When David Lee Roth left Van Halen in the mid-’80s, Eddie Van Halen turned to Scandal singer Patty Smyth.
It turns out that Eddie’s first wife, Valerie Bertinelli, was a fan of Scandal and she took Eddie to see them, even spending a few days on the road with them. But, when Eddie asked her to join, she was pregnant with her first child and didn’t want to move to Los Angeles — where VH is based.
“He was just so brilliant and so sweet and so warm. You know I regretted not joining that band for a couple of years. Mainly because I had a few lean years before I got to [my hit] ‘Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough.’ But, the truth is, if he’d said to me, you know, like, ‘Let’s just make one record. Let’s just see what happens,’ I could have handled that. Now I just feel like I just wished that I had had the time in the studio with him to see what we would have done. I mean it was pretty audacious and smart of him to ask me to do it. It was a really interesting idea.”
