(Dr. Dre vs. Eazy-E; Dave Mustaine vs. Metallica; David Lee Roth vs. the Van Halen Brothers)
Let’s say you had access to a time machine, and you could only do one thing with it. What would you do?
Surely you have already been asked this, probably when you were younger and 100 percent more stoned than you are now. “What would you do with a time machine?” is a pretty common question among unoriginal deep thinkers. It’s equally common to respond by saying, “I would travel back in time to kill Hitler.” You’re sort of obligated to say “kill Hitler” in this scenario. If you don’t say “kill Hitler,” you will appear self-involved and possibly even anti-Semitic. An interrogation of your personal ethics will inevitably follow. “While I understand that learning how to play ‘Your Body Is a Wonderland’ by John Mayer, then time-traveling back to the period right before that song became a hit might seem alluring—as you could persuade beautiful college girls to sleep with you by claiming that you and not John Mayer wrote it. But wouldn’t you agree that preventing the Holocaust is more valid, you Nazi-sympathizing bastard?”
Now, if you’re moderately clever, you’ll recognize the flaw in this scenario: if you can go back in time once, you can go back a hundred times, and it will be imperceptible to anyone who isn’t also time-traveling. In the time it took you to read that previous sentence, I could’ve paid visits to Woodstock, Woodstock ’94, and Woodstock ’99. To you, it passed by in a nanosecond; meanwhile, I was ingesting substandard acid during Santana’s performance, suffering stomach cramps from swallowing too much mud during Green Day’s set, and decapitating Fred Durst before he went onstage with Limp Bizkit.
So if I had a time machine, and if I had already corrected at least a dozen major historical injustices, I would travel back to 1999 in order to crash VH1’s interview with Dr. Dre in the episode of Behind the Music that was devoted to him and his work.
(I realize that worming my way into a Dr. Dre interview might in fact be more difficult than time travel. But if I get a goddamned time machine in this hypothetical scenario, it’s not as if having access to a sympathetic publicist willing to sneak me into a TV show taping is a less realistic disruption of the space-time continuum.)
If you’ve seen that episode of Behind the Music, you’ll remember that a crucial turning point in Dr. Dre’s rise-fall-rise narrative arc is reached when his former founding partner in N.W.A., Eazy-E, dies suddenly of AIDS, in 1995. This is what I would want to ask Dre about, because I suspect that the way he presents his feelings in the episode aren’t totally on the level.
For years, right up until roughly a week before Eazy passed, he and Dre had been beefing bitterly. It started when Dre left N.W.A. because he believed that the group’s manager, Jerry Heller, was unfairly aligned with the financial interests of Eazy to the detriment of the other members. There’s a well-known (and possibly exaggerated) story recounted in John Borgmeyer and Holly Lang’s Dr. Dre: A Biography about Eazy refusing to release Dre from his contract, which prompted Dre to dispatch future Death Row Records head Suge Knight and a gang of lead pipe–wielding goons to negotiate with Eazy on his behalf. Knight’s strategy was two-pronged. First he claimed that he had kidnapped Heller and was holding him in a van. Then he threatened Eazy’s family. “I know where your mama stays,” he supposedly told Eazy after handing him a piece of paper with her address on it. Eventually, Eazy caved.
The public learned about the inner workings of N.W.A.’s split primarily via two songs: Ice Cube’s “No Vaseline” and Dr. Dre’s “Dre Day.” Cube’s song was meaner. (He refers to Eazy as both a “maggot” and a “half-pint bitch.”) But Dre’s track did more damage because it ended up in regular rotation on MTV. In the video, Eazy-E is referred to as “Sleazy E” and depicted as a clownish, Jheri-curled puppet for his craven, overweight, and pointedly Jewish-looking manager, who refers to “Sleazy” as “boy” in the opening scene. (The incendiary political incorrectness of the “Dre Day” video would’ve been nuclear in the social-media era.)
Simply put, the “Dre Day” video destroyed Eazy’s reputation among casual rap fans. People who knew Dre from Straight Outta Compton could put the Eazy insults in context. But the success of Dre’s The Chronic overshadowed everything he and Eazy did with N.W.A. in the minds of millions of pop listeners. Released as a single in May of 1993, “Dre Day” went on to quickly secure summer-jam status. It was one of those songs that just seemed to magically appear whenever a minimum of two people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five congregated in a public space. For legions of white middle-American high schoolers like me, “Dre Day” was the first and last word on the Dre-Eazy rivalry.
