What Every Ex Member Of Van Halen Is Doing Today

Few bands accomplished as much as Van Halen did. Inducted into the sometimes controversial Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and selling nearly 80 million copies of acclaimed and influential albums like "1984" and its self-titled debut, Van Halen injected classic songs like "Jump," "Runnin' with the Devil," and "Right Now" into the collective consciousness.

Van Halen could sometimes go too far, but it inspired countless other bands because it did hard rock differently. Its musicians understood that pop song-craft and showmanship were as important as licks, attitudes, and volume. Through a nearly 50-year history, Van Halen experienced only a relative handful of lineup changes, including some of the least and most successful band member replacements ever. It always operated from a core of brothers Eddie and Alex Van Halen, jamming with bassists Michael Anthony and later Wolfgang Van Halen, and performing behind singers David Lee Roth, Sammy Hagar, or Gary Cherone.

Moving beyond its many messy band breakups, Van Halen reunited variously with Roth and Hagar for 21st-century tours and recorded its final album in 2012, before breaking up for good in 2020. Here's what every musician who was ever officially a member of Van Halen — or might as well have been — has spent the last decade or so doing, both in and out of the rock band that made them musical icons.

Once ruling over the world of hard rock in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, Eddie Van Halen's final decades were characterized by health issues and controversy. In 1999, Van Halen underwent surgery to have a bionic hip installed. He then had to have about a third of his tongue removed by a surgeon in 2000 due to the presence of cancer, which had spread to the musician's throat. While eventually declared free of cancer, he maintained for many years a regimen of special treatments in Germany. 

A chronic chain-smoker of cigarettes, Van Halen blamed his illness on another cause. "I used metal picks — they're brass and copper — which I always held in my mouth, in the exact place where I got the tongue cancer," Van Halen told Billboard. The cancer returned and spread into Van Halen's brain, and he died on October 6, 2020, at age 65. A death certificate cited the cause of death as a stroke, with pneumonia, a blood disorder called myelodysplastic syndrome, and lung cancer as major contributing factors.

In spite of his medical issues, Eddie Van Halen still kept Van Halen afloat, recording the 2012 album "A Different Kind of Truth" as a reunion with first singer David Lee Roth, and embarking on multiple tours in the 2000s and 2010s. He left behind a trove of recordings made with brother Alex Van Halen, one example of which the drummer released in 2024.

Propulsive drummer Alex Van Halen helped found Van Halen and stayed a member throughout all of its incarnations. The group received most of Van Halen's musical energies, and his solo work only consists of two songs recorded with Eddie Van Halen for the "Twister" soundtrack in 1996. That same year, Van Halen divorced his wife of 12 years, Kelly Carter. 

In 2013, the musician sued his former spouse, all because she'd continued to use her married name as her last name in a professional capacity for her construction, interior design, and fashion company, Kelly Van Halen. Alex Van Halen's umbrella business affairs company, ELVH, said that such use suggested to the public that the rock band of the same name was endorsing those businesses. The Van Hales settled out of court after more than a year of legal fighting, with the Kelly Van Halen company permitted to keep using that name.

In 2024, Alex Van Halen published "Brothers," his memoir and tribute to his deceased sibling and Van Halen bandmate. In the wake of the death of his best friend and brother, Van Halen said that he endured grief so agonizing and affecting that he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. While in the initial stages of mourning, Van Halen endured a spinal injury so severe that an MRI scan depicted a hole in it. For the better part of a few years, Van Halen couldn't play drums or walk correctly because of the medical issue.

In 1998, Eddie Van Halen started to push bassist Michael Anthony out of the band they'd both been a part of for more than 20 years. He wasn't allowed to contribute much to the "Van Halen III" album, his participation in a 2004 tour only happened when he agreed to receive less pay than the other band members, and in 2006, Eddie Van Halen fired Anthony in favor of his own teenage son, Wolfgang Van Halen.

According to Anthony, Eddie and Alex Van Halen turned on him because of his side hustle. Anthony is such a fan of hot sauce that he got a tattoo of the anthropomorphized chili pepper mascot of the Ring of Fire brand, and then collaborated with that product's producer to launch his own line of spicy condiments. Under the Mad Anthony's brand, the bassist helps devise and produce various hot sauces, barbecue toppings, and mustards. "The Van Halens were not okay with my hot sauce," Anthony told New York Magazine in 2007. 

