The 1997 album Sammy Hagar called his greatest: “Underrated, undersold”
There was no real way of gauging how Sammy Hagar was going to fit into Van Halen.
David Lee Roth was impossible to replace in many respects, but when you listen to the way that ‘The Red Rocker’fit in, he was one of the best forces that the band could have asked for when they were making some of their later records. He brought that fifth gear to everything with his voice, but he felt that some of the best albums that he ever made came without the help of Eddie’s tapping skills.
Then again, Hagar wasn’t one who was looking for a bunch of flash when stepping into his new band in the mid-1980s. He saw Roth as a sideshow act when he first heard him singing with them, and while Eddie was clearly a genius in every sense of the word, he was looking to do something different. He wanted the band to hunker down on songwriting, and Eddie was more than willing to throw some new stuff at him that he had put together on the piano instead of the guitar.
It was definitely different from what the majority of fans wanted to hear, but it’s not like Hagar was outwardly trying to hurt the band’s image. I mean, look at his solo career right before he joined the band. He had already been in one of the most underrated bands of all time, Montrose, and since Van Halen had grown up listening to that record, he could easily slide back into that role since he was already riding high off of ‘I Can’t Drive 55’.
Once he overstepped his bounds, though, it was only a matter of time before Eddie started having his doubts. Everyone seemed to be in the best of spirits coming into the 1990s, but whether it was because of the changing times or Hagar not gelling like he used to, Eddie figured that it was time to end things with him. He was clearly not on the same page with the singer anymore, but if Hagar got shown the door, he was going to make the kind of record that the band wished they could have made.
And even years after the fact, Hagar felt that Marching to Mars deserved to be up there with the greatest records of his career, saying, “But if I had to choose [one album], I’d say Marching to Mars. It was my first solo record after Van Halen, and I had so much music and so many lyrics built up inside me that I think it’s a really great record – underrated, undersold, went gold, but to me it’s one of the finest things I’ve ever made.”
Then again, some of the problems from those last Van Halen albums do carry over to this one to a certain degree. Hagar had been trying to get more introspective with his lyrics, and while it does work for the most part, there are moments on the record that veer a little bit towards dad rock compared to his previous work. But this record is also the moment where he seemed to morph into the version of himself that he is today.
Every single one of his records since then has felt like one big party, and when you look at the special guests on the record, Hagar was willing to hang out with anyone who came his way. Getting Slash, Ronnie Montrose and Bootsy Collins wasn’t going to hide the big Van Halen-shaped elephant in the room, but Hagar could have cared less about making up with the band at this point.
He may have been booted from the band, but he knew that life was too short to dwell on the little things. His music needed to make him happy at the end of the day, and you can feel him rediscovering what made him fall in love with music across every single track he played on this record.
