KISS not signing Van Halen after cutting a demo with them was a huge mistake.
If you ask Gene Simmons about those early days of Van Halen, Eddie might have been willing to put on the makeup to get away from the band dynamic.
While Gene had taken the band under his wing when they were cutting their first demo, he and Eddie kept in touch until 1983. Gene claimed Eddie wanted to leave his band behind saying,
“He was so unhappy about how he and Roth were – or weren’t – getting along. He couldn’t stand him. And drugs were rampant. And so he took me to lunch and said, ‘I want to join KISS. I don’t want to fight anymore with Roth. I’m sick and tired of it.’”
That’s not what Paul Stanley remembers though, saying that Eddie was never in the conversation of being the next guitarist in KISS saying,
“I didn’t ever hear that. I was on the phone with him around that time – he was calling me, and I think there was tension in his band and he was asking me why we did solo albums. I think he felt that fracturing within his band. But as far as anything beyond that, wanting to join us or anything like that, I can’t say no and I wouldn’t say no.”
Even if Eddie were in the running, Gene shot down the idea of him actually being in the band, thinking that it wouldn’t have worked creatively saying,
“I told him, ‘Eddie, there’s not enough room. You need to be in a band where you can direct the music. You’re not going to be happy in KISS.’ I talked him out of it. It didn’t fit.”
Gene may have seen the potential within Van Halen in the early days, but there is no reality where those personalities would coexist.
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