In a conversation conducted by The Hook Rocks podcast, bassist Michael Anthony once again discussed the all-star Van Halen tribute show and explained the reason it failed to happen:

“You’re talking about Joe being approached by Alex and Dave (Lee Roth). And then there’ve been people that, all of a sudden, in the press, I read that Jason Newsted, who played with Metallica, was (approached about it as well). Now I, myself, I got a call from Alex and Dave a few years, a right around that same time.

”And they wanted to put something together, and Joe was in the mix. I remember talking to Joe a couple of times after that, too. And Joe was telling me, ‘Yeah, well, they gave me some of that album and told me to listen to it or whatever.

“All I can say is, I’m not gonna point fingers, but through all of this, one of the ingredients was not, let’s say, playing ball with everybody else. And that’s all I’m gonna say. I’ll let you all figure it out. And that’s why none of it worked. And you’ve read it probably with Wolfgang’s (Van Halen) interviews, too, that he’s been doing this past year.

“It’s pretty sad, because even when the band was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, this was in 2007, Sammy (Hagar) and I were the only two from the band that showed up, and we weren’t even in the band at the time.

”And it was pretty sad, because I turned to Sammy during the show, I forget who was on stage playing, and we were sitting at our table and I go, I go, ‘Sammy, could you imagine if all of us, if we were all here and everybody got along and we got up there, we would kick the a*s out of this thing. It’d be a induction ceremony that nobody would ever forget.’ And sadly enough, it wasn’t to be.”