Rumors That Van Halen ‘Hate Each Other’ Emerge in Wake of Tour Postponement
With no official word from the Van Halen camp about the reasons behind yesterday’s sudden postponement of over 30 dates on their summer 2012 tour schedule, speculation has set in, some of it focused on the reportedly testy relationship between David Lee Roth and his bandmates.
Rolling Stone quotes a tour insider as saying that the band members “hate each other,” with another stating that, “The band is arguing like mad. They are fighting.” After ruling the rock world together for much of the late-’70s and early-’80s, the original members of Van Halen famously spent much of the last three decades apart, trading occasional barbs via the press (and dueling album titles) before reuniting sans bassist Michael Anthony for a highly successful tour in 2007.
The band has been on the road since February in support of their first album with Roth in 28 years, ‘A Different Kind of Truth.’ Just last week they added several new dates to their summer tour plans, making the news from yesterday all the more puzzling. (Our current favorite theory involves “a terrible case of hiccups.“)
In one of his few recent interviews in support of the new album and tour, Roth spoke highly of his bandmate, guitar wizard Eddie Van Halen, telling the Los Angeles Times, “There’s an old Russian saying: ‘There’s no more lines in that guy’s stomach.’ It means somebody got fat and slow. There are still a lot of lines in Eddie’s stomach.”
Van Halen returned the favor last month in Esquire, declaring of Roth, “We never really hated each other. I think the press blew that out of proportion… if we argued — you know, now it’s always about, about the structure of a song. It’s never personal. We’ve never on a personal level not gotten along.”