Real rap fans knew better. At the end of ’93, Eazy put out a furious answer with his EP It’s On (Dr. Dre) 187um Killa, which included a G-funk parody called “Real Muthaphukkin’ G’s” in which Eazy called out Dre for being a phony gangster. (Whereas Eazy sold drugs before investing the earnings in his label, Ruthless Records, Dre was already trying to get a rap career going by the mid-’80s.) It’s On sold two million copies to an audience predominantly made up of rapheads and N.W.A. fanatics. The Chronic, meanwhile, sold three million copies and made Dre a pop star. Authenticity didn’t matter. Dre had a bigger platform and a long shadow that engulfed Eazy.
“Is there a more reviled name in hip hop than that of Eazy E?” Vibe asked when it interviewed Eazy in 1993. Vibe was quick to answer its own question, and that answer basically amounted to: “No. No, there is not.” The magazine dwelt on Eazy’s “thinly veiled obsession with the life and career of Dr. Dre,” which was manifested by the way he “alternately rails against Dre and waxes nostalgic over the early days of N.W.A.” The impression you get from the article is that Eazy is a broken man and Dre is the clear victor in their war of words.
In a famous essay, Chuck Klosterman argued that successful people need one nemesis and one archenemy. “We measure ourselves against our nemeses, and we long to destroy our archenemies,” he wrote. Going by Klosterman’s definitions of those terms, Ice Cube was Dre’s nemesis (Dre insulted Cube when he left N.W.A. over a money dispute, but Dre soon followed him out the door for essentially the same reason), and Eazy-E was his archenemy. But then Eazy died—not a violent death, but certainly it was a shocking and surprising demise. Suddenly Dre couldn’t use Eazy as his archenemy anymore. On the contrary, circumstances required Dre to speak of Eazy with respect.
If I could’ve asked Dre one question during that Behind the Music taping, it would’ve been this: In terms of your grudge match with Eazy, did the other guy win?
Let’s imagine for a minute that Eazy hadn’t died. Would he have ever reconciled with Dre? Would his reputation have ever recovered? We have no way of knowing. What we do know is that Eazy got Dre to capitulate in their feud without ever apologizing to him, publicly or privately. Even when he was near death, Eazy never reconciled with his archenemy. Dre saw Eazy for the last time on March 19, just eighteen days after his diagnosis and seven days before his death. Eazy was already confined to a hospital bed and incapacitated. On Behind the Music, Dre said, “It just seemed like everybody knew he was gone.”
Part of me wants to believe that Eazy hated Dre so much that he willed himself into near-death catatonia out of sheer pettiness. I know that’s not true, but I would’ve loved to see Eazy’s reaction when he heard Dre say on Behind the Music that he felt bad that he didn’t get to kick it with Eazy before he passed away. I suspect that Eazy’s cry of “BIIITCH!” is still ringing throughout the celestial kingdom.
The reintegration of Eazy into Dre’s narrative—and the use of Eazy’s death as a melodramatic plot point in Dre’s eventual estrangement from Suge Knight—comes off as self-serving on Behind the Music. Nevertheless, Dre was paying tribute to a man whose reputation he successfully destroyed in the years before that man’s untimely demise. And this continued for years after Eazy’s death. In the ludicrous video for 2011’s “I Need a Doctor,” Dre even visits Eazy’s grave and gives the man also known as Eric Wright his tribute. Twenty years earlier, a Dr. Dre video ending with a scene at Eazy’s grave would have surely culminated with Dre pissing on the headstone. But in “I Need a Doctor,” Eazy’s grave signifies the burdens of Dre’s past continuing to weigh on him as he moves forward. Eazy is practically an angel in Dre’s iconography now, a stunning reversal from The Chronic days.
In life, as in his songs, Eazy was a soldier to the end. He never surrendered in the war against Dre. In a 2013 radio interview, Jerry Heller claimed that Eazy wanted to murder Suge Knight because he blamed Suge for turning Dre against him. Heller talked Eazy out of it, which Heller later regretted. (“I should have let him kill him. I would have done the world a favor,” Heller said.) But strictly in terms of grudge holding, what Eazy did to Dre was almost as cold-blooded. Eazy made Dre forgive him.
