The band both Sammy Hagar and Robert Plant wanted to join: “Exactly the way I wanted”
Anyone would count themselves lucky to have the career that Sammy Hagar or Robert Plant have had.
Although neither of them got there without a bit of hardship, it’s easy to look at their track record as nearly spotless going through their solo careers and with Van Halen and Led Zeppelin, respectively. But if they had it their way, there were a few musicians who owned their heart long before they started fronting their own outfits.
Then again, Van Halen always felt like a bit of a successor to Zeppelin in many ways. Aside from the fact that Jimmy Page inspired Eddie to start his tapping technique, there’s a certain timelessness to Van Halen’s records that excite people the same way that every fan’s older brother got a thrill out of listening to something like Houses of the Holy or Physical Graffiti for the first time.
And when Hagar joined in place of David Lee Roth, all the musicianship seemed to go up another notch half the time. They didn’t want to be the same band, but they knew there was a lot of untapped potential. Eddie could do a lot of things both on guitar and on the keyboard, and when they started making records like 5150, they had free reign to do whatever the hell they wanted when they started making tunes like ‘Love Walks In’.
But in between the melodic masterpieces, all roads trailed back to the blues for every member of Van Halen. Hagar was always interested in bands like Cream before he had the idea of joining Montrose, but when he first started taking the idea of being a frontman seriously, he felt that no other artists had a sweeter gig than what Rod Stewart had being the singer for Jeff Beck.
Beck was the kind of technician that any guitarist that did their homework aspired to be, and Hagar would have loved the chance to be a member of the group if he could, saying, “I was lucky enough to see this band live, and I was completely filled with both envy and admiration. The way that Rod Stewart sang was exactly the way that I wanted to sing. The way that Jeff Beck played guitar was exactly the way that I wanted to play.”
In the case of Plant, though, it’s a bit of a different story. Whereas ‘The Red Rocker’ was clearly a fan of Beck when he was making waves, ‘Percy’ was a contemporary when putting Led Zeppelin together. Page was already one of the premier guitarists of the day and had been shown the ropes by Beck, but Plant admitted that he would have been lying if he said that he hadn’t thought about if things had gone differently.
Because had he had the chance, there’s a high probability he could have taken Stewart’s place had he been asked, saying, “It was good to be able to hit it off like that [with Zeppelin]. Had I been asked to join Jeff Beck, I’d have probably gone down and seen him, found out that he was a good guitarist, needed the bread, gone with him and got really off.” Then again, would either of them have worked with what Beck was trying to do?
Certainly Plant had the range to pull that off, and Hagar was more than capable as well, but that would have