It also didn't help that Anthony stayed both friendly and professional with Sammy Hagar following his departure from Van Halen in the mid-1990s. When the singer created the supergroup Planet Us, he asked Anthony to join. "Eddie felt that I was a traitor," Anthony told "The Pulse of Radio" (via Blabbermouth). After recording Planet Us's only album with Hagar in 2002, Anthony followed the front man into the bands Chickenfoot and Sammy Hagar and the Circle.

Part rock star, part stand-up comedian, the charismatic and popular David Lee Roth got so big for Van Halen that he left the band in 1985 with the urge to make albums under his own name. Roth released seven albums, the last arriving in 2003. While he still hit the road with Van Halen and without, Roth has focused on other career opportunities. In 2004, he trained to become an emergency medical technician in New York City and has since helped save lives over the course of hundreds of calls. 

Then in 2006, after Howard Stern took his popular radio program to satellite radio, Infinity Broadcasting found a replacement program: "The David Lee Roth Show," but it was canceled after three months on the air. Roth also helped found and run the skin care for tattooed people line Ink The Original and painted a line of humorous artworks during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Musically, Roth has been quiet for the past 10 years. His shows with Van Halen in 2015 are, as of 2025, his final live performances. Booked to open for Kiss during a 2020 tour rescheduled to 2021, Roth got booted, and then a holiday-period residency in Las Vegas was called off. In December 2024, Roth re-emerged in the form of a viral video depicting the musician singing and dancing along to his 2022 cover of "Panama," the 1984 Van Halen song on which he sang lead vocals.

As the former singer for the '70s hard rock band Montrose and a solo star in the 1980s with hits like "I Can't Drive 55," Sammy Hagar was used to going it alone when he departed Van Halen in 1996. He quickly focused on business, hospitality, and branding, including running Cabo Wabo Cantina, his hard-partying club in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, named after a 1988 Van Halen song that birthed a chain and a tequila brand. Hagar completed the sale of the liquor brand to Campari in 2010, which totaled more than $100 million, and he stayed on as a spokesperson.

Shortly after finishing a tour, Hagar was set to start a residency in Las Vegas in 2025. "I don't think I want to go on tour anymore," he told the Miami Herald. "I'll go out and do a one-off show and do things like that, but the residency is going to give me a good extension of my career." At various points, that career included solo tours, Van Halen reunion tours, and making new music with the groups the Waboritas, Planet Us, Chickenfoot, and Sammy Hagar and the Circle.

Hagar and Eddie Van Halen ended their estrangement before the guitarist's death, and in 2025, he plans to record a song about his late bandmate he wrote with his sideman, virtuoso guitarist Joe Satriani. "It was like this could be a song that Eddie and I would've written," Hagar told Rolling Stone.

Amidst Sammy Hagar's contentious split with Van Halen in 1996, David Lee Roth briefly rejoined, only for old tensions to resurface at the MTV Video Music Awards. He was out, but Van Halen had already recorded some material with a new front man: Mitch Malloy, who'd scored a couple of minor rock chart hits in 1992. When it came time to return to the job in late 1996, he bowed out, offended that Van Halen made the MTV appearance without telling him. "I go on gut feelings, and it was clear to me that something was amiss, so why continue?" he told music journalist Mitch Lafon (via Ultimate Classic Rock). "I was like, well, if they don't want me, let me do them a favor and bow out."

Malloy had a solo career to fall back onto, and that's exactly where he headed. Since his flirtation with joining Van Halen, Malloy worked as a for-hire songwriter in Nashville and has recorded multiple albums, the most recent, "The Last Song," arriving in 2023. A true solo effort, he wrote, produced, mixed, and mastered the entire LP, on which he played all the instruments. Malloy finished the record just after a four-year period in which he served as the replacement singer in another vintage hard rock band, Great White.

