Watch 22 Versions of ‘Panama’ By Van Halen and Their Many Lead Singers

“Panama” was the third single from Van Halen’s 1984, following “Jump” and “I’ll Wait.” That first single hit Number 1 and transformed Van Halen into the biggest hard rock band in America. “Panama” stalled at Number 13 on the Hot 100, but it was still a major presence on MTV and rock radio. Like most Van Halen videos of the time, it’s not exactly high concept. It shows the group playing an arena concert, swinging from cables attached to the ceiling, and chugging beer, as well as Roth motorcycling down a street, and doing a bizarre pole dance next to twin versions of himself. If you’re looking for a deep meaning to any of this, it’s not there. And at no point do we see a race car.

Van Halen didn’t exactly struggle at the box office before 1984. But the success of that album turned them into a touring juggernaut that sold every seat in the house as soon as they went on sale. They played 101 shows that year, wrapping up on Sept. 2, 1984, at the Monsters of Rock tour in Nuremberg, Germany, where they shared the bill with AC/DC, Ozzy Osbourne, and Mötley Crüe. They could have easily kept the party going into 1985, possibly hitting stadiums. Unfortunately, Roth and the band split apart before that was possible. Their explanation for the breakup changed quite a bit as the years went by, but it’s clear that Roth wanted a glossier sound, and was pissed about Eddie Van Halen playing outside of the band, most notably on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” There were also personality conflicts that had been simmering since the beginning. And despite all the reunions over the years, the classic lineup of David Lee Roth, Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, and Michael Anthony never again played “Panama” or any other song together after the 1984 Nuremberg show.

When Van Halen split apart in 1985, many in the industry felt that David Lee Roth had a brighter future than the band. They may have been called Van Halen, but Diamond Dave was the face and the voice. He also had a larger-than-life persona that translated perfectly onto the MTV airwaves. But in March 1986, Van Halen kickstarted the Sammy Hagar era with 5150, and the leadoff single “Why Can’t This Be Love.” Much like with AC/DC six years earlier, the fans instantly accepted this new incarnation of the band. When they began the 5150 tour March 27, 1986, at the Hirsch Memorial Coliseum in Shreveport, Louisiana, they only broke out three original songs from the Roth era: “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” “Jump,” and, of course, “Panama.”

Eat ‘Em and Smile is technically a David Lee Roth solo album, but it’s really a collaborative effort with guitarist Steve Vai, bassist Billy Sheehan, and drummer Gregg Bissonette, informally known as the David Lee Roth Band. The album hit Number 4 on the Billboard 200, leadoff single “Yankee Rose” reached Number 16 on the Hot 100, and the tour sold pretty well. Van Halen had already been out for three months when Roth played his first solo show on Aug. 16, 1986, at the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia. Eight of the 17 songs came from the Van Halen catalog, including “Panama.” Steve Vai does a very credible job aping Eddie’s original parts. He’d be far from the last guitarist faced with this very difficult task.

The David Lee Roth/Van Hagar war continued in 1988 when Van Halen’s OU812 went up against Roth’s Skyscraper. And even though Roth had a genuine hit with “Just Like Paradise,” OU812 was much more successful. Still, the 1980s ended without a definitive victor. That didn’t happen until 1991, when Van Halen dropped For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, with the hits “Poundcake” and “Right Now,” and Roth crashed hard and burned with A Little Ain’t Enough. On most nights of the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge tour, Hagar was down to just two Roth-era originals: “Jump” and “Panama.”

Steve Vai left the David Lee Roth Band in 1991, and was replaced by guitarist phenom Jason Becker. They hit the U.S. summer shed circuit in the summer of 1991 with Cinderella and Extreme, but sales were soft in many markets, and several shows were canceled. As always, Roth went heavy on the Van Halen material in the setlist. He played “Panama” first most nights. Jason Becker played guitar on A Little Ain’t Enough, but had to drop out of the tour when he was diagnosed with ALS. Joe Holmes took his place, a few years before he landed a more prominent gig with Ozzy Osbourne.

