Halen album neared completion in December 1985, there was a buzz in the air at 5150.

“We all felt,” Hagar said, “that the music we were making was on such a high level, we just didn’t feel like anyone could touch that. There was a quote that was said maybe five times a day: ‘Wait ’til the fans hear this shit.’ We knew.”

But there was one person who wasn’t smiling. From the first day that Mick Jones arrived at 5150, he had sensed animosity from Donn Landee.

“Donn had expected he would produce the album,” Jones said. “So there was an atmosphere of resentment between him and me.”

Jones handled this with quintessential British reserve. Until, that is, Landee flipped.

“Donn had a bad moment,” Jones explained. “He locked himself in the studio and threatened to burn the tapes. It was a stand-off for almost a day – like one of those situations where somebody’s going to commit suicide. He was very highly strung. But in the end, we talked him down.”

Surprisingly, there were no repercussions for Landee. He cleared the air with Jones, and together they completed the final mix of the album in January 1986. “We had to work fast,” Jones said. “The band had a tour booked.”

On a sunny LA day in February, Mick Jones was driving in a convertible sports car, the top down, the radio tuned to a rock station, when a DJ announced in an excited voice: “Here’s something brand new from Van Halen!”

He played Best Of Both Worlds. Jones cranked up the volume.

“It sounded amazing,” he said.

He was certain that Van Halen had nailed it.

In early March came the first single.

Why Can’t This Be Love was an instant hit, rising to No.2 on the US chart.

The 5150 album was released on 24 March. It was an out-of the-box success.

“The album went platinum in one week,” Hagar said. “It was the fastest million-selling record in Warners’ history.”

The reconfigured Van Halen kicked off their first tour on 27 March in Shreveport, Louisiana.

The first song they played that night was Hagar’s 1982 solo hit, There’s Only One Way To Rock. Coming from Van Halen, it was a powerful statement of unity.

A few weeks later, before a show in Atlanta, Georgia, the four members of Van Halen were summoned to their manager’s hotel suite for a meeting. Champagne was poured, and the band were told that 5150 was at No.1.

“We fuckin’ partied!” Hagar said. “It was such a high. None of us had ever had a number one.”

There were attempts to spoil the party by a small number of old-school Van Halen fans loyal to Roth.

Hagar said: “I saw people in the audience holding up these banners: ‘FUCK HAGAR, WHERE’S DAVE?’ ‘SAMMY SUCKS! WE WANT ROTH!’

Hagar claims that Roth had a hand in this. “Dave would pay for these guys’ tickets,” he said. “But the truth is, we didn’t give a fuck. We were selling records faster than they could print them and we were selling out every show. We felt invincible.”

In July, Roth’s album Eat ’Em And Smile was released. It peaked at No.4 on the US chart.

Hagar insisted that Roth’s failure to match Van Halen’s No.1 was not the cue for another celebration.

“We didn’t care about him,” he said. “We were so absorbed in our own success.”

But the numbers would tell the story. Roth’s album sold one million to Van Halen’s five million. The enemy had been defeated.

When Sammy Hagar reflected on what he calls “my crazy ride with Van Halen”, he had mixed emotions.

But he was never a man to hold grudges.

“The bad shit doesn’t carry with me,” he said. “As bad as it was at the end of my time with that band, I have no resentments, no regrets.”

He said of 5150. “It was a mind-blower. To have the success that we had with that record – a second run for the band – it was kind of a miracle in rock’n’roll.

“The fans could have rejected it, but they bought into our trip.

“I would say that record was the highlight of my musical career. And the power in those songs – you can still feel it.”

This original version of this article appeared in Classic Rock in 2014.

Steve Vai had a great time in the ’80s, playing guitar for ex-Van Halen singer David Lee Roth and with former Deep Purple frontman David Coverdale’s band Whitesnake.

But as Vai admits to MusicRadar, it’s a risky business when you’re up on stage strutting your stuff, night after night.

You’re walking a tightrope - and sometimes you can end up flat on your back.

As Vai says, “One of the worst things that can happen to any guitar player is that your rig goes down and they don’t know what it is and can’t fix it right away.

“That’s only happened to me on a few occasions, but it’s never fun. I just leave the stage and say, ‘Sorry, something’s not working, I’ll be back when it’s fixed!’

“But there have been other challenges,” he says. “Playing when it’s snowing is not fun, because you can’t move your hands.

“And I remember two situations with the two Daves…

“One was with David Lee Roth. I was playing a big arena somewhere and people throw things occasionally.

“When you see them coming, not a problem, you can play with it and dodge. You can even catch it.

“So, I saw something coming at me and was about to catch it, then it blew up about six feet in front of me. There was a huge explosion and I went up in the air. I could see my feet and then I was totally out, unconscious on my back.