Grudge holding is not generally considered an attractive trait. For centuries, wise people have advised against it. Confucius once said, “To be wronged is nothing, unless you remember it.” (There’s a semiterrible Chinese restaurant a mile from my house called Confucius. This quote might’ve originally derived from a place mat I read there and not from the ancient Chinese philosopher.) In Jane Eyre, a book I attempted to finish in the eleventh grade, Charlotte Brontë writes that life is too short “to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.” Then there’s Tool’s “The Grudge,” a deep cut from 2001’s spite-inducing Lateralus, in which Maynard James Keenan likens a grudge to “a crown of negativity” and an “ultimatum prison cell.” Clearly the time I spent listening to Tool instead of reading Brontë paid off.
Being a civilized person (or merely a nondickhead) requires withholding the instinct to catalog all the wrongs committed against you and plot appropriate punishments for every line item. I will fully admit that inside me there’s a jilted, perpetually indignant individual obsessed with breaking free and tracking down his enemies like the dogs they are. I call this person Walker, after the character played by Lee Marvin in the classic ’60s revenge movie Point Blank.
If you haven’t seen it: Walker is a thief who is two-timed by his partners and left for dead after a big score. Once Walker recovers, he puts on a sharp suit and goes about tracking down the sons of bitches who screwed him out of the money he’s owed—precisely ninety-three thousand dollars. This means taking on a corporatized organized crime syndicate single-handedly.
Point Blank is a great grudge movie because it portrays the ultimate revenge fantasy (all petty people envision having the unshakable rectitude and nihilistic cool of Lee Marvin) while simultaneously showing how pointless revenge fantasies are. Walker is both a monstrous genius and a noble idiot—his anger is totally justified and absolutely self-destructive. This is underscored toward the end of the movie, when Walker finally confronts the head of the syndicate, played by pre–All in the Family Carroll O’Connor, who can’t believe that Walker has gone to all this trouble for a relatively small amount of money.
“You threaten a financial structure like this for ninety-three thousand dollars?” the proto–Archie Bunker asks. “What do you really want?”
“Somebody’s got to pay,” says Walker.
Somebody’s got to pay. This is the guiding principle of the grudge holder. Something that belongs to me was wrongfully taken, and I want it back. I need it back.
I am actively holding two low-level grudges at the moment. I say “low-level” because I currently have no plans to avenge these grudges. I barely even remember them. One involves a college friend (whom we’ll call Terry) who dated a girl I was irrationally in love with during my sophomore year. The other grudge involves a professional acquaintance (let’s call him Terry, too, as I hate the name Terry) who led me to believe that he could hire me for a job I really wanted, then informed me that another person got it instead in a manner I found to be unchivalrous.
Frankly I’m embarrassed to admit caring even a little bit about either of these grudges. The circumstances of the “wrongs” these individuals committed against me had zero long-term effect on my life. But if I’m being honest, I must admit to being consumed by anger, jealousy, depression, and malice for a long time over these incidents.
You’re not allowed to act like Walker in real life. The world frowns on people who handle their business with a Smith & Wesson. So I created a competition between me and my grudgees that existed solely in my mind. Any time I appeared to be doing better than they were, personally or professionally, that was karma correcting the injustice committed against me. Having a satisfying career, marrying my soul mate, and fathering a healthy, beautiful son weren’t just hallmarks of a good, lucky life. They were decisive scores in a game only I cared about.
This is what Michael Jordan might call finding the motivation to be great. But at this point in my life it requires way too much energy. Grudges are exhausting. It takes a lot of work to maintain a distorted view of reality. In my mind I was in the right. But if anybody else knew what was going on in my head, I would have looked like a crazy person.
I would have looked like Dave Mustaine.
You might know Dave Mustaine as an outspoken Christian and Obama birther, but since I’m writing about popular music and not writing an Ann Coulter book, I’m going to focus on his brief tenure in Metallica, his controversial firing from that band, the anger-fueled formation of Megadeth, and Megadeth’s rise to not-Metallica-level fame. Therefore let’s begin with my favorite Mustaine-Metallica nexus point, Some Kind of Monster.
