alternatehistory.com

A lot of people know of Van Halen as a good-time party rock band during the David Lee Roth years, especially with the first two Van Halen albums and 1984, but around the time of Women and Children First, the band starting straying from the formula of party music and hard rock covers of old 60's Kinks and 70's disco tunes and going in a more strange and perhaps diverse direction with their music. After W&C1st, tensions between Eddie and Dave were starting to mount and Eddie started writing material for a solo album. One day, Dave found Eddie's material and started writing lyrics to it reflecting his recent trip to an inner-city in Haiti and its tales of violence, prostitution etc... The result of all this came the album "Fair Warning" released in 1981.

Fair Warning was a fairly unusual album as it was a lot funkier than anything VH had put out previous, but it was also very dark lyrically and sonically. Due to this different musical direction, the album sold poorly (for VH standards anyways), and prompted Warner Brothers along with David Lee Roth to put pressure on the band to put out a very commercially viable album with choc full of covers and "happier" sounding originals. Being that the band was exhausted by this time from non-stop touring, they relented and the result was a very watered down album called "Diver Down" which sounded almost completely opposite of Fair Warning.

After Diver Down, VH put out the highly successful (and very pop-oriented) 1984 leading to massive commercial overkill, and a clash of the egos between Eddie and Dave leading to the latter's departure in 1985.

But what if...

Van Halen ignores the poor album sales and soldiers on in the direction of Fair Warning basically telling their record company to get bent?

Do they break up shortly after and everyone goes into solo projects?

Do they become a more underground act?

Is this even feasible?
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