Throughout most of the 1980s and the 1990s, the prodigiously piped vocalist Gary Cherone fronted the Boston hard rock and pop metal band Extreme. In 1991, Cherone fueled Extreme to two-hit wonder status with the less aggressive, acoustically-driven vocal showcases "More Than Words" and "Hole Hearted," and just after Extreme split up in 1996, the singer was chosen to replace the outgoing Sammy Hagar in Van Halen. (At the time, Cherone and Van Halen shared a manager.) In 1998, Cherone provided the raspy and acrobatic vocals on "Van Halen III," a terrible album that has one great song. The record sold half a million copies and generated the No. 1 rock radio hit "Without You," but all that wasn't enough for Cherone to earn a long-term position in Van Halen. The group relieved the singer of his duties in 1999.

Cherone moved on to other musical pursuits, including the bands Hurtsmile and Tribe of Judah, a single solo release, 2002's "Exit Elvis," and reconvening Extreme on two occasions, in 2008 and in 2023, the latter of which included an extensive tour. Cherone has also publicly discussed his devout Roman Catholic beliefs, and in 2020 he recorded and made a video for his version of Kanye West's gospel song "God Is."

Van Halen's 2007 reunion tour brought singer David Lee Roth back into the band, but it didn't allow for a full re-creation of the classic lineup, because guitarist Eddie Van Halen had fired bassist Michael Anthony and installed his then-16-year-old son, Wolfgang Van Halen. The younger Van Halen remained in the band created by his similarly named father and uncle, both on stage and on recordings, but with the band not touring after 2015 and ending altogether in 2020, the bassist has had plenty of time to explore his own musical muse.

Outside of Van Halen, Wolfgang Van Halen returned to his primary instrument. Following a stint in Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti's band, Tremonti, he formed the project Mammoth WVH, which takes its name from an early iteration of his late father's band. The hard and heavy band has since released many singles and two albums, a self-titled effort and "Mammoth II." In 2022, his single "Distance" landed a Grammy Award nomination for Best Rock Song, and about a year later, he contributed guitar parts to "I'm Just Ken," the mock-power ballad for the soundtrack to the 2023 blockbuster "Barbie" movie. The song received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song; Van Halen performed it live at the ceremony. Another 2023 highlight for the musician was his marriage to his partner of eight years, Andraia Allsop.

Michael Anthony was the longest-serving bassist in Van Halen, but he wasn't the first. Before Van Halen took on that name, it performed under the names Genesis and Mammoth, and with a musician named Mark Stone playing the bass guitar. Part of the group of musicians from 1972 to 1974, Stone left the band because he didn't want to sing harmonies or backing vocals, and because he wanted to concentrate on his college studies. Stone didn't pursue music professionally after that, but he did once perform with the Van Halen tribute act, Fan Halen.

When Van Halen staged the last show on what would prove to be its final tour in 2015, a show at the Hollywood Bowl not far from where the band formed in Pasadena, Eddie Van Halen sent Stone tickets, his presence serving as bookends to the entire history of the band. 

In another tragic detail about Van Halen, on September 26, 2020, Stone's brother, Brad Stone, announced the death of the bassist. Spending his final days under hospice care, Mark Stone died from cancer, just 10 days before the death of his former bandmate, Eddie Van Halen, from the same disease.

As a staff producer at Warner Bros. Records, Ted Templeman became the album creator of choice for many titans of the 1970s, including Van Morrison, the Doobie Brothers, and Van Halen. The band signed with Warner after Templeman was so impressed by guitarist Eddie Van Halen's musicianship that he personally escorted label head Mo Ostin to a show. Templeman is as responsible for Van Halen's sound and success as any full-fledged member of the group. He orchestrated all five albums Van Halen recorded during the David Lee Roth era, and then 1991's "For Unlawful Carnage" with Sammy Hagar.

Templeman even managed to stay loyal and friendly with members of Van Halen whether or not they were in the band — he produced solo records for Roth and Hagar, and he frequently spoke to Eddie Van Halen until the guitarist could no longer speak due to cancer. "He would send texts to me every morning," Templeman told Billboard. "Put like a little 'Love you, Ted' and put a strong arm next to that, meaning, 'I'm still [fighting].' Bunch of hearts." 

Templeman started to scale back his workload in recent decades, often co-producing albums with others. His final credits are two Joan Jett and the Blackhearts albums in the 2000s, and the Doobie Brothers' "World Gone Crazy" in 2010. In 2020, he published his memoir, "Ted Templeman: A Producer's Life in Music."