As one of the finest rock documentaries ever made, Some Kind of Monster is essential viewing for fans of metal, therapy, and behind-the-scenes films about off-peak albums made by legacy bands. In the interest of time, I will limit the discussion of this movie’s greatness to just five classic scenes, in ascending order of personal preference:
(5) the scene where Metallica singer James Hetfield admits that he missed his son’s first birthday because he was hunting bears in Siberia;
(4) the scene where drummer Lars Ulrich yells “Fuck!” in Hetfield’s face—not because Hetfield missed the kid’s birthday, just because;
(3) the scene where guitarist Kirk Hammett defends guitar solos (because he’s right!);
(2) the scene where Hetfield and Ulrich argue about Hetfield’s “stock” guitar parts and Hammett says, “You know what, you guys, why don’t we just go in and hammer it out instead of hammering on each other?” (right again!); and
(1) the scene where Mustaine confronts Ulrich about Mustaine’s being fired from Metallica in 1983, right before the recording of the band’s classic debut, Kill ’Em All.
The scene happens about forty minutes into the movie. Metallica has commenced work on the album that will become 2003’s St. Anger, and the process is stalled after Hetfield checks into rehab. The other members are working with a kooky therapist known for shepherding rock bands through trying periods—basically, once your band is too big to break up because the brand is too valuable, this is the guy who will talk you into staying together.
Then some moron decides that it would be a good idea to put Ulrich in a hotel room with Mustaine so that they can rehash Mustaine’s canning two decades prior.
The idea (I guess) is that this is supposed to be therapeutic for Ulrich, but Mustaine is the one who gets confessional. Mustaine hijacks the movie as though he were sneaking into somebody else’s cab. “I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” Mustaine says ominously, and you believe him. He’s like Robert De Niro cornering Nick Nolte’s family on that houseboat at the end of Cape Fear.
Mustaine chastises Ulrich and himself in equal doses, swinging wildly between sounding a little too grandiose (“Do I like being number two? No”) and a lot too self-pitying (“People hate me because of you”). Mustaine pontificates with reckless yet endlessly watchable abandon. The best part is when he refers to Ulrich as “my little Danish friend,” which somehow comes out sounding like “motherfucker.” The whole encounter lasts maybe two minutes, but it has the epic sweep of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. If it were a TV show, I would’ve been a loyal fan of Dave Mustaine Tells Off Lars Ulrich for ten seasons.
Mustaine’s termination from Metallica was already the stuff of hesher legend long before Some Kind of Monster: Mustaine was, by his own admission, a terrible drunk in the early ’80s—loud, abusive, and prone to physical and emotional destruction. Since Metallica spent the entirety of the ’80s in a drunken stupor, Mustaine’s behavior eventually proved to be an insurmountable problem—cutting off the booze simply wasn’t an option. Right before Mustaine was fired, he traveled with Metallica from their home base, in San Francisco, to New York City, where the band’s first record label, Megaforce, was located. The band members lived together in a famously squalid rehearsal space. One night Mustaine got screamingly intoxicated, just as he and the rest of Metallica did every night. The following morning, Ulrich and Hetfield presented Mustaine with a bus ticket back to the West Coast.
In his memoir, Mustaine writes that Metallica put him on that lonely bus to post-Metallica oblivion when he was still fucked-up and didn’t even give him any traveling money. Mustaine claims he was hungover and hungry, relying on the kindness of strangers for the occasional potato chip. (He specifically mentions potato chips as his sole sustenance.) But he wasn’t completely down-and-out: on the floor of the bus he discovered a pamphlet written by California politician Alan Cranston about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. The handbill included the word megadeath, a term describing the loss of more than a million lives as a result of nuclear attack. With the removal of that errant second a, Megadeth was born.
From then on, “it wasn’t enough for Megadeth to do well,” Mustaine writes. “I wanted Metallica to fail.”
Back to Some Kind of Monster: Mustaine claimed later that he was ambushed by the filmmakers. The scene was filmed at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco two days after 9/11, and he and Lars were feeling understandably emotional and sentimental. (In his book Mustaine admits that he still harbored hopes of being invited to rejoin Metallica.) When Mustaine saw an early cut of Some Kind of Monster, he was incensed and demanded to be taken out of the movie. Mustaine felt Monster was “false and manipulative,” which is odd, since Some Kind of Monster seems like a fair and accurate representation of how Mustaine himself has framed his relationship with Metallica in the years before and after that movie came out.
