Question Celebrity

After playing "Roxanne" together at the Grammys, the Police launched ticket sales for a major reunion tour this spring and summer -- and so have Genesis, the Smashing Pumpkins and the Eagles. For almost any defunct but beloved rock band, there is no greater reason to shut up and get along than the immense financial gains of reuniting. You'd be insane not to boost royalties and publishing fees from albums and songs created long ago, while also reaping a nice pile of cash from ticket sales in the here and now.

These fiduciary pursuits are not very rock-like, but they are understandable if that solo career hasn't been all one had hoped. Plus, nostalgic audiences can be awfully forgiving of the ravages of time. (In fact, they find in your wrinkles something to love about their own.) What more could a celebrity -- and his accountants and business managers -- ask for?

Too bad, then, about Van Halen's somewhat predictable inability to pull off its reunion plans. The band, whose various members were just inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, had recently announced that it would re-form, with 15-year-old Wolfgang Van Halen joining his guitar-god father, Eddie, and drummer uncle Alex, along with original singer David Lee Roth.

But the band never got past a January rehearsal, since, as the Los Angeles Times helpfully explained, Eddie Van Halen is "somewhere between Axl Rose and Michael Jackson on the music industry scale of eccentric recluses." It turns out that the normal, calm one who seemed most able to make the reunion work is Roth, 52, who told the Times about his lifelong dream of becoming a paramedic and the recent months he spent working as an emergency medical technician in New York: "I was working in neighborhoods that were almost exclusively black and Spanish-speaking, so only maybe twice out of 200 clients was I recognized . . . I've been in more project apartments than Jay-Z and Diddy combined."

Now, while it would be great to see Van Halen all over again (since, after all, "What we sell is that we make all the guys feel young and invincible and all the girls feel young and desirable," Roth said), it is our firm belief at Question Celebrity that there is something pathetic in reunion tours, for stars and fans alike, no matter how much the experience rocks.

Plus, the idea of David Lee Roth riding around in ambulances (as medic, not mental patient) speaks to QC's core mission: helping spent celebrities find something else to live for, something not anchored in the past.

E-mail: celebrity@washpost.com.