The album Sammy Hagar said changed his life: “Set me on my course”
Sammy Hagar seemed to embody rock and roll before taking his first breath. Since he had started in the business before he was even out of his teens in Montrose, Hagar knew nothing else other than strapping on a guitar and playing as loud as he could once he opened up that mouth of his. But Hagar’s genre always comes back to hard rock, and that kind of aesthetic is something that Cream indirectly pioneered.
At least, that was how history was written. Because if you look at the way that Cream formed, they were just looking to make something they wanted to hear, which involved blending elements of blues and jazz together to create something new. Even though The Beatles were still one of the biggest bands in the world, you couldn’t deny that the power trio were challenging people’s perceptions of what music was supposed to be.
Whenever talking about the group, it usually comes back to Eric Clapton. Regardless of what Jimi Hendrix did in the 1960s, Clapton was the British guitar god to end all guitar gods for the first half of the decade, even continuing to grow once the ‘Purple Haze’ songsmith came to town.
But the crux of the group was always about that distinct rub between Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. Having a guitar god in your arsenal is one thing, but being able to conjure up a groove out of nothing and proceed to play heavy blues without coming off as ‘dad rock’ is a skill that few people actually notice.
Although Hagar was into all varieties of music, it was all over when he heard Disraeli Gears for the first time, telling SPIN, “It’s all because of Cream that I’ve always wanted to play with the highest calibre of musicians around me. Cream was the first band for me that was a real supergroup. They had a unique chemistry that only those three guys could have, and I’m still searching for it today… This album really changed my life and set me on course!”
If Hagar was a huge Cream fan, he lucked out having the number-one Clapton fan in guitarist Eddie Van Halen. Whereas Clapton had graduated to playing tasteful blues by the end of the 1970s, Eddie had pioneered his own technique and expanded on what Clapton was doing, down to making his guitar squeal and employing tapping licks pulled from Clapton’s lick library.
There are even a few songs from the Hagar era that seem to pull from this version of hard rock. While ‘Finish What Ya Started’ feels closer to the baseline blues that The Yardbirds may have had, ‘A Apolitical Blues’ off of OU812 is firmly in the Cream playbook, featuring Hagar singing his pointed lyrics while the rest of the group seems to be riffing just for the hell of it half the time.
However, don’t mistake that kind of jamming for half-hearted playing, either. After all, jams are where some of the best songs originate, and when you have someone like Eddie Van Halen next to you, it’s not long before he starts to pull out some riffs that could put ‘Slowhand’ to shame.