Nevertheless, Mustaine contended that Metallica had once again stabbed him in the back. Soon after, Mustaine wrote a song, “Something That I’m Not,” which doesn’t mention Metallica by name but is clearly about Metallica and Mustaine’s Some Kind of Monster experience. (The lyrics accuse an unnamed subject of being “one big charade,” a “fraud,” and a “little baby.”)
“Something That I’m Not” is included on 2004’s The System Has Failed, which was not a commercially successful Megadeth record. But by most measures, Mustaine has had a laudable career in music—he’s sold in the neighborhood of twenty million albums, he is recognized as one of the primary innovators of thrash metal, and he’s still able to tour the world playing his own music for large audiences. Mustaine has been incredibly successful. In his own mind, however, Mustaine is locked in a competition he’ll never win. When Megadeth was a legit big-name mainstream rock band—the early-’90s albums Rust in Peace and Countdown to Extinction produced several MTV hits—it happened to coincide with the peak of Metallica’s popularity. When Metallica albums started to suck, in the late ’90s, Megadeth albums, inconveniently, started to suck harder.
This is why Mustaine will attempt to reinsert himself into a Metallica context from time to time. As one of the few people who still bother to pay attention, I’d like to recount some of the highlights:
• In 2009, Mustaine protested Metallica’s not including him when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “To say that I’m not on the record, well, I’d say that there are 40 million fans with Megadeth and Metallica records in their collections that would say that Dave is on the Metallica records because my name’s on there [in the songwriting credits],” he told Metal Hammer. “But I guess Lars never really looked past the word ‘Ulrich.’ He just stopped there and read it again, over and over and over.”
• In his 2010 autobiography, Mustaine implies that Metallica stole the “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” prayer part of “Enter Sandman” from “Go to Hell,” a song he recorded for Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and released around the same time. Mustaine does concede, however, that he did not in fact write the prayer itself.
• In 2012, Mustaine claimed that he was forming a supergroup with Hetfield and Ulrich, prompting Hetfield to tell a fan magazine, “This is the Dave we kind of wanted to forget about.”
I saw Megadeth in concert at a small club in 2001 and was pleasantly surprised by how great they sounded. Metallica was in shambles at the time, but Mustaine had cobbled together a new band lineup and performed valiantly. However, he wasn’t playing a stadium with James and Lars while fans tossed around Kirk Hammett’s severed head as though it were a beach ball. I’m guessing that’s probably what stuck with Mustaine that night.
My ability to maintain grudges against people who are no longer in my life for offenses I can barely remember bothers me (when I think about it, which is almost never), but not as much as the possibility that there are people out there who hate me for what I’ve done to them (when I think about it, which is right now).
If I think really hard, I can come up with the names of seventeen individuals who might have reason to speak my name in vain. A few of them come from childhood; the majority are professional acquaintances. I have no idea if this number is conservative in my favor (meaning I’m grossly overestimating the number of people who actively have it in for me) or if I have pissed off way more people than I realize. All the potentially aggrieved people in my life are in my rearview—I thought about reaching out and asking these people if they’re still beefing with me, for the sake of research, but then I thought, “Steve, that’s a terrible idea. Let’s watch John Wick again instead.”
The advantage of living a regular life (as opposed to performing in a legendary musical act) is that the bulk of the relationships that were pivotal in your life will fade over time. It has been theorized that human beings generate a new set of cells every seven to ten years—the same goes for relationships. It’s rare to be actively engaged in another person’s life for more than ten years. To make it past twenty years is truly unusual. You have to live in the same place, or work at the same company, for an uncommonly long time. This has a way of diluting the grudges most of us accumulate. Napping mongrels get to keep on napping, to paraphrase a cliché.
If you’re in a band, you don’t get to do that. Stupid shit that happened when you were twenty-three still matters. The detritus of letdowns and double-crosses never gets cleared away. Some Kind of Monster is the definitive document of this phenomenon—Metallica nearly comes apart because Hetfield and Ulrich can’t relate to each other when they’re no longer degenerate boozehounds. (The inability to communicate without being drunk is, in my experience, intrinsic to many male friendships.) In bands, the resentments build up until they either kill you or turn you into a self-defeating conspiracy theorist who starts an Alan Cranston–inspired metal band out of spite. Even when you think the sludge has been set aside, it will be redirected in unexpected ways.
Consider Van Halen, for instance.
