Alex Van Halen says Van Halen almost passed on David Lee Roth, but later ended up hiring him to “save 20 bucks.”
In a new interview with Ariel Levy, drummer Alex Van Halen recalled David Lee Roth’s audition to be Van Halen’s singer, and how initially they didn’t think it was going to work out with him. It was during Roth’s second tryout that Alex and Eddie Van Halen decided to let him join the band.
“It was no mystery to me, and I had to do some arm twisting with Ed,” Alex said. “But the way Ed and I made decisions is that if one of us wanted to do it and the other one didn’t, then we wouldn’t do it. If both of us were in agreement, then we would do it. For no other reason than just to be equitable in how we approached what we did.”
“Like I said, everybody was leaving town, and the people who were serious about music were very few left. Ed and I went to Dave’s house to try it one more time.”
Aside from Roth’s talent and stage presence, he had something else Van Halen was in desperate need of: a PA system. As Alex explains, that factored into them asking Roth to join the band because it would allow them to save money going forward.
“We’d been gigging, and we were paying a lot of money to his PA, and it just didn’t make any sense to me. ‘Ed, why do we pay him 20 bucks a night for PA? If he’s in the band, we can save 20 bucks.’ You gotta combine everything, man. You gotta make things work, stretch.”
“So we went to this house,” Alex continued. “And we, long story short, we drank a few shots of this, that, and he was very entertaining and very articulate and very convincing in that he should be in the band. And so at the end of the night, Ed and I are going all over all the things that our dad has said, and we said, ‘Yes,’ just like that, ‘You’re in.'”