“I opened my eyes in front of 25,000 people and Dave was standing over me going, ‘Dude! Dude! You okay, man?’ And when I said I was okay, he told me not to get up.

“Dave always knew how to keep things interesting…

“They carried me to the back [of the stage] and Dave said, ‘When you walk out there, act all fucked-up before throwing your hand up in the air!’

“Everyone in the audience was dying to see what happened. They were wondering if I was okay and if the show going to carry on?

“So I did this funny walk, looking all messed up, and put my hand up. I gotta tell you, the place came apart and it was brilliant. And then we did Jump!”

Vai recalls a similar incident on stage with Whitesnake and the band’s singer David Coverdale.

“It wasn’t too different,” Vai says. “Fast forward a couple of years and I was playing Jones Beach Theater with Whitesnake, playing that big heart guitar in the rain.

“I usually do pretty good footwork. I never go down. You get this foot radar, knowing where the pedals are, so you can act like a rock star.

“I was backing up and knew the monitor was behind me, so I was moving to step over it, but I had these spurs on my boots.

“The spurs caught the monitor and again I was up in the air, staring at my feet and landing on my back, completely out.

“And this time I had this giant triple-necked heart-shaped guitar on top of me!

“I opened my eyes and this time it’s David Coverdale standing over me saying, ‘Steven, darling, are you okay? Are you alright?’

Vai says: “It’s funny what can happen to you on stage every now and then.

“You can call this The Tale Of Two Davids!”

Steve Vai was the guitar-playing sidekick for David Lee Roth in the late ’80s, appearing on the first two albums that the singer made after leaving Van Halen - Eat ’Em And Smile and Skyscraper.

But as Vai tells MusicRdar, one of the best things about working with Roth was the chance to perform classic Van Halen songs in concert.

“I mean, every one of those songs was a classic!” Vai says. “Have you ever tried playing along to those parts? They’re so fun!

“Panama, Unchained, Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love... they’re all incredible. That band had written so many great songs.

“For a guitar player, those parts were so much fun. They’re like little orchestrations that fit really well together.

“It was all so well-organised. They were put together in such a cool and appropriate way that made them speak. It was fun, heavy and rock ’n' roll.

“I could play the same parts that Edward played - anybody can within reason. But it never sounded like him.

“At the time I knew not to even try because that would have been a dead giveaway I didn’t have anything to offer.

“That would also piss the fans off, because you are inviting comparisons and trying to fit into somebody’s shoes, as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, well I wear a different pair of shoes!’

“I guess if I had to pick a favourite, it was probably Panama, because I loved all the chords.

“Hot For Teacher was great, too," Vai says. "We would also do Pretty Woman, and I loved playing that.

“Such great tunes to play. Every young rock guitar player would be bound to enjoy going through all that stuff.”

It was rock’s version of the heavyweight championship of the world. In one corner, Van Halen. In the other, the band’s former singer David Lee Roth.

It was 1986, and there was outright hostility between the two camps after Roth quit Van Halen and was replaced by Sammy Hagar.

Van Halen landed the first blow. Their album 5150 was released on 12 March 1986, and was an instant hit.

But Roth had assembled a stellar backing band for his debut solo album Eat ’Em And Smile - drummer Greg Bissonette, bassist Billy Sheehan and guitarist Steve Vai.

Vai was Roth’s most potent weapon - an emerging guitar hero whom Roth felt might beat Eddie at his own game.

And when the first single from Eat ’Em And Smile dropped in June 1986, it was like a bomb going off.

The single was Yankee Rose - and its stunning intro featured Roth and Vai talking to each other, Roth with his voice and Vai with his guitar.

With Yankee Rose, Steve Vai’s status as a guitar hero was sealed.

And as he now tells MusicRadar, his inspiration for that song went all the way back to his childhood.

“It’s funny,” Vai says. “In some ways, it was a reflection on something that my sister Pam said to me as a little boy. She said, ‘One of these days, you are going to make your guitar talk!’

“It kinda stuck, I guess.

“With David Lee Roth, you are always reaching for the absurd – things that live on the cusp of cool and crazy. And I approached that project just like any other situation where I had to take the place of another guitar voice.

“I did that with Frank Zappa’s band. And with Dave’s band, it was Edward [Van Halen]. Whenever you hear Dave’s voice, you immediately hear Edward’s guitar playing.

“My goal was to not sound like what was there before me. Of course, there’s a wheelhouse you play in, but my goal was to always bring something new.

“When I set out to do that Eat ’Em And Smile record, I was an Edward fan, of course. But I knew I didn’t sound like him and wasn’t going to try.

