Return to Form?

By Ben Taylor

Note: This week's "Pop Life" was run on last week's edition of the Web site by mistake, except for Quotidian Challenge. Below is this week's Pop Life in its entirety

Last week Dave Navarro, guitarist for ’90s alternative rock pioneers Jane’s Addiction, announced that he and his former bandmates were going to get together and make a follow-up to 1991’s Ritual de lo Habitual. Unfortunately, he also hinted that he’d release a second solo album—something patently unnecessary, given both his and singer Perry Farrell’s abysmal solo offerings last year. Those two half-baked records revealed that Perry and Dave without each other are like a Reese’s missing the peanut butter.

A great music geek pastime is to debate just what exactly made a band a band. Despite his limited talent, would The Beatles have been The Beatles without Ringo? I’d say no. The simplicity of his drumming was crucial in shaping their early sound, and, in the boy band tradition, his personality was indispensable. Are the Rolling Stones the Stones without Bill Wyman? I’d say yes. In fact, I’d argue you could lose Ron Wood, and it’d still essentially be the Stones—maybe just another version, but as long as you’ve got Mick, Keith and Charlie, it will still sound authentically like the Stones.

It’s fun for the musically obsessed to quibble over the finer points of band chemistry. What’s not fun, though, is when a group loses an integral member but soldiers on anyway in a neutered and unsatisfying form. Several bands who play what is now playfully referred to as “the rock” are lately in this situation and would do well to reunite with their former compatriots if they want to do what they do best. People finally seem to have grown weary of teen pop, and there’s a bit of a rock renaissance to be capitalized upon.

Diamond David Lee Roth has been out of the Van Halen fold for more than 15 years now. During that time, we all grinned patiently through the Sammy Hagar years, and when we spoke of it we lied to ourselves, our friends and our families when we said, “They’re still pretty good with Hagar.” But deep down, we all silently wished for the return of that satyr with the Catskills sense of humor gone awry. Then VH teased us in 1996 with that reunion at the MTV Video Awards—a reunion that lasted for about five hours. After that, there was the record with the guy from Extreme, which we’ll just pretend never happened. Now, after 15 years, it’s become excruciatingly apparent that although the band are called Van Halen, the key element may well be Lee Roth.

Now more than ever, there is a thirst in the air for a Diamond Dave-led Van Halen. With bands like Weezer appropriating the old VH symbol into their logo and the Foo Fighters having VH cover band Atomic Punks open their shows, it would seem that a light has gone off in some collective heads.

So where are they, then? Why haven’t they seized the occasion and come back to strut their stuff? Well, apparently they did, but whether it’s going to see the light of day is anyone’s guess. According to Roth, the band got together and recorded back in 2000, albeit with him cutting his vocals alone at night and the band recording during the day. But shortly after Roth made this announcement, guitarist Eddie Van Halen revealed he had an unspecified form of cancer that he was in the process of beating. So at present little has come of these developments.

It’s well known at this point that Eddie hates Dave, but it’s time for him—if he’s healthy, of course—to face the music and accept that Van Halen just don’t have a future at this point without their original singer. Frankly, after Gary Cherrone, I think they owe us a Diamond Dave reunion.

I’ll give Eddie Van Halen this much, though: He never went out of his way to discredit Roth’s contribution to the band. Axl Rose, on the other hand, apparently wants to pretend his former Guns N’ Roses bandmates never existed. He’s gone out of his way to ostracize them and even had them banned by security at a New Year’s show last month—something guitarist Slash found out, much to his chagrin, when he tried to check out the performance. It’s also been said that one of the first tasks Axl had for his new GNR lineup was to rerecord Appetite for Destruction. This had been dismissed as rumor till recently, when film director Ridley Scott asked for permission to use “Welcome to the Jungle” in Black Hawk Down. (The American soldiers involved with the raid in Somalia played the song to get themselves pumped before they went into action.) Axl insisted that the only way Scott could use the song was if he used a new version recorded by the new lineup.