Toronto Star Pop Music Critic Ben Rayner has written the following commentary prior to VAN HALEN's eagerly-anticipated sold-out reunion shows in Toronto at the Air Canada Centre tonight (October 7th) and October 12th:

The last time Van Halen came through town, even Eddie seemed to be suffering the strain of things going horribly awry.

Early in the morning after a desultory, under-attended performance by the band and its new singer, Gary Cherone, at the Molson Amphitheatre in 1998, the guitar virtuoso was sufficiently incensed by my review of the show that he rang up my voicemail at work and berated me for a couple of minutes. "I'll be making records long after you're done writing about 'em," he concluded, leaving the matter inconclusive to the present.

It's almost verboten for rock stars to do that sort of thing – although it would be kinda cool if more of them did, 'cause I still have the Van Halen tape and it's hilarious – and, to me, the act still smacks not so much of Eddie taking my remarks personally, but of Eddie reaching the absolute limit of the bad press he could take over Cherone's recruitment and the ensuing, monumentally ill-fated Van Halen III album. He sounded like a man who'd had enough. Because, for once, the fans had had enough with Van Halen.

The lead-singer switch is one of rock's most dangerous tricks, and Van Halen got away with it once when David Lee Roth ceded to Sammy Hagar in 1985. When Cherone didn't "take" with fans or the press, Van Halen was essentially done. There was no going forward. What was the band going to do? Crawl back to Sammy? Try a fourth (fifth if you count short-lived sub Mitch Malloy) singer? It was done.

Unless, of course, legendary foes Eddie Van and Diamond Dave could patch things up long enough to make it into a stage or a studio. Which, until the "reunion" tour that brings Van Halen to the Air Canada Centre tonight and again on Friday actually kicked off 10 days ago, nobody really believed would ever happen.

"They've been trying to do this since 1996. This has been the longest foreplay in rock-reunion history," says Ian Christe, heavy-metal historian and author of the recent band bio Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga. "I went through two years of working on the book with no expectations at all that any of this would ever happen."

Read more here.