“Instead, I wanted to bring in my own voice. I’m a little quirky, there’s a quirkiness to what I do sometimes. And when you’re hanging out with David Lee Roth, that stuff will come out.

“We were in the studio working together and you have to remember Van Halen were one of the biggest rock bands in the world and Dave had just quit. They were making another record and so was Dave.

"These guys were all trying to do the next big thing. And I was like a colourful fly on the wall watching it all go down and enjoying it very much.

“We wondered how to open the record – what could be interesting, fun and totally ridiculous to grab everyone’s interest. I said ‘I’m going to make my guitar talk!’

“And with that I was able fulfil my sister’s prophecy!”

Steve Vai has been looking back on some of the top-tier vocalists he has worked with in his career and says that Devin Townsend is “as brilliant as they come” who was ultimately “a little squelched” when he fronted his band for 1993’s Sex & Religion.

After playing with Frank Zappa, then David Lee Roth, and the release of Passion And – a landmark in electric guitar – Vai was already established while Townsend was just starting out on his musical journey. He was only a teenager when Vai hired him. Speaking to the Vintage Rock Pod, Vai admitted that he only needed a singer and that his vision for the band and its sound left Townsend frustrated. 

“Devin was great to work with in the studio because he was eager and he was patient,” said Vai. “He didn’t need a five-star hotel. He was also incredibly talented in his own right. And that was kind of squelched in my band because I just needed him as a singer. I didn’t know how brilliant he was as a creator, a musical creator, because I didn’t allow it, basically! A little bit, here and there, but I had my vision.”

• Devin Townsend replaced a track from his new album because of... Barbie Girl?

Vai had a clear idea of how the record was going to go. He wanted to put a supergroup together, and while he was not prepared to altogether jettison the ambitious arrangements that made Passion & Warfare resonate, he wanted to make a more accessible record.

Vai’s melody-centric approach never changed but that vision did fall under Townsend’s influence as he turned him onto heavier music. Townsend, who was recommended to Vai by his label, Relativity, gave Vai’s arrangements the voice he had been looking for.

“I finally had a singer that I could work with,” he says. “If you listen to that record, there are oceans of vocal harmonies.”

• Steve Vai: “Joe Satriani has an ear like none other. When I was a kid he would say, ‘No, don’t vibrate it out of tune. You’ll sound like an idiot!’”

There were creative tensions. There is, of course, that famous story of Townsend taking a number two in Vai’s guitar case. But that is all water under the bridge, and is the sort of misadventure that happens when you have two creative minds trying to express themselves when only one has the casting vote. It certainly hasn’t coloured Vai’s affection for their collaboration. 

“Devin was always entertaining, I can tell you that,” said Vai. “You never knew what he was going to do. He was unpredictable, and he was bold, and he was… Did I say unpredictable!? Yeah! He would do these crazy things. It was constantly entertaining. I knew it was frustrating for him because he had so much to offer and it was bubbling inside him and he was trapped in the Vai cage, doing music that maybe wasn’t necessarily what he would do, but he was a good sport about it.”

Townsend put that energy and talent to good use. After completing his stint with Vai, he formed Strapping Young Lad, initially as an industrial metal studio project, but within a few years Townsend had recruited Gene Hoglan behind the drum kit, Jed Simon on guitar, and Byron Stroud on bass guitar, and that intensity made them extreme metal royalty. 

After flaming out on extremity, Townsend went on to become one of prog-metal guitar’s most creative talents. It was then that Vai fully appreciated how good Townsend was.

“We collaborated on some things but it wasn’t until later when Devin started making his solo music that I’m like, ‘Woah! I didn’t know that was there!’” Vai says. “Because he is in my book a bona fide genius. He is as brilliant as they come.”

You can listen to the full conversation with Steve Vai at Vintage Rock Pod, and watch an extract above, in which Vai reflects on the good times playing with David Lee Roth, and the pressure of being the first guitarist to work with Diamond Dave after Eddie Van Halen. The pressure? As Vai explains, there was no pressure.

“I didn’t feel pressure because if I would have felt pressure it would have meant that I was competing with Edward and you can’t do that,” he says. “That’s foolish. You can’t compete with Edward, y’know.”

David Lee Roth has released a newly recorded studio version of Van Halen’s Unchained. Recorded on 3 May 2022 at Hollywood’s Henson Recording Studios, and shared on YouTube with the title card, ‘Roth Lives!’, and features Al Estrada on electric guitar.

