Raised on Radio by Paul Rees (Excerpt)

Excerpted from RAISED ON RADIO: Power Ballads, Cocaine & Payola—the AOR Glory Years 1976–1986 by Paul Rees, published on February 24, 2026. Copyright © 2026 by Paul Rees. Used by arrangement with Da Capo Publishing, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing and a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.

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“We Were Different People”: The Dissolution of the Classic Van Halen Lineup

Listen, forget the glossy retrospectives and the sanitized Hall of Fame induction speeches. You want the truth? The truth is usually found in a pile of empty beer cans at noon and a bunch of guys who can't stand the smell of each other's sweat anymore.

Paul Rees’s Raised on Radio isn't another dry autopsy of the charts; it’s a grease-stained map of the decade when rock 'n' roll sold its soul for a better FM signal and a faster car. We’re talking about the AOR era—that glorious, bloated, cocaine-dusted peak where the music was big, the hair was bigger, and the payola was just the cost of doing business.

In this excerpt from the book, the wheels are finally coming off the Van Halen machine. You’ve got Diamond Dave treating a rock band like a fitness seminar and Eddie just trying to find a singer who wouldn't trade a rehearsal for a movie script. It’s a beautiful, jagged mess of ego, Ferraris, and missed phone calls. Dig in and smell the stale smoke—this is what it actually looks like when the biggest band in the world realizes they’ve finally run out of road.

Eddie Van Halen: “[David Lee Roth] was always into roller skating and jogging. Hey, that’s fine. But he would bang on everybody’s door at eight, nine in the morning, going, ‘Come on, get your ass out of bed, come roller skating.’ I’m going, ‘Fuck you, man, I just got to sleep.’ And he’s saying, ‘Well, man, you live wrong.’ We were very, very different people.” <2>

David Lee Roth: “Poor little Eddie Van Halen. Struggled to survive a continuing onslaught of platinum records and Lamborghinis. Poor little Eddie. Forced to live a lie. They just couldn’t get their asses out of bed. They usually couldn’t get through rehearsals for a two-week period without an argument.” <3>

Martha Quinn: “David Lee Roth was so smart. He’s the most charismatic person you ever want to sit across from. It was just Take-your-breath-away.”

Eddie Van Halen: “[Roth] wasn’t showing up for rehearsal. He’d call me and say, ‘Oh, I don’t feel so good today, man—tell the guys I don’t think I’ll be making it.’ And he’d be at the office, doing interviews for his solo thing. After a couple of weeks of that, I just laid it on the line. I said, ‘What’s going on here? Do you want to do a record or not?’ And he said no. He wanted to make his movie. And he actually asked if I’d write the music for it.” <4>

Eric Martin: “Eddie Van Halen gave me a call. That came about through Danny Kortchmar. Eddie told Danny he was looking for a singer, and Danny told him, ‘Oh man, I’ve got this kid, he’d be perfect for you.’ We talked for a long time on the phone. All the while, Eddie’s obviously asking me to come and sing and jam with him. I’m so excited, I can’t believe it. But I didn’t have confidence back then. At all. And I thought to myself, ‘Holy shit... David Lee Roth! I’m gonna step in the clown shoes of David Lee Roth!’ I went to LA, and I bragged a little bit. ‘I’m going to go see Eddie Van Halen tomorrow over at his 5150 studio in Coldwater Canyon.’ I talked too much. It was raining that next morning, and I felt a fake cold coming on. I totally shit the bed and chickened out. This was the Led Zeppelin of America, and I didn’t feel suited. I didn’t have it.”

Patty Smyth: “Who the heck knows what would’ve happened if I had joined Van Halen? I was probably heavily hormoned out because I was eight months pregnant, so there was a state of mind I was in of how I need to take care of myself. But I regretted turning [Eddie] down. For a long time I regretted it. I was like, ‘Oh man, I would’ve made so much money.’ I never said anything about it for years. I got a call from Ed, and he was like, ‘Look, I’m not saying that I asked you to join because I don’t want Sammy Hagar to look like [he was] second choice.’ And I was like, ‘Okay.’ So I never spoke about it after that.” <5>

John Kalodner: “I suggested that Sammy Hagar go with Van Halen. He was perfect for Van Halen. Eddie was used to a star who was not very easy to get along with, and Sammy Hagar was.”

Sammy Hagar: “I had a good career going. I was wealthy, I was eating in the finest restaurants and wearing the finest fucking clothes. I was driving Ferraris. I was becoming a little too sophisticated—it was killing my music. Whereas those guys were living a completely different lifestyle. These guys had cigarette butts and empty beer cans and whiskey bottles everywhere ... Eddie comes walking out with a pair of sunglasses, jeans with holes in them, just out of bed, cracking a beer, and smoking a cigarette. Alex was still drunk. Mike hadn’t even been home. I’m looking at these guys, then I’m looking at myself in a suit, and I go, ‘I look like a fucking idiot. This is a real rock ’n’ roll band.’” <6>

About the author: Paul Rees is the author of the acclaimed biographies Robert Plant: A Life, The Ox: The Authorized Biography of the Who’s John Entwistle, Mellencamp: The Biography, and Shooting Star: The Definitive Biography of Elliott Smith. He has written about music for more than thirty years. In that time, he has interviewed everyone from Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, and Bono to Madonna, Lana Del Rey, and Adele. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Sunday Times Culture, the Telegraph, the Independent, and The Guardian. He was also Editor-in-Chief of two of the UK's most successful and long-standing music publications, Q and Kerrang!, for a total of thirteen years. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Paul Rees website is paul-rees-author.com