Wolfgang Van Halen has explained what he considers to be the personal gamble that comes with playing Van Halen material live.
The singer/multi-instrumentalist, who joined his father Eddie and uncle Alex in Van Halen from 2006 to 2015 before launching his solo project Mammoth, has only performed tracks by the pioneering hard rock band on two occasions since Eddie died following a cancer battle in 2020.
The first instance was at a tribute concert to late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins at Wembley Stadium in 2022, when Wolfgang played On Fire and Hot For Teacher with Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, The Darkness vocalist Justin Hawkins and future Foo Fighters drummer Josh Freese.
The second performance was when Wolfgang rejoined Grohl and Foo Fighters onstage at Welcome To Rockville festival in 2024. There he tore through Eruption as part of a humorous bait-and-switch where it initially seemed that Grohl was playing the legendary solo.
Before the Hawkins tribute, Wolfgang eschewed dusting off Van Halen material in a bid to forge his own legacy as a musician, and he tells Metal Hammer that the decision to play some of his former band’s songs was not made lightly.
Looking back on the moment Grohl asked him to play some Van Halen tracks in 2022, he says, “I was like, ‘This is either going to be a nice coda to Van Halen or it’s going to ruin my life.’”
When asked why the moment had the potential to “ruin [his] life”, he explains: “I don’t think I would have ever been able to live it down – with how many people who hate me and say, ‘You’ll never be good enough and you have to play Van Halen to be relevant’ – if the one time I played Van Halen on my own, I ruined it and messed up. In my mind, it would have ruined my life had I messed up. I took it very seriously.”
Although Wolfgang has twice broken his ‘no Van Halen covers’ rule, he still has no desire to perform the band’s material at Mammoth shows. In an interview with Drumeo in June, he revealed that he has a distant relationship with Van Halen’s songs following Eddie’s death, as does Alex.
He said: “I’m really just not interested in playing it anymore without Dad. And I know he [Alex] feels the exact same way.
“I’ll play it for fun every now and then. If Dave Grohl comes to me and goes like, ‘Hey, you wanna do this?’ Like, ‘Yes, Dave Grohl, I would like to do that with you.’ But, overall, it’s really a tough thing for me.”
Mammoth will release its third studio album, The End, via BMG on October 24. The album’s third single, I Really Wanna, came out on Thursday (September 11).