Daryl Hall recently spilled some information about Eddie Van Halen. He recently confirmed that Eddie had asked him to join Van Halen after David Lee Roth parted ways with the band which was more than three and a half decades ago.
Daryl Hall opens up on Eddie Van Halen’s offer
Hall recently brought the topic of his hypothetical link-up with Van Halen in a new interview with “Out Of The Box With Jonathan Clarke”, which airs on the New York radio station Q104.3. He was asked if it’s true that Eddie offered him a role of the band’s frontman after Roth’s exit to which Daryl laughed and said:
“Well, yeah. Actually, yes. I knew those guys [Van Halen] well; we shared some people — crew and things like that. And Eddie came to a show with [his then-wife] Valerie [Bertinelli] — this goes back, you know — and David had just left the band. And Eddie said, ‘Do you wanna join Van Halen, man?’ He was half-joking, but I think he was serious — I do believe he was serious. And I took it seriously. I went, ‘Meh, I think not. I think I’ve got my shit going on.'”
It turns out that Hall was not the only singer whom Eddie reportedly approached about joining Van Halen before he recruited Sammy Hagar to front the band. The former Journey vocalist Steve Perry told Rolling Stone in a 2020 interview that he was “honored” when Eddie asked him to come to Los Angeles and jam but that he felt he wasn’t “really suited” to representing Van Halen’s “legacy up to that point”.
Patty Smyth of the group Scandal had also weighed in that she was asked to join Van Halen but that she ultimately declined because “they were heavy drinkers” and she didn’t want to relocate to Los Angeles. “I was, like, ‘I’m from New York. We don’t move to L.A.,'” she recalled in a 2020 interview with Stereogum.
It was noted that Van Halen eventually roped in Hagar, who sang on four studio albums between 1986 and 1995 before he quit the group in 1996.
