Van Halen in 1984: Alex Van Halen, David Lee Roth, Eddie Van Halen and Michael Anthony

David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen Are Sharing a Stage Again. Nobody Is Playing a Note.

July 28, 2026 Bobby And Jason

By Bobby Catalano & Jason Pascoe·We were on Dance Party USAWe lived this decade in real time, some of it on national TV. The feel is memory. The facts are research, checked against the record.

Two names, one stage, and not a single note of music. We are still processing this one.

David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen are appearing together this Thursday, July 30, at TEDxFargo, at the Brewhalla entertainment space in Fargo, North Dakota. It is the first time the two of them have been in front of an audience together since Van Halen’s last concert on October 4, 2015. The Van Halen News Desk had it first, off an Instagram post from TEDxFargo and Robert Vargas, and Ultimate Classic Rock picked it up the next day. The internet did exactly what you would expect.

So let us take the air out of the balloon right now, gently. This is not a reunion. Nobody is playing. It is a conversation, and once you know what happened between these two men after Eddie died, the fact that it is only a conversation stops being a disappointment and starts being the entire point.

What is actually happening in Fargo

TEDxFargo is an independently run TED-style event, this year themed CHARGE. It runs two days with more than 40 speakers. Roth and Alex will sit down with the Los Angeles painter Robert Vargas, whose work includes a mural of Eddie Van Halen at the Guitar Center in Hollywood, and the whole thing is being sold with one line: “Three icons. One stage. One conversation you won’t want to miss.”

Alex was announced weeks ago. Roth got added late, which is the part that made everyone sit up. A musical performance is not expected. No tour, no album, and no reformed Van Halen has been announced by anybody.

The timing is its own story. On Thursday, July 23, Roth pulled almost all of his remaining 2026 dates, wiping stops in Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky and Illinois off the schedule and leaving exactly one, August 7 in Sturgis. Neither he nor his team gave a reason. One week after clearing his own calendar, he is turning up in North Dakota to talk. And if you cannot get to Fargo, TEDxFargo posts its talks to YouTube, so this one should surface in a few weeks.

How we got here: the tour that fell apart

Here is the part most of the coverage is skipping, and it is the part that actually explains Thursday.

They already tried to do this the loud way. Alex laid the whole thing out to Rolling Stone in October 2024, around his memoir Brothers. After Eddie died on October 6, 2020, Alex’s first phone call was to Dave. The two of them got into a room and started early rehearsals for a tour, with a couple of guys from Roth’s solo band filling chairs, and a plan to bring in Joe Satriani on guitar and maybe even Michael Anthony on bass. Alex had been calling Brian May to ask how Queen kept going after Freddie Mercury.

Then Alex asked for the one thing he needed the show to do.

“The thing that broke the camel’s back, and I can be honest about this now,” he told Rolling Stone, “was I said, ‘Dave, at some point, we have to have a very overt, not a bowing, but an acknowledgment of Ed in the gig. If you look at how Queen does it, they show old footage.'” By Alex’s account, that ended it on the spot. “The vitriol that came out was unbelievable,” he said. Later in the same interview, still turning it over: “It’s just, my God. It’s like I didn’t know him anymore.”

That is Alex’s telling of it. Rolling Stone took it to Roth and noted plainly that Roth declined to comment.

The tour was finished anyway. In 2022 Alex went to a shooting range and his spine gave out. “The rifle kicked me on my ass,” he said, “and broke my back, instantly. And then I spent a year on the floor.” By the time he sat down with Rolling Stone in 2024 he had not been able to play drums for a couple of years, though he had started hitting practice pads again.

And here is the quote that makes Fargo make sense. Asked about the tour that never happened, Alex said he had few regrets: “It’s too bad on one hand, but it’s fine on the other. Because now, in retrospect, playing the old songs is not really paying tribute to anybody. That’s just like a jukebox, in my opinion.”

Read that again, then look at a panel discussion in North Dakota. A man who does not believe in the jukebox version, sitting next to the singer he fell out with over how to honor his brother, talking instead of playing. That is not a consolation prize. That is the only shape this was ever going to take.

What Van Halen meant to us in the 80s

Everything, and then it got complicated, which is very 80s of them.

1984 landed on January 9, 1984 and turned that band into something your parents had heard of. “Jump” went to No. 1 on the Hot 100, a guitar hero’s keyboard riff of all things, and the album stalled at No. 2 on the album chart for one reason only: Thriller was in the way. That is the kind of second place nobody should apologize for.

And then they blew up. Roth put out the Crazy from the Heat EP in January 1985, a pile of off-beat pop standards delivered with maximum grin, and by later that year he was out of the band. Sammy Hagar took the microphone. In March 1986 the Hagar lineup released 5150, and it did the thing the Roth lineup never managed: it went to No. 1 on the album chart. Three and a half months later Roth answered with Eat ‘Em and Smile, which went to No. 4.

Which means that in the summer of 1986, while we were on the Dance Party USA floor, you could not get through a week without both of those records coming at you, and everybody our age had to pick a side. Dave or Sammy. It was a real argument. People had positions. Some of you reading this still have a position, and honestly, so do we.

That is the thing about this band. They were never just a band, they were a running argument that happened to make incredible records, on MTV every twenty minutes, for the entire back half of the decade. Plenty of the bands from that era broke up and got back together three times over. Van Halen turned falling out and coming back into an actual operating system.

Dave said so himself, out loud, from the stage. On the Saturday night of that final Hollywood Bowl run in 2015, in the middle of “Dance the Night Away,” he stopped to mock Jon Bon Jovi’s onstage pose, then used it to pivot: “The difference is Edward and I agree to apologize every couple of summers and come out and share the good news with you.”

Every couple of summers. He was joking and he was not joking. Then he walked over to Eddie, and whatever the two of them said to each other, they said it off mic. That was the arrangement, right up until there was nobody left to apologize to.

Go listen to it today

The last time Alex and Dave were on a stage together, on October 4, 2015 at the Hollywood Bowl, the last song they ever played was “Jump.” Nobody in that building knew it was the end. Eddie stepped back from public life afterward and died five years later.

So Thursday is not a reunion, and we would ask you not to want it to be. Two guys who have been circling each other since before we were old enough to have opinions are going to sit in a room in Fargo and talk about the man they both lost. The apology cycle is running one more time, on schedule, without the guitar player.

Put on 1984 today, front to back, loud enough to annoy somebody. That is what it was built for.

Bobby and Jason

FAQ

Are David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen reuniting?
Not as a band. They are appearing together at TEDxFargo on July 30, 2026 for a conversation alongside artist Robert Vargas. A musical performance is not expected, and no tour, album or Van Halen reunion has been announced.

When was the last time David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen appeared together?
October 4, 2015, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. It was the final night of Van Halen’s 41-show North American tour and the last concert the band ever played. Eddie Van Halen died on October 6, 2020.

Why did the Van Halen tribute tour never happen?
Alex Van Halen told Rolling Stone in 2024 that he and Roth began early rehearsals for a post-Eddie tour, with Joe Satriani penciled in on guitar, but that it collapsed when Alex said the show needed to openly acknowledge Eddie. Roth declined to comment to Rolling Stone. Alex also broke his back in 2022 and had not been able to play drums for a couple of years as of that interview.

Can you watch the David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen conversation?
TEDxFargo posts its talks to YouTube after the event, so the conversation is expected online within a few weeks of July 30, 2026.

Sources

Photos: Van Halen promotional image, 1984, Warner Records, public domain. David Lee Roth by Abby Gillardi, CC BY 2.0. Alex Van Halen by Craig ONeal, CC BY 2.0. All via Wikimedia Commons.