The one album Sammy Hagar never gets tired of: “It still raises the bar for me”
Sammy Hagar never claimed to be the most technically proficient musician in the world. All good rock and roll tends to be rough around the edges, and that kind of mentality has been what Hagar has been used ever since he joined Montrose when he was barely out of his teens. Though most of his musical diet, in the beginning, was based around the blues-soaked hard rock, he knew that he was hearing the sounds of the future the first time he put on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.
Despite being known as one of the biggest albums in the world today, Pink Floyd was never thinking in those terms. They were just looking to make the best album they could, and while Syd Barrett’s dismissal was still weighing heavy on them, Roger Waters’s vision for an album that dissects someone’s sanity was almost too perfect.
While the band were working out the basics of the album live, this is an album that really needs to be listened to as a studio creation. Yes, a song like ‘Money’ works incredibly well as a radio single with its bouncy odd time signature, but it’s harder to appreciate it on its own if fans don’t experience the first side of the record, complete with one of the best vocal performances on ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ and the guitar solo on ‘Time’.
Outside of the raw musicianship, the album still holds up because of its universal appeal. Everyone will have to deal with the passage of time and everything that life has to offer while they’re on this planet, so having an album that reminds them to avoid the darkness of life is practically a mantra to live by.
Regardless of the overarching themes or the grand vision that Waters intended, Hagar always looked at the album as the model that he tried to beat whenever he went into the studio, telling Spin, “It never gets old. That’s why I love it. After all these years, when I listen to it, it still raises the artistic and creative bar for me and has me saying to myself: ‘I still haven’t done it’. It’s so profound that it doesn’t need more explanation, does it?”
But Hagar may be a little too hard on himself. He may not be able to equal an album like Dark Side of the Moon in his head, but the success stories that he’s had both as a solo artist and as the leader of Van Halen for nearly a decade are still some of the best rock and roll music created during its time.
There are even a handful of songs that tend to have a few Floydian slips in them as well. Van Halen were never a progressive rock band by any metric, but a tune like ‘Cabo Wabo’ does have a few progressive tendencies, including the elongated jam that could have been lifted from a Floyd song if not for Eddie’s amazing tapping licks.
At the same time, it might be for the best that Hagar never tried to equal what Waters did when sculpting the concept for Dark Side of the Moon. It may have been an inspiration, but all great music is about taking what turned you on to music and making something that’s a reflection of yourself rather than your heroes.
