Van Halen to rock 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' next week and tour this summer
The men who play “Mean Street” are joining forces with the man who brings you “Mean Tweets.”
To promote an upcoming summer/fall North American tour, Van Halen will play a special performance on Hollywood Boulevard on March 30 to be featured on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the band and JKL announced today. The hits-laden set will can be seen on the late-night ABC talk show that evening and the following night at 11:35 p.m. (No word on whether it will include “Top Jimmy,” but it feels appropriate.) This is being billed as the band’s first U.S. television performance with original lead singer David Lee Roth, who most recently rejoined the band in 2007.
The 39-date tour will kick off July 5 in Seattle and wrap up Oct. 2 in Los Angeles, with tickets going on sale April 4. The band, who will also rock slightly disoriented audience members of Ellen on April 2, is releasing its first live album with David Lee Roth, Tokyo Dome Live In Concert, on March 31.
News of the tour will be music to the ears of Van Halen fans, who have received little news recently about the band’s state of affairs. Eddie told Rolling Stone at an event last month at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Amercian History that Van Halen currently had no plans to record a new album or embark on another tour. Moreover, Roth’s status in the band sounded vague. “I’d love to make a studio record,” he said. “Depends on everybody’s timing. I don’t know what Dave is up to now. I don’t know if he’s living in New York or Japan or wherever he is.”
After a nasty split in 1985, Van Halen reunited with Roth briefly in 1996 (recording two new songs for a greatest hits album before it all fell apart again) and much more successfully a decade later, when they embarked on a 2007-2008 tour with Diamond Dave and Eddie’s son, Wolfgang, who replaced original bassist Michael Anthony. The band released a well-received album, A Different Kind of Truth, in 2012, and played its last concert in the summer of 2013.
