David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen have reunited in public for the first time since Van Halen‘s final concert, giving fans a rare glimpse of two of the band’s most iconic members together again.
The reunion took place on July 30 at TEDxFargo in Fargo, North Dakota, where Roth and Alex participated in a 15-minute discussion titled “Beyond Boundaries: How Human Experience Informs Art And Music.” Painter Robert Vargas moderated the conversation at Brewhalla.
While the event wasn’t a Van Halen performance, the appearance was notable given how long it had been since Roth and Alex had appeared together publicly. The band’s final concert took place at the Hollywood Bowl on October 4, 2015, and the group has remained inactive since then.
The reunion also comes nearly six years after the death of Eddie Van Halen, who passed away in October 2020 following a battle with cancer.
The complete TEDxFargo conversation has now been uploaded to YouTube (see below), allowing fans to watch the two Van Halen veterans together again.
Alex Van Halen has continued to speak occasionally about Van Halen‘s history since the band’s activities came to an end. Earlier this year, he also discussed the autobiographies written by two of the band’s most famous singers: Roth and Sammy Hagar.
During a conversation with Brazilian journalist Marcelo Vieira, who translated Alex‘s memoir Brothers into Portuguese, the drummer was asked about Roth‘s 1997 autobiography Crazy From The Heat and Hagar‘s 2011 memoir Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock. The interview was published in issue 293 of Roadie Crew magazine.
Alex‘s opinion of Roth‘s book was generally favorable, although he did point out some of its shortcomings.
“It’s quite fun and accurately reflects [David]’s sense of humor. Although the text is somewhat abstract and loses its train of thought at times, it’s still a very interesting perspective on that era.”
His response to Hagar’s memoir was considerably harsher.
“I don’t know what he wrote, and I don’t wanna know,” Alex said. “In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.”
“Red” deals at length with the band’s 2004 reunion tour, and describes Eddie Van Halen‘s physical condition and drinking during it in unsparing terms. Hagar also told an interviewer in 2012 that “what happened on that reunion tour in ’04 was some of the most miserable, back-stabbing dark crap I’ve ever been involved with my whole life.”
Eddie Van Halen disputed parts of it. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2015, he called a section of the book embellished, rejecting the portrayal of him as an angry drunk on that tour.
Hagar has since said he would write it differently. Asked in June 2021 on Brazil’s “Inside With Paulo Baron” whether there was anything he wished he had left out, he pointed to the same passages.
“More than anything, because of the untimely and tragic death of Eddie Van Halen, I apologize from the bottom of my heart for exposing his dark side to where I don’t think anyone wants to hear that now, and, unfortunately, it’s in the book. And it’s true — it’s all true. It’s not like I have to say, ‘Oh, I was lying’ — no, no, no. If I wrote the book today, I would only put the good of Eddie Van Halen, because he was such a brilliant, genius guitar player and such a great friend and a great partner — until everything went wrong, like everything else. Anybody’s that’s been divorced or broke up with your girlfriend or your boyfriend, you know how it goes. Happy endings aren’t always the case in a relationship. [Eddie and I] had a happy ending — thank God — but before that, it wasn’t a happy ending of the band. But thank God we got it back together,” he said at the time.
When journalist Regis Tadeu suggested there was value in documenting the difficult parts, Hagar said the audience had only seen half of it.
He continued: “No one knew a lot of that about Eddie, but they’d see him on stage and they would think, ‘Why is he acting like that?’ And I would say, ‘Well, you should have seen what happened backstage. Holy f**k!’ If we’d have known he was sick then, then I would have understood and I would have been a little more, ‘Hey, Ed, come on,’ try to reel him in. But he was impossible. He was on a track of just wild. It was tough.”
