The last time Van Halen came through town, even Eddie seemed to be suffering the strain of things going horribly awry. Early in the morning after a desultory, under-attended performance by the band and its new singer, Gary Cherone, at the Molson Amphitheatre in 1998, the guitar virtuoso was sufficiently incensed by my review of the show that he rang up my voicemail at work and berated me for a couple of minutes.

I’ll be making records long after you’re done writing about ‘em, he concluded, leaving the matter inconclusive to the present.

It’s almost verboten for rock stars to do that sort of thing although it would be kinda cool if more of them did, ’cause I still have the Van Halen tape and it’s hilarious and, to me, the act still smacks not so much of Eddie taking my remarks personally, but of Eddie reaching the absolute limit of the bad press he could take over Cherone’s recruitment and the ensuing, monumentally ill-fated Van Halen III album. He sounded like a man who’d had enough.

Because, for once, the fans had had enough with Van Halen. The lead-singer switch is one of rock’s most dangerous tricks, and Van Halen got away with it once when David Lee Roth ceded to Sammy Hagar in 1985. When Cherone didn’t take with fans or the press, Van Halen was essentially done. There was no going forward. What was the band going to do? Crawl back to Sammy? Try a fourth (fifth if you count short-lived sub Mitch Malloy) singer? It was done.