Van Halen on canceled tour: 'We bit off more than we could chew'

Van Halen on June 1 in Los Angeles

Credit: AP Photo

It was a bit of a surprise that Van Halen curbed almost their entire summer reunion tour last month, but the band wants to re-emphasize that the canceled dates were due to exhaustion, and not from band in-fighting.

In a rosy profile on Eddie Van Halen and his son Wolfgang -- who is performing bass duties on the tour -- USA Today had Eddie speak on the jolting news of the 30+ dropped dates.

"We bit off more than we could chew," he says. "This record took a lot out of us. And we went on tour earlier than we wanted to so we could play Madison Square Garden [in March], and that threw the schedule out of whack."

Those were almost the exact same words David Lee Roth used in a video posted in May. "As usual, we bit off way more than we could chew when it came to scheduling."

Eddie continued to say that the dates could be perhaps made up, and that "a lot of the canceled dates were in cities we already played. So in November, we'll hit Japan, and in the new year, we'll possibly do something special, but I can't talk about it."

As for speculation that the band wasn't getting along -- which caused many of their breaks to begin with -- Eddie spoke on its frontman.

"Dave's the same as he's always been, funny, witty... Sometimes I can only take that in small doses, because he just goes on and on."

Van Halen performs six more shows this month before breaking. They unleashed their new album "A Different Kind of Truth" in February.

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Katie Hasty
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After five years as a columnist and editor at Billboard, Katie Hasty joined HitFix in 2009 for music and film reporting out of New York. The Midwest native has worked as a writer, music promoter and in A&R since 1999 and performs with her band Numbers And Letters.