Just when you thought rumors of David Lee Roth [ tickets ] reuniting with Van Halen [ tickets ] had been put to rest once and for all, Roth has again stoked the flames.

"I talked to the drummer [Alex Van Halen] about a week ago," Roth said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review published Tuesday (1/3). "And I think, eventually, the inevitable will happen."

Roth's comment is the latest entry in an ongoing drama that now spans two decades; it was in 1985 that he split with Van Halen after fronting the group over the course of its first six albums, and was subsequently replaced by Sammy Hagar [ tickets ].

Hagar parted with the group on bad terms in 1996, at which point Roth returned to the fold for two new tracks that appeared on a best-of album that same year, but the reunion was short-lived, and ended in an ugly exchange of angry press releases between Roth and his on-again/off-again bandmates (guitarist Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen and bassist Michael Anthony).

The group briefly went through a third incarnation with former Extreme vocalist Gary Cherone at the helm before slipping into a years-long state of limbo, during which rumors abounded of a VH reunion with either Roth or Hagar.

Vegas odds were in Roth's favor when he announced in April of 2001 that, over a period of several months during 2000, he and Eddie wrote "three astonishing tunes," and that, despite not hearing from the band for a number of months, he was "ready to go" if given an opportunity to participate in a full-scale reunion with the group.

A few weeks later, Eddie Van Halen announced that he was battling cancer. The announcement was the first official word from the group since Cherone's 1999 departure. The guitarist announced in May of 2002 that he had beaten the disease.

Also in 2002, Roth and Hagar--famously at odds other over the years--mounted a co-headlining tour, by the end of which the two flamboyant frontmen were again professing their mutual disdain for each other.

That same year, the chances of a Roth-VH reunion seemed to shrink when Roth filed a lawsuit against the group in which he claimed the trio owed him thousands of dollars in unpaid royalties.

The saga appeared settled in 2004 when the group announced that it had reinstated Hagar, and the reunited quartet--which had recorded three new songs for its second best-of collection--mounted a lengthy tour.

The cease-fire turned out to be temporary, however, when the reunion outing ended on a sour note; Hagar later said in the press that the band's final 2004 show--during which, according to a number of accounts, Eddie Van Halen appeared to be drunk and was behaving erratically--was a "disaster," and that he and Eddie had to be physically separated at the end of the performance.

Last year, Hagar mounted a solo tour, and Anthony, who joined Hagar during most of the singer's 2005 concerts, was quoted in the press as saying that Eddie was "still doing a bit of drinking" and that the guitarist's alcohol consumption during the group's 2004 tour made for some nights when the show was "kind of like a rollercoaster."

"I would have liked to have seen him totally clean up if we were gonna take this further ... 'cause, gosh, we could've gone all around the world with it," Anthony told Launch Radio Networks in May of last year.

Eddie Van Halen has mostly remained out of the public eye since the 2004 tour ended, but recently made headlines when he and actress Valerie Bertinelli finalized their divorce after a four-year separation.

Meanwhile, Roth--who this week made his debut as Howard Stern's replacement on a number of radio stations--predicted in the Tribune-Review interview published Tuesday (1/3) that his reunion with Van Halen would be sooner rather than later.

"And it definitely won't be rockers with walkers," Roth said. "Getting onstage and singing 'Dance the Night Away'--let me tell you how difficult that isn't going to be."

So far, the response from the Van Halen camp has been a familiar one: silence. At press time, Irving Azoff, Van Halen's manager, was unavailable for comment.