The 1991 album Sammy Hagar called his greatest work: “The definitive Van Halen record”
Being a member of Van Halen wasn’t something that was all that appealing to Sammy Hagar when he was first floated the idea.
Of course, it would have been incredible to perform with someone like Eddie whenever he got the chance, but he was never going to be the same kind of performer that David Lee Roth was every single time he got onstage. He had a completely different presence onstage than ‘Diamond Dave’s schtick, and when he got into the studio, he was willing to put in the work to make the best album that the group had ever made.
Granted, it’s not like ‘The Red Rocker’ had to worry about being a gamble or anything. His voice fit into Eddie’s songs perfectly on 5150, but even when looking at the kind of material that they were working with, there’s a good chance that a lot of the riffs that they had in the backlog were tunes that were written with Roth’s voice in mind. Hagar had a much more flexible set of pipes, but it took them a while to finetune everything.
Their debut with Hagar was pretty much aces from cover to cover, but OU812 was the first time they hit a stumbling block. Almost every single ‘Van Hagar’ release tends to have just the slightest bit of bloat to it, and while the album is a lean ten tracks across its runtime, there are times when you tend to feel it a little bit more. Even when they were trying something new, some of their moments of experimenting didn’t always work out and tended to sound a little bit boring.
So if they were going to make another record, Hagar wanted to correct that problem with a vengeance. The band weren’t going to be going back to their heavy metal roots by any stretch, but when listening to For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, there’s a lot more grit to the way that everything was recorded. Getting Andy Johns of Led Zeppelin fame to work on the record certainly didn’t hurt, but for Hagar, all that mattered was whether or not they had the songs to pull off everything.
In his mind, this was going to be the moment where the band made a massive statement, and even if they were having more fun outside the studio, that didn’t mean that they couldn’t show up in the studio, saying, “We wanted to make the definitive Van Halen record, and we were getting along pretty good then. But I’ll straight up say it – the only problem with that record was that we were a little bit lazy.”
“We had so much success, and we were having such a good time and not wanting to go into the studio and work as much. So, the reason that record took so long was mainly because of that, but it was a great record in the end.”
Sammy Hagar
And you can hear the real growth in the way that the band is playing. Alex’s drums had never sounded as punchy as they did on this record since the days of Women and Children First, and compared to what Hagar had been doing on the past few records, you can hear him digging a bit deeper into his bag of tricks when working on tracks like ‘Judgement Day’ and ‘Top of the World’.
The poppy single may have been ‘Right Now’, but that wasn’t really what the record was about. In fact, the album is a lot hornier than most of Van Hagar’s other output when you look at the title. Say what you will about the sleazy side of Roth’s time with the band, but titles like ‘Poundcake’, ‘Spanked’ and ‘In ‘n’ Out’ do at least fit in with an album that was originally supposed to be called FUCK.
But even if it did have a bit more risque themes this time around, that didn’t mean that Hagar was shortchanging the audience by any means. He was still willing to give everything he had to make the record, and from a sonic standpoint, this is the kind of sonic footprint that made them hang with some of the other legends in their field during the 1990s.
