The twice-postponed Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard stadium tour could have also featured David Lee Roth, had the legendary Van Halen singer not turned down the offer. According to Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx, DLR has a strict rule about which acts he’ll support in concert.
Sixx told the Los Angeles Times that when Mötley Crüe offered Diamond Dave the support slot on their highly anticipated reunion tour, he responded, “I don’t open for bands that I influenced.” As it stands, Poison and Joan Jett round out the bill for the US outing, which will now take place in 2022 after originally being scheduled for 2020.
A couple years ago, Roth told radio station KKLZ (via Blabbermouth), “Van Halen was a ’70s band — we started off in 1972, and our first two albums were in the ’70s. We sold our first 10 million records before the ’70s were over. We spawned a whole lot of imitators who resorted to gimmickry and trade crap. It’s easier to imitate a haircut and a kind of pants and to exhibit bad behavior.”
Roth’s policy didn’t apply to Van Halen contemporaries KISS, whom he did agree to support when they set out on their “End of the Road” farewell tour at the beginning of 2020. While DLR did open KISS’ shows up until the pandemic put a stop to the tour, he wasn’t on board when KISS finally resumed the outing earlier this month.
That said, it’s pretty fair to say that DLR won’t be opening for KISS any time soon — or ever again, for that matter. When confirming Roth’s absence from the rescheduled dates, Gene Simmons praised Roth as the “ultimate frontman” during Van Halen’s heyday, but then compared current DLR to a “bloated naked Elvis on the bathroom floor.” Roth responded with 18 middle fingers directed at Simmons, and the KISS singer-bassist subsequently apologized, saying, “I am so sorry and ashamed, actually, that I hurt David’s feelings.”
Meanwhile, Sixx recently said he was “so happy” that Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard decided to once again postpone their tour now that the Delta variant of COVID-19 is wreaking havoc across the country, explaining it was “not a hard decision to make when so many people’s lives are at risk.” That tour will now kick off in June 2022, with tickets available here.