The 1996 album Sammy Hagar wanted nothing to do with: “He completely conned me”
Sammy Hagar always had a sixth sense for when he was making the wrong decision with his career.
He knew that it was already going to be a little bit of an adjustment trying to work with the members of Van Halen, but when you look at his era of the group compared to David Lee Roth’s, he clearly had a good idea of what the band should sound like aside from the party band atmosphere that they had already been. He knew that it was going to be hard work getting them to the next phase of their career, but he knew that he was in danger of burning out at any time as well.
Compared to other rock and roll stars at the time, though, ‘The Red Rocker’ didn’t see the meaning of the word ‘break’ whenever he worked. Every one of the solo albums that he worked on seemed to be straight from the heart, and even if he had a family back at home, there was life that he loved more than on the road with a bunch of his friends. He would have done that forever, but Van Halen weren’t the same band that they were when they reached the 1990s.
The start of the decade was pretty good with For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, but there were more than a few times when they were slightly out of touch. They were able to have a few more hits before grunge really hit the airwaves, but in the age that was dominated by everyone from Nirvana to Green Day, the idea of them having yet another hit on a record like Balance was already going to be a tough sell.
It also didn’t help that the band weren’t getting along that well when they were recording. Eddie had already started to take control of what the songs should be, and even if he had far different problems with Hagar than he did with ‘Diamond Dave’, he didn’t want the frontman to say something that he didn’t feel the band could articulate that well.
That kind of attitude made for an album that felt like it was being held together by sheer force of will, but when listening to the way that their management responded to it, Hagar was livid after looking forward to taking a year off. In his mind, all that they needed was a little time away from each other so they could regroup a little bit, but since the opportunity to work on the movie Twister came up right after they went off tour, Hagar felt that their song for the soundtrack was something that was never supposed to happen.
The movie was a decent blockbuster for the time, but Hagar didn’t mince words about how he was tricked to write and record the new song when he talked to their manager, saying, “Ray [Danniels] convinced me that Twister was going to be one of the biggest movies of the year, and that we needed to do it because the money we’d make off this project would carry us through ’96. I told Ray that if what he was telling me was the truth, then I’d sacrifice and work on the project. He completely conned me. When I found out about the shuffling of songs on this project, I blew my lid.”
And since the rest of the band were already at their wits’ end, it didn’t take long for Eddie to bite the bullet and fire Hagar altogether. Or at least, that’s what it was in Hagar’s eyes. ‘The Red Rocker’ never wanted to leave the band, but after having one bad phone call with Eddie, he remembered being told that his involvement in the band had run its course and that they had done all they could do together.
Hagar was more than a little bit heartbroken, but even though he grinned and bore it throughout most of the hard times, he didn’t want to look back on Twister at all. He had only good memories about those early days in Van Halen, and all this brought back was the headaches that he got into with every member of management trying to convince him to go back into the studio to create that one extra piece of magic.