By 1994, nobody was pitting Van Halen up against David Lee Roth. At this point, Van Halen were global titans of rock, and David Lee Roth was their washed-up singer whose 1993 weed bust in Washington Square Park generated 100 times more attention than his recent solo work. But Roth wasn’t ready to completely surrender. He teamed up with producer Nile Rodgers for the 1994 solo LP Your Filthy Little Mouth, and hit the road with Terry Kilgore on guitar. No attempt was made to book Roth in arenas or sheds. He instead hit the club circuit for the first time since the early days of Van Halen. Once again, he played “Panama” as the second song most nights. He also dropped all of his Eighties solo work besides “Just Like Paradise.” It was the start of a shift towards the Van Halen catalog and away from his own work that would grow as the years ticked by.

The alt-rock revolution was just beginning when For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge dropped in the summer of 1991. Pearl Jam was still two months away from releasing Ten, and Nirvana’s Nevermind wouldn’t hit until September. There was still a lot of room in the rock world for Van Halen. When they followed up For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge with Balance, however, four extraordinarily long years had passed. The entire grunge era had come and gone. This was now the time of Hootie and the Blowfish, Sheryl Crow, and Nine Inch Nails. That might not have mattered if Balance had been a great album or had at least one catchy single. But it was a weak effort without a real hit. That doesn’t mean they had trouble selling tickets. They were an institution by this point. The Balance tour stretched out to 135 shows across 11 months. “Panama” remained one of the few Roth songs Hagar would sing, and there were many nights they dropped it from the set list. Crazy as it sounds, there were likely many in the audience who didn’t even care. They came to hear “Right Now” and other Van Hagar hits.

At the end of the grueling Balance tour, Sammy Hagar left Van Halen. The final straw was a battle over the group’s contribution to the Twister soundtrack, but it could have been anything. They’d worked way too hard over the course of a decade, and both sides needed time apart. The obvious business move was to jump on the same 1970s nostalgia bandwagon as the Eagles, Kiss, Fleetwood Mac, the Sex Pistols, and Page and Plant by reuniting with David Lee Roth. But the Van Halen brothers were determined to hire a third singer and move forward, not back. Their first attempt was with Mitch Malloy, even though this didn’t go much further than a few informal jams at Van Halen’s 5150 studios before the band went in another direction. But during that very brief time, they cut a demo of “Panama” with Mitch Malloy on vocals that somehow leaked out. It’s a look into an alternative universe where he got the job. (For much more on Malloy’s Van Halen saga, head here.)

At the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards, the David Lee Roth lineup of Van Halen presented an award to Beck, marking the first time they’d all stood together on a stage since 1984. They also recorded two new songs for a Van Halen compilation album. Everyone, of course, presumed that a reunion tour was the next step. But they didn’t know the band had secretly teamed up with former Extreme vocalist Gary Cherone. They dropped the underwhelming Van Halen III, and hit the road. Unlike Hagar, Cherone had no compunctions about singing Roth songs. He brought back “Romeo Delight,” “Mean Street,” “I’m the One,” “Dance the Night Away,” and “Feel Your Love Tonight” for the first time since Roth was in the band. And “Panama” came out every single night. “For whatever reason, Sammy only did four songs from the Dave era,” Cherone told Rolling Stone in 2012. “I get it. He was a contemporary of Dave’s. I get it. But for me coming in as a third singer, I said, ‘Listen, I got to do everything that I can to get into the good graces of these fans here.’ I remember telling Alex, ‘Look, I’ll do whatever you guys want.’”

The public had a very hard time accepting Gary Cherone as the new lead singer of Van Halen in 1998, but the group still played arenas. By 1999, Roth was reduced to playing venues like the Abyss in Houma, Louisiana, Midnight Rodeo in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Coyote’s in Louisville, Kentucky. He released the DLR Band album in ’98, but it barely made even a tiny ripple. And his live set in 1999, with Bart Walsh on guitar, was 17 Van Halen classics, including “Eruption,” plus “Yankee Rose” from Eat ‘Em and Smile. There was no more pretext of a solo career. He was now a one-man Van Halen tribute show. He even recruited Walsh from the Van Halen tribute band the Atomic Punks.

By 2002, Van Halen hadn’t existed in any form for four years. That’s why some savvy concert promoters reached out to Roth and Hagar, and convinced them to put their differences on hold and co-headline an amphitheater tour where they swapped off closing duties every night. It was a good idea on paper, but these two men had spent the last two decades trashing each other in the press. The bitterness between them wasn’t an act. In order to keep some semblance of peace, a wall was constructed backstage to keep their two camps apart. We don’t mean some sort of metaphorical wall. We mean an actual, physical wall. “It was just a bunch of plywood on little stands,” Hagar told Rolling Stone in 2022. “If you really wanted to get to somebody, you could just kick it down. I used to knock on the plywood to yell at David when I was getting ready to go on stage.” Dave’s set was once again nearly entirely Van Halen songs with the sole exception of “Yankee Rose,” but this time Brian Young took over guitar duties from Bart Walsh.

Once it became clear that audiences wouldn’t accept Gary Cherone or any other new lead singer, the Van Halen brothers — who still weren’t ready to welcome back Roth — reached a soft detente with Hagar that allowed them to cut a couple of new songs for a compilation album and go on tour. It was a very difficult time since Eddie was drinking heavily, and tensions remained thick between the Van Halens, Hagar, and Anthony. The last show in Tucson, Arizona, on Nov. 19, 2004, was the final time that Alex and Eddie shared a stage with either of those two. It was also the last time they saw either of them in the flesh.

They spent 23 years trying to do everything possible to avoid it. They said it would never happen. But once the Hagar reunion ended in bitter acrimony, there was just one person for Eddie and Alex to phone up if they wanted to hit the arena circuit again. Sadly, they refused to go the extra mile and make peace with Michael Anthony, who had been a crucial component of their live sound thanks to his background vocals. Eddie instead tapped his teenage son, Wolfgang, to take over on bass. Fans would have preferred a complete Van Halen reunion, but 75 percent was good enough for them as long as Eddie and Dave were finally back onstage together.

The 2007 Van Halen reunion tour was a box office success, even if fans and critics complained about the state of Dave’s vocals, the lack of onstage chemistry, and the absence of Michael Anthony. The next step was a new album, which took quite a few years to get off the ground since Eddie and Dave were living in two very different musical universes by this point. In the end, they had no choice but to revisit demos from their earliest days and record them properly. When it came time to promote it, the band didn’t agree to a single interview or television appearance. They instead invited the press to a show at the tiny Greenwich Village club Cafe Wha?, which was founded many years earlier by Dave’s uncle, Manny Roth. Did they play “Panama” during their truncated set? Do we really need to answer that question?

Physical media were still at least somewhat of a thing when Van Halen released A Different Kind of Truth in 2012, so they recorded a brief acoustic set at L.A.’s Henson Recording Studios to release as bonus tracks on a deluxe edition of the album to cajole fans into buying it twice. The first song was “Panama.” It’s interesting to hear their acoustic approach, even if Roth’s vocals are less than perfect. And this is as close to a Van Halen Unplugged as we’ll ever get.

The Foo Fighters threw a 46th birthday party for Dave Grohl at the L.A. Forum on Jan. 10, 2015, featuring Paul Stanley, Slash, Tenacious D, Alice Cooper, Zakk Wylde, Perry Farrell, Trombone Shorty, Lemmy, and David Lee Roth. Diamond Dave came out near the very end of the show, and kicked off his performance with a fantastically sloppy “Panama.” It was the start of a very busy (and occasionally bloody) year for the Van Halen singer.

Van Halen didn’t release a single live album during the original David Lee Roth era. They attempted to make up for lost time by releasing a 2013 Tokyo concert two years later, simply titled Tokyo Dome Live in Concert. They hit the shed circuit that summer, ostensibly to promote it, but it was just a flimsy excuse to get back on the road. A Van Halen tour with Roth was no longer an instant sell-out at this point, so they booked appearances on Kimmel, the Billboard Music Awards, and even Ellen to boost sales. They opened their Kimmel set with “Panama,” but they had to stop when Roth sliced his nose open while twirling around a microphone stand like a baton. He needed 14 stitches and could easily have called off the performance, but he went back onto the stage as soon as the doctors were done with him. Check out this fan-shot video of the first take where Eddie is forced to improv while Dave walks offstage for assistance.

Van Halen’s 2015 summer amphitheater run wasn’t marketed as a farewell tour, and it largely flew under the radar. That’s a shame since it was the last chance for fans to see Eddie Van Halen live in concert. It ended on Oct. 4, 2015, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. “Panama” was the penultimate song, right before “Jump.” “The best years of my life; the high points of all my life — onstage with you, homeboy,” Roth told Eddie that night in a rare moment of sentimentality.

Wolfgang Van Halen could have taken the path of least resistance after his father died by going on the road and playing Van Halen classics to appreciative fans. After all, he’s Eddie’s only child, a very talented guitarist in his own right, and he actually spent eight years as a full member of Van Halen. Instead, Wolfie formed his own group and plays only original songs whenever he tours, as much as that upsets some fans online. In 2021, one wrote him in frustration and said, “Wolfie, I like your stuff. I just think the time to honor Dad is now. You’ve already shown you can stand on your own!” Wolfgang fired back an incredible response: “I honor my dad by existing and doing what I do every day. I’m not fuckin’ playing ‘Panama’ for you guys.” He made a one-time exception the following year, when he performed at the Taylor Hawkins memorial concert in Los Angeles, and indeed played “Panama” as a tribute to both his father and the late Foo Fighters drummer.

When Sammy Hagar formed Chickenfoot with Michael Anthony, Chad Smith, and Joe Satriani back in 2008, they didn’t play a single Van Halen song on tour. Hagar said he simply didn’t want to force Satriani to play Eddie’s parts. Well, Hagar had a big change of heart when he launched the Best of Both Worlds tour in 2024, and did the closest thing possible to a Van Halen set without anyone onstage with the last name “Van Halen.” To pull this off, Satriani spent months perfecting Eddie’s precise guitar parts. The result was a dream show for countless fans of the Van Hagar period. Prior to the tour, Hagar hadn’t done “Panama” since the 2004 Van Halen reunion tour. But he brought it back, and has continued to perform it since then. “Never say never,” he told the fans in Holmdel, New Jersey. “I fuckin’ love this song.”

David Lee Roth resumed his solo touring shortly before Covid hit, and this time around he didn’t even do “Yankee Rose.” The setlist was 100 percent Van Halen classics. He announced his retirement after Covid shut down live music, but then un-retired for shows in 2025 and 2026 where he was joined by four background singers. There were many more dates on the books for 2026, but he called them off following a July 18 show in Fort Hall, Idaho. Weeks later, he reunited with Alex Van Halen at a TED Talk where they appeared together for the first time since 2015. In theory, a tour with David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen would sell quite a few tickets. If you throw in Michael Anthony, it sells even more. If somehow or another Hagar could be roped into this fan-fiction tour and they call it Van Halen, they’re headlining arenas. To go even crazier, if Wolfgang Van Halen is the guitar player, it’s one of the biggest rock events of the year. Sadly, there are about 18 separate reasons why such a tour isn’t going to happen, even if Irving Azoff decides to give it everything he has. Let’s just be grateful that as of a few weeks ago, Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth were both on the road singing “Panama” every night. The world is a messed-up place and the once mighty Van Halen lies in ruins. But as long as they’re both out there, all hope isn’t lost.