Wolfgang Van Halen has revealed how he and Eddie Van Halen pranked an angry David Lee Roth at the last Van Halen concert in October 2015 at the Hollywood Bowl. Eddie Van Halen ‘fell asleep’ at a surprising 2019 show.
Wolfgang told SPIN, “I got a really funny story about that. Nobody’s asked me about this before, so I’m glad you did. I’ll set it up for you. Throughout the whole tour, Dave [David Lee Roth] had an issue whenever someone in the audience had a beach ball. Outdoor theater, summer concert, Southern California party rock, Van Halen — it’s not out of the ordinary.
But every time he saw them, it would really upset him for some reason. And he would stop singing and then stand at the front of the stage and say, ‘Throw the beach ball up here, throw the beach ball up here, throw the beach ball up here’ eight times until it eventually got up, and he would stamp it out. Then he’d throw it off the stage. I guess he just really didn’t want that out there.
Before the very last show. The tour manager came up to my dad and me and whispers, “Hey, you’ve got a funny little surprise for all of you guys at the end of the show.” We’re like, “What?” And he goes, “At the very end of ‘Jump’ when you’re doing the ride out, we’re going to release 50 beach balls from the top of the audience. And we’ll just see what happens.”
But even if he gets pissed off, what was he gonna do? It’s the last fucking show. And sure enough, we get to ‘Jump,’ the very last show, there was just a cavalcade, an avalanche of beach balls, and Dave was just, like, short-circuiting. He didn’t understand how to handle it. But we all laughed it off. And it was just a really fun, almost like a fun practical joke. And yeah, that was a really fun memory of that show. As time went further and further by, the more I thought about it like, ‘Wow, if that is the last show, what an amazing way to cap it off.'”
Wolfgang Van Halen is tentatively planning to release his debut album in spring 2021. BSBLL4 posted on VHLinks.com speculating about why Van Halen stayed silent during Eddie Van Halen’s health struggles.
“I think the reason the band didn’t say anything is because Ed wanted to keep things private. Had they put out a statement saying they were delayed due to health reasons everyone would immediately assume it was Ed and also assume the worst. Then you would get all the magazines speculating that he’s on his death bed (as it was we already got some of that), he would be hounded about it whenever he or someone from his family would be in public, etc.
He probably wanted to go through that process in the most private manner possible and not burden everyone else with it. Plus, there obviously was hope that things could turn around. If you look at how Wolf handled it, he clearly had a product ready to go to hype and he got ripped to shreds for the start and stop nature of him putting out his music, so you can only imagine what would have happened if VH was going to tour/record, then they weren’t, then they were, etc.”
