Van Halen once wrote a song called “Ain’t Talkin’ About Panama”

The multi-instrumentalist and singer Wolfgang Van Halen is currently on the road with his own band Mammoth WVH and in an interview with Classic Rock he talked about his time as Van Halen’s bassist during the band’s final reunion.

He revealed that he helped his father and his uncle Alex Van Halen to write a song called “Ain’t Talkin’ About Panama” that could have been used on their final record “A Different Kind of Truth” but David Lee Roth decided that he would not record it.

Van Halen once wrote a song called “Ain’t Talkin’ About Panama”

“I remember the way we knew how to work with Dave. Al, Dad and I were working on a song at the time (before the final album). We’d come up with something in the moment when we were jamming and it was really cool. We called it Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Panama as a joke, because it had a vibe of both of those songs put together.”

“We told the producer we were working with at the time, ‘When Dave comes to sing tonight, whatever you do, do not tell him that we wrote this. When we’re together tomorrow, we can come to him together and act, like, Hey listen to this…’

“But he didn’t listen to us. He told Dave. ‘Hey, check this out…’ And Dave was, like, (abruptly) ‘No, not doing it. We were, like, ‘If you’d listened to us, it could have been another cool song on the album.’ The relationship between Van Halen and their singers was always complicated,” Wolfgang Van Halen said.

Van Halen came to an end in 2020 after the death of the legendary co-founder and guitarist Eddie Van Halen at the age of 65. Since then there are rumors about a possible reunion to pay tribute to the late guitarist but it seems that it won’t happen, like radio host Eddie Trunk pointed recently that David Lee Roth would be the one who wasn’t allowing the reunion to happen, because he was someone complicated to deal with.