By David Browne
As Alex Van Halen told Rolling Stone last fall, a tour reuniting the drummer and David Lee Roth didn’t come to fruition after Eddie Van Halen’s death in 2020. But at the M3 Rock Festival in Columbia, Maryland, Saturday night, Van Halen fans were accorded the next best thing: Roth’s return to the stage after five years, playing a set comprised completely of songs from his former band.
Other than a corporate gig for Home Depot in 2023, the last time most people saw Roth onstage was more than five years ago, when he opened for Kiss and played a roughly dozen-song set largely comprised of Van Halen songs but also slipping in “Just a Gigolo”/”I Ain’t Got Nobody,” one of his solo hits. The pandemic shut down the rest of the tour, and a scheduled 2022 series of shows at the House of Blues in Las Vegas, which were called farewell gigs, was canceled over coronavirus concerns.
Saturday’s set, at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, was a different animal. Grinning ear to ear, clad in black leather, and joking about his “retirement,” Roth and his current band opened the 75-minute set with “Panama” before winding their way through Van Halen standards (“Runnin’ With the Devil,” “Jamie’s Cryin’,” “And the Cradle Will Rock …”) and deep cuts (“Atomic Punk,” “Drop Dead Legs”) before wrapping up with “Hot for Teacher,” “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” and, naturally, “Jump.”
Roth’s band featured guitarist Al Estrada, who replicated many of Eddie’s licks, and four backup singers, who ably handled and bolstered the harmonies on songs like “Jump” and “Dance the Night Away.” In between songs, Roth reminisced about Van Halen’s early days (and the origins of the song breakdowns in those sets) and, in a very Dave way, the Lieutenant Uhura character in the original Star Trek TV series.
The three-night M3 Rock Festival also featured sets by Ace Frehley, Sebastian Bach, Great White, Warrant, Vixen, Winger, and Lita Ford.
Matters between Roth and the Van Halen camp have been never been warm and cozy, but in the aftermath of Eddie’s death, emotions still appear to be raw. As he told RS, Alex suggested what he called “a very overt — not a bowing — but an acknowledgment of Ed” in the discussed tour with Roth, but that the singer “fuckin’ popped a fuse” and, in Alex’s words, found the idea “offensive.” Also to RS, Sammy Hagar recently groused about the Sam and Dave 2002 tour that brought the two former VH frontmen together, albeit for separate sets. “”Dave always wants too much,” Hagar told RS. “He always tries to upstage.”
But onstage with his own band, Roth appeared to be enjoying himself, especially when he riffed on the enduring karaoke appeal of “Dance the Night Away” and the time an ex-girlfriend would drunkenly sing along with it in the passenger seat of his car. “It was the sexiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I think about that every time I sing this song.”
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