“I wish we would have gone past that”: The album sessions Sammy Hagar will always regret
Any recording session that any band has ever made is usually on the verge of devolving into an argument at any moment. It can become more than a little bit tense when working on getting the sounds right for any song, and even if the final product sounds great, there are always going to be people having to either eat their words or bite their tongues when someone else gets their way. Although Sammy Hagar was more than willing to compromise when he joined Van Halen, it didn’t take long for everything to unravel in their later years.
On their first go-around on 5150, though, the band were happy to have David Lee Roth out of their hair at this point. The journey from becoming one of the biggest rock bands in the world to not having a singer was going to be tough, but getting ‘The Red Rocker’ into the mix helped solidify them as one of the greatest comeback stories that any hard rock band had seen up until that point.
While they had weathered the storm much in the same way AC/DC and Black Sabbath did when they lost a singer, Hagar had his own problems that were completely different from Roth’s. Whereas ‘Diamond Dave’ wanted to be a sideshow character every time he walked onstage, Hagar was more interested in embracing the musician aspects of the band, usually trying to arrange the songs to sound a bit more sophisticated than before.
Most people would call that sophistication “dad-rockifying” the group, but it always seemed to work on albums like For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, complete with tunes like ‘Right Now’ in the mix. But the minute that the band hit the recording of Balance, that title quickly turned into one of the most ironic jokes in the band’s history.
Throughout every session, the band had started to butt heads over which direction to take, and even when Hagar got his way, it hit a bit of an ugly note when looking at tracks like ‘Amsterdam’. While Eddie could put his foot down on changing the lyrics to tracks like ‘Don’t Tell Me What Love Can Do’, Hagar remembered wanting to make that album entirely differently had he been given the chance.
Despite standing up for the record, Hagar felt that the sessions didn’t need to be as strained as he made them, saying, “5150 had the love and magic to where Balance is dark. The love was gone. And I wish we would have gone past that, taken a break, and that they wouldn’t have wanted to push forward and do any reunions or hire another singer like they did. And that I would’ve gotten over my desire to be a solo artist where I could do everything my way, which is so stupid.”
And considering how the whole thing ended, it’s not surprising that Hagar would have preferred more time to talk things out. Balance is far from the worst record in the band’s catalogue, but it’s easily the worst one that Hagar had his hands on, so it might have been worth having more of a dialogue rather than drawing lines in the sand.
But the biggest tragedy of this whole debacle was knowing that Hagar and Eddie never got to properly make up on record. They may have been starting to warm up to each other around the time of the guitarist’s death, but it’s now anyone’s guess as to what’s going to happen in terms of Hagar’s legacy with the group going forward with the emergence of Van Halen guitar tracks that haven’t been given the full studio treatment.