Van Halen was one of the first rock bands I ever liked. My first Van Halen tape—I only had tapes when I was a tween, because I was a medium-fidelity snob—was OU812, which means I was initially into the Sammy Hagar incarnation of Van Halen. I bought OU812 because I loved “When It’s Love,” so not only was I into Van Hagar, I was also into Van Hagar’s soft, romantic, power-ballad side. I was the Van Hagariest of Van Hagar fans.
After that, I got into two of Van Halen’s previous albums, 5150 and 1984. I knew the hits from 1984—“Jump,” “Panama,” and “Hot for Teacher”—so I was fully aware of the majesty of David Lee Roth. But I did not come to truly understand the superiority of DLR until I delved into 1984’s deep cuts, which celebrated cool guys (“Top Jimmy”), shapely appendages (“Drop Dead Legs”), and Irish-American rap groups that hadn’t formed yet (“House of Pain”). I also played the shit out of “I’ll Wait,” because I am and forever will be a power-ballad wimp.
Loving Dave did not make me hate Sammy—I also dug 5150, which I’d argue even now belongs in the upper echelon of VH albums. But most Van Halen fans felt obligated to take sides, and over time it was accepted that Roth was the one true king of Van Halen Nation.
For years there was a drumbeat among true believers that Eddie and Alex should get over their feud with Roth and reunite. When Hagar exited the band in 1996 and Roth appeared with Van Halen at the VMAs to present an award, it seemed like the impossible was really going to happen. Then DLR pulled a DLR and acted like a hyperactive poodle as Beck stood onstage and accepted a Moonman trophy. The Van Halen brothers decided that they couldn’t stand to share a stage with their prodigal front man after all and hired Gary Cherone instead. This version of the band subsequently released Van Halen III in 1998, which was clearly a smash success for everyone involved.
Flash forward ten years: somehow the incredible happens, and Roth is back with Van Halen. There’s a comeback tour in 2007. The band plays seventy-four shows to nearly one million people and grosses $93 million, the most successful tour in the band’s history. Four years after the tour concludes, Van Halen releases its first album with Roth in nearly three decades, A Different Kind of Truth. And it’s actually pretty good! Many of the songs are based on demos dating from the mid-’70s, which seems like the best possible scenario for a new Van Halen album released in the ’10s.
Now, if you’re a Van Halen fan, you know that I’m leaving out an important detail, and it’s what prevents this story from being a redemptive example of how grudges can be disarmed between bandmates. Around the time that the Van Halens reconciled with Roth, they parted ways with their original bassist, Michael Anthony. Anthony’s offense was touring with Hagar during one of Van Halen’s many inactive periods. Anthony either quit or was fired, depending on whose side you wish to believe, and Eddie’s son, Wolfgang, was installed as Van Halen’s apparent bassist for life.
My knowledge of what makes Van Halen tick derives entirely from a chapter in Roth’s memoir, Crazy from the Heat, entitled (fittingly) “What Made Classic Van Halen Tick.” According to Diamond Dave, from day one, Van Halen was never rooted in friendship. It was always a war. In a 2013 BuzzFeed profile, Roth confirmed that nothing had changed, claiming that he only saw his bandmates shortly before gigs and onstage. Van Halen, like most other long-running rock institutions, was strictly a business. (The exception to the rule is Rush, unless Beyond the Lighted Stage is a sham.) I imagine that if Eddie Van Halen would’ve had two sons and the second kid could sing, DLR would be out of the band along with Anthony. Friendship in rock and roll is transient, but family members tend to stick around for a lifetime.
I’ve never met or interviewed Michael Anthony, but he always seemed like the least egotistical person in Van Halen by a factor of about ten thousand. He’s never appeared to be less than affable. (Chris Farley should’ve made him a recurring character on SNL.) Musically, Anthony’s backing vocals were absolutely essential to the Van Halen sound—those high harmonies contribute greatly to that “buzzed on cheap beer on a clear summer night” feeling of classic Van Halen songs. And yet for the dumbest of reasons, his reentry into Van Halen is probably even less likely than Roth’s return to the fold was at the height of his dalliances with Steve Vai. A full Van Halen reunion is impossible now, because the Van Halen brothers hate Hagar as ardently as Van Halen’s anti–Van Hagar base does, and that hate carried over to their poor ex-bassist. Michael Anthony caught the Van Halen brothers’ grudge boomerang. Somebody’s got to pay, after all.