The album Sammy Hagar thought was too self-indulgent: “It wasn’t really a piece of art”
While a guitar solo is the ultimate act of bonafide rock and roll escapism, certain critics find it a little too self-indulgent for their liking. Ultimately, songs do indeed serve a wider purpose than building a climax for the pentatonic scale to get pounded in the bridge, so when they on on too long or overshadow the rest of the song, it can come off a little crass. Conversely, rock is at it’s most exciting when the band’s axeman is given free rein to rock out. And have a band ever typified that approach more than Van Halen?
Taking rock and roll sensibilities and ramping them up to ten, they brought a face-paced energetic style of the genre into the mainstream. Led fearlessly by the mercurial Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth, it was all about bringing the guitar to the forefront and ‘sticking it to the man’.
But when Sammy Hagar took the reigns after Roth’s departure, the band were given ample opportunity to explore the spaces that existed between foot-to-the-floor rock and roll. “From the first second, Sammy could do anything I threw at him,” said Eddie Van Halen, “It just opened up a whole new door. Finally, we felt like we were four people with a common vision. All of a sudden, everything felt complete.”
Hagar’s introduction thrust the band into the Van Hagar years, a new chapter centred around fresh interpretations of songwriting, pulling in different instrumental elements. But while a change of tact was refreshing and revitalising at the beginning, it ultimately drove a wedge between Hagar and Van Halen, who parted ways in 1996 due to creative differences.
With his prolific contribution and forward thinking contribution to the band being ripped away from him, Hagar was left with both a point to prove and an empty void into which he could dump his free-thinking mind. Somewhere in between confident and angry, he stepped into the studio to record Marching to Mars and Red Voodoo. While many Hagar fans herald the work, he looks back on it with relative discomfort:
“When I left Van Halen, I went in the studio and made a CD called Marching to Mars with all studio musicians. I did it immediately. With the disappointment riding on my shoulders of the breakup of the band, I felt just driven to go right into the studio” he said.
“I made a very self-indulgent record. … Then I went right back in the studio and made Red Voodoo which was very much like our live concerts. It really wasn’t a piece of art, in my opinion, as much as it was a celebration of us just playing music”.
What followed was a murky relationship that saw more falling outs before a damp squib of a reunion. There’s no denying that when the band were on song during the Van Hagar years, they were as good as any and leave you wondering what may have been without the squabbles.
