Eddie Van Halen Makes a Wild Child Out of Valerie Bertinelli -- Twisted Tales
Thirty years ago, the hard rock powerhouse known as Van Halen was just coming into its own, and by April of 1981, the original group was already in deep trouble. At the end of the month, Van Halen would release its fourth album, 'Fair Warning' and the last track, sung by frontman David Lee Roth, was called 'One Foot Out the Door.'
The timing of the band's self-titled debut, which came out in 1978, gave Van Halen an odd, tenuous connection to punk rock ("Homegrown Punk," read the headline of an L.A. Times feature). In truth, the band had been together since 1972, when young brothers Alex and Eddie Van Halen, born in the Netherlands, started an L.A. rock group with Roth, the guy who rented them their sound system. After toying with several names (Mammoth, Rat Salade, the already-taken Genesis) and the backing of Kiss' Gene Simmons, the band settled on naming itself after the brothers.
Following the monster success of the band's first two albums, Roth would stick around until 1985, when the band replaced him with ex-Montrose belter Sammy Hagar. But Roth and Eddie Van Halen were already at odds by the time of 'Fair Warning.'
A few weeks before the album's release, on April 11, 1981, the prodigious guitarist got married to Valerie Bertinelli. Given his bride's line of work -- she was a young actress famous for her long-running role as sensible Barbara Cooper on the Norman Lear sitcom 'One Day at a Time' -- it might have been easy to assume that Eddie's newfound domesticity was causing the rift in the legendarily hard-rocking band.
Instead, the unlikely couple lapsed into a reckless rock 'n' roll lifestyle together. In a TV interview
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