10 Artists That Ended Their Career With One Album

In the era of MTV, there was nothing that was going to dull Van Halen’s rise as the biggest band in the world. Even though they may have gotten their start in the late ‘70s, they practically birthed the hair metal movement on the Sunset Strip, with bands like Motley Crue coming up in their wake to create something that was a lot more sleazy. Van Halen could still prove why they were one of the greatest bands on the scene, and it was that ambition that broke the first version of the band.

Around the time that they were working on 1984, Eddie Van Halen was getting more and more interested in the textures that could be used with keyboards, which didn’t sit well with David Lee Roth, who insisted that they try to stick to their usual formula. After years of having to compromise, Eddie put his foot down about keyboards being a prominent part of the next album, and it made for some of their most successful hits like Jump and I’ll Wait. That’s not to say that this is a sell out record by any stretch, with Panama and Hot For Teacher being some of the most intense songs that the Roth era of the band would ever have.

If things were already tense in the studio though, it got even worse when they tried to take things on the road, with Roth and Eddie continually butting heads before Diamond Dave left the group altogether to make his solo debut. Without their star frontman, Van Halen built themselves back up from nothing with Sammy Hagar, going on to even more success in the next few years with the Red Rocker behind the mic. For a few short months after 1984, there was a good chance that one of the greatest hard rock bands of all time was dead in the water.