‘Balance’: the one album Sammy Hagar felt Eddie Van Halen ruined
Eddie Van Halen had the right to give his opinion on anything that Van Halen released.
If his last name was ending up on the cover of the album, he was going to make sure it was something that he could stand behind, but it’s not like Sammy Hagar or David Lee Roth couldn’t add their two cents in, either. But even for the standards that Eddie set for himself, Hagar felt that there were times when he overstepped his bounds in the studio a little too much.
Then again, judging Eddie’s habits in the Roth era and the Hagar era is like talking to two different musicians. A lot of what Eddie was doing at the start of his career had to work around Roth’s voice most of the time, so there was no way that he was going to be able to show him a song like ‘Dreams’ and expect ‘Diamond Dave’ to sing everything note for note the way that he wanted.
With ‘The Red Rocker’ behind the mic, things suddenly got a little more flexible. Hagar could reach some massive heights with his voice that no one else could have predicted, but there’s one occasional problem that comes with the Hagar era: bloat. Make no mistake, the records are fantastic, but the band started succumbing to what we’re going to call ‘Peter Jackson Syndrome’. There’s no lack of quality there, but chances are they could have tightened up different pieces of their records and made a much more digestible result than what we eventually got.
And nowhere is that more evident than on Balance. There are many pieces of the record that work well, but after going through the same compromises that he had always gone through with Roth, Eddie finally had had enough with Hagar. But with both of them planting flags in the sand of what they wanted the tunes to sound like, all it resulted in was a record that feels like two different visions.
But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who was going to win the argument. Eddie did eventually get his way by asking Roth to change some of the lyrics to tracks like ‘Don’t Tell Me What Love Can Do’, but aside from letting a song like ‘Amsterdam’ onto the final record, Hagar remembered being frustrated seeing Eddie trying to completely control every aspect of the group.
Hagar was more than happy to work with Eddie to get the best take, but he could only see a control freak after a while, saying, “It really would piss me off because I’m sitting there waiting for Ed to stop complaining about something he hasn’t even heard yet. So [producer] Bruce [Fairbairn] said, ‘F*ck this. Come on, we’re going to Canada.’ And him and I went up to Bryan Adams’ house where he had a vocal booth in his studio and a board. That’s it. So, I did ‘Can’t Stop Loving You’. I did ‘Don’t Tell Me What Love Can Do’. I did ‘Deja Vu’ there.”
Although Hagar did eventually get some great tunes out of the deal, the writing was on the wall that they either needed a break or at least some time to sort out their creative impulses. But since the record company needed a tour and a tie-in movie song for Twister, the band ended up fracturing halfway through, with ‘The Red Rocker’ eventually being given a phone call by Eddie saying that he was fired.
While Balance could not have been a more ironic title, a lot of the issues are more about the things that weren’t said at the time. They had spent years being the best of friends, but if the issues take time to fester for that long, it’s either going to result in them blowing up or having a few emotional wounds by the end of everything.
