Alex Van Halen Brutally Insults Sammy Hagar

Alex Van Halen recently spoke to Rolling Stone but didn’t mention Sammy Hagar .

Alex Van Halen talks about his regret

Alex said that he has a few regrets about the aborted tour, which he would have been physically unable to do, anyway. “It’s too bad on one hand, but it’s fine on the other,” he said.

“Because now, in retrospect, playing the old songs is not really paying tribute to anybody. That’s just like a jukebox, in my opinion.… To find a replacement for Ed? It’s just not the same.”

Alex hasn’t been able to play drums for the past couple of years due to his spinal injury, but lately, he’s been able to hit practice pads again. More importantly, he can walk, with a slight lurching limp, which is more than he could manage for a while.

Van Halen’s second singer, Sammy Hagar, recently went on tour with Satriani and Anthony, playing those old songs. Alex won’t even utter Hagar’s name.

“The heart and the soul and the creativity and the magic was Dave, Ed, Mike, and me,” he says.

He’s at least as cutting in his book: “We had a lot of other singers over the years,” he writes, in his only acknowledgment of the Van Hagar era.

In all fairness, there were more singers, or at least potential ones, than the world knows about. Around 2001, while the band was without a frontman, the Van Halen brothers met with Sharon Osbourne, who is Ozzy Osbourne’s wife and manager, to discuss a plan for an album with Ozzy Osbourne as the lead singer for Van Halen.

“When you get a dog, you don’t expect it to be a cat,” Alex says.

“When you get an Ozzy, you get Ozzy. Play the music, he’ll sing, and it’s gonna be great.” Right before they were set to start work, the Osbournes took a meeting with MTV, and their reality show happened instead. (Ozzy Osbourne confirms the story in an e-mail to Rolling Stone: “Yes, we were discussing it,” he writes.

“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 got in the way of creating new music at that time, unfortunately.”)

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