Alex Van Halen has lifted the lid on a score of would-be Van Halen projects in a candid new interview with Rolling Stone.
The Van Halen drummer is promoting his new book, Brothers, which details his life growing up and taking over the music world with Eddie Van Halen. The audiobook version features their final recording, captured shortly before Eddie’s passing in 2020.
Of the revelations dropped during the interview, the most surprising are that, at separate points, Chris Cornell and Ozzy Osbourne each nearly ended up fronting Van Halen.
Alex can’t recall when their secret jams with the late Soundgarden frontman happened, but he says Cornell — who took his life while on tour with Soundgarden in 2017 — was “in a very fragile part of his life.”
"I got behind the drums, and he started playing bass,” Alex says of their jams. He was especially impressed by Cornell's commitment to his performance. "We played for 45 minutes. This motherfucker got so into it he started bleeding. I said, ‘This is the man you want.’
"And then he died.”
Cornell was certainly a fan of Eddie Van Halen's. In 2009, while working on his divisive solo album, Scream, with producer Timbaland, Cornell reportedly requested Van Halen contribute to an acoustic-guitar version of the title track. A recording of Eddie's parts is said to exist, although vocals were never tracked for it.
Meanwhile, Osbourne has confirmed there were talks about him fronting Van Halen for a record in 2001, while the band was in between singers.
“Yes, we were discussing it,” Osbourne confirmed to Rolling Stone. “It is something that if it had come to fruition, would have been phenomenal.
“Eddie and Alex were great friends of mine for a very long time and it’s a regret of mine that we never got it together. The Osbournes [reality show] got in the way of creating new music at that time, unfortunately.”
In related news, former Van Halen members Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony have recently wrapped up the Best of All Worlds tour alongside Joe Satriani and Jason Bonham. The Van Halen tribute show saw Satriani make multiple mods to his guitars in order to honor Eddie’s legacy and style.
The tour follows an earlier attempt at a Van Halen tribute that would have united Satriani with Alex Van Halen, original Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth and either Anthony or former Metallica bassist Jason Newstead. Alex has blamed Roth for the project's demise.
“The thing that broke the camel’s back,” he says, “was when I said, ‘Dave, at some point we have to have a very overt — not a bowing — but an acknowledgment of Ed in the gig. If you look at how Queen does it, they show old footage [of the band with their late frontman, Freddie Mercury].’
“The moment I said we’ve got to acknowledge Ed, Dave popped a fuse.… The vitriol that came out was unbelievable.”
According to Alex, Roth’s refusal to acknowledge his brother led to a physical altercation, and the project fizzled out before it even started.
“In retrospect, playing the old songs is not really paying tribute to anybody,” Alex says. “That’s just like a jukebox, in my opinion…
"To find a replacement for Ed? It’s just not the same. The heart, the soul, the creativity and the magic were Dave, Ed, Mike, and me.”
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