“What are these guys thinking?”: the album Sammy Hagar said ruined Van Halen’s reputation
Any musician should be willing to lay themselves bare whenever they release a record. The music is the one time where people get to see the real version of you, and while the lyrics might cushion the blow a little bit, no one can get hooked on a song that’s nothing but someone hiding their feelings for minutes at a time. The best musicians now know how to keep everything completely honest, but Sammy Hagar never bothered to air his grievances when he felt Van Halen was taking a few plunges over the years.
There were many instances where ‘The Red Rocker’ had disagreements with Eddie over the years, but when listening to them play together, they were always joined at the hip, music-wise. Even on their least fleshed-out albums like Balance, you can still hear the version of the band that was birthed on 5150 shining through, even if it does mean going through more than a few cringy moments on tunes like ‘Amsterdam’.
But while the band’s reunion with Hagar saw Eddie at his worst point health-wise, their renaissance with David Lee Roth back in the fold made people think a miracle occurred. Eddie and Roth’s falling-out was the stuff of rock and roll legend, so the fact they had time to bury the hatchet and start playing together again was a godsend, even if it meant Wolfgang Van Halen taking over for bassist Michael Anthony.
When the band first started working on new material, though, A Different Kind of Truth marked the moment where they seemed to be closing that chapter of their career. Roth was clearly showing his age on a few songs, and he even became too embarrassed to put it on streaming services, but the real test to see if the band could work was to see if they could pull it off in a live setting.
After all, the Roth era had some of the greatest shows of their career, and their live album Tokyo Dome Live in Concert was everything their concerts were meant to be. The band prided themselves on saying hardly any touch-ups were made to the record, but when Hagar listened to what they put out, he figured they could have benefited from polishing a few of those rough edges.
For him, Roth had tragically regressed since his first stint in the band, and since Hagar wasn’t a fan of his to begin with, he couldn’t ignore it anymore, saying, “Every time they do something, I’m like, ‘Oh my god, can these guys do anything worse to their reputation and to the level of the music of the band?’ They’ve got some pretty rough vocals, but here I am, already starting this interview with it. It’s impossible. It’s impossible to stay away from. Standing back, I’m just going, ‘What the [expletive] are these guys thinking?’”
But it’s not like the band was looking to create their answer to Frampton Comes Alive or anything. This was supposed to be an album for die-hard fans, and since most people didn’t have the chance to see them live in concert for what would be one of their final runs around the world, this was a good snapshot in time to see them all on good terms again playing for the sake of playing.
And knowing that this was the last thing that Eddie put his name on before his tragic passing, it’s nice to see that he hadn’t lost an ounce of shine on his trademark guitar chops. He had spent years refining everything, and even after his wilderness, where he was on the verge of falling apart, he never took his guitar playing for granted for a second.
