On the latest Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, Wolfgang Van Halen offered a measured update on where things stand between him and Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth. The backdrop: in January 2024, Roth uploaded an audio piece to YouTube, accusing Wolfgang of bad behavior during Van Halen’s final tour.
Asked about it, Wolfgang replied with a calm rebuttal (via Blabbermouth): “I didn’t put a two-hour-long YouTube rant of completely unfounded lies about said person out of nowhere. So I don’t know what I did, but that’s certainly where I sit.”
The exchange has also revived a familiar dig at Wolfgang — that he’s still the “kid” who joined Van Halen at 15. He’s having none of it: “I’ve always been a punching bag. So, it’s just whatever… I’m a 34-year-old married man with a third [Mammoth] album. I’m not a kid.”
Back in August 2024, on the “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast, Wolfgang was asked if he and David Lee Roth get along these days. His answer was straightforward: “Not really, at least as of recently. I thought we were on good terms, and he actually made a couple of YouTube videos about me, about how much he doesn’t like me, which was, like, ‘Okay, cool man.'”
Pressed on why Roth would post those videos at all, Wolfgang framed it as perception masquerading as fact: “He basically just said a bunch of stuff that was true to him, I guess. It doesn’t matter if it’s not true because the people who are going to listen to it will believe it and use it to hate me anyway. So you’ve just gotta move forward.”
There’s grief in the subtext, too. Without Eddie Van Halen around to absorb the spotlight or the criticism, Wolfgang feels like the lightning rod: “I think the big thing, one of the bigger things is that my dad isn’t around,” Wolfgang explained. “So I think he just went for what’s still there to kind of point at.”
None of this is entirely new in the Van Halen universe. By Wolfgang’s account, the creative axis between Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth was never simple, “always,” in his words, uneasy. As he put it: “I mean, throughout their history, I think, absolutely,” he said, before adding: “I don’t know what it is with ’80s bands. There’s always fucking something. I’ve kind of used it as my own… just, like, I don’t want this to happen. So it’s, like, for my band, it’s, like, why can’t we just have a good time and just be happy and make music? Like, is it that fucking difficult?”
Zooming out, Wolfgang also points to the vacuum created by a famously private camp. When the principals didn’t narrate the story in real time, other narratives inevitably filled the gap: “I think the really tough thing with Van Halen is that my dad and my uncle never talked about it. They just pushed forward and kept doing what they were doing. I think that left room for interpretation or one side to be loud about it, to have the only truth be out there, and that’s the only thing that people end up believing, when that’s not necessarily the case.”