Unchained is the latest in a series of Van Halen tracks that Roth has reworked. On 2 September 2022, Roth similarly shared a rerecording of Van Halen’s 1984 classic Panama, with the Van Halen News Desk offering more details of the recording, reporting that the new version of Panama was one of 14 tracks that Roth recorded during the May 2022 sessions. All were tracked live, no AutoTune, with no other members of Van Halen involved, and incredibly the whole thing was over in two hours. 

Estrada was on guitar. Ryan Wheeler was playing bass guitar, with Francis Valentino on the drums. The renowned producer, engineer and mixer Tom Syrowski (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam) was credited as recording the sessions. 

More followed. On 26 December, we got a reworked Everybody Wants Some!!, and now yesterday’s release of Unchained. These new recordings don’t lack for energy. Roth’s voice is in fine fettle. They obviously lack something – a big, massive, huge something – without Eddie Van Halen’s guitar. But it all begs the question: what is DLR up to?

After the will he/won’t he/well why wouldn’t he? over the question of whether a tribute show or tour could be arranged in memory of Eddie Van Halen, Roth’s intentions have been hard to read. He is sitting on a lot of material. 

Besides this session with Estrada et al there is an album’s work of songs that Roth recorded several years ago with John 5 who is now touring the world with Mötley Crüe as Mick Mars’ live replacement. Last summer, Roth shared the latest of these, Nothing Could Have Stopped Us Back Then Anyway, which took a wistful look back on Van Halen’s heyday, and was led by John 5's acoustic guitar. 

Speaking to Guitar World in 2012, John 5 described the material as acoustic but altogether more orchestrated than a campfire jam or coffeehouse set, with some tracks involving dozens of overdubs.

“Dave and I have about 12 or 13 songs in the can for a future record,” he said. “And it’s all acoustic. But not strummy, campfire stuff – I’m talking lots of cool, crazy jazz chords, and 50 or 60 overdubbed guitar tracks, with all this harmonising and other weird stuff going on. Dave’s vocals are incredible. He sings his ass off.”

Some of those tracks, such as EVH tribute Somewhere Over The Rainbow Bar And Grill, emerged on The Roth Project, Diamond Dave’s 2020 digital comicbook project combining Roth’s illustrations with Colin Smith of PhotoshopCAFE’s animation. 

At the time, Roth told Variety that he preferred to release individual tracks rather than an album. Perhaps this is intention with the ‘Roth Lives!’ Van Halen recordings, and one by one they’ll surface on YouTube. You can check out Roth's new take on Unchained above.

Eddie Van Halen’s son, Wolfgang Van Halen, is a talented musician in his own right.

In 2006, he replaced bassist Michael Anthony, before joining Van Halen on their 2007/2008 North American tour aged just 17.

This tour was also notable for the fact that singer David Lee Roth, who fronted the group from 1974 until 1985, was reunited with his former bandmates, Eddie and drummer Alex Van Halen.

This lineup recorded the final studio album by Van Halen, A Different Kind of Truth, that was released in 2012.

Sadly, in October 2020, the electric guitar legend passed away.

The follow month, Wolfgang was interviewed on Entertainment Tonight where he was asked, “Will there be a tour in the future? There have been rumours that you may go out and you may replace your dad in the band.”

“No way. That’ll never happen,” asserted Wolfgang.

“You can’t have Van Halen without Eddie Van Halen. It’s impossible.”

Though it would, of course, be impossible to replace Eddie Van Halen, fans and peers continue to pay homage to his incredible legacy.

Excitement surrounding the possibility of an Eddie Van Halen tribute concert has continued to grow following an interview with former Metallica bassist Jason Newsted that appeared in The Palm Beach Post in April.

Though the article reported that Alex Van Halen and Joe Satriani were on the lookout for a bassist with respect to a Van Halen tour, Newsted maintained he felt unable to do the band’s legacy justice.

“There’s nobody that can top it,” he said, “so how do you show it honour? I didn’t want it to be viewed as a money grab. 

"And then it kind of just all fizzled.”

In an interview published by Rolling Stone this week, Wolfgang directly tackled the tricky subject of a tribute concert by confirming, “there was an attempt at doing something.”

And although it appears to be too early to confirm one way or the other, fans have been given a glimmer of hope.

“I don’t like to speak negatively about people,” he continues, “but there are some people that make it very difficult to do anything when it comes to Van Halen.”

Remaining equivocal, Wolfgang highlighted the importance of Van Halen’s fanbase with respect to such decisions.

“They are very motivated by which specific people they like in the band,” he said. “It’s just not worth it. We made an attempt, and some people can be hard to work with, and made it not happen.”

Prompted by the interviewer as to whether he was referring to “a certain singer with three initials,” (read: David Lee Roth) Wolfgang suggested, “Do your research on the history of Van Halen, and come to your [own] conclusions.”

Order A Different Kind of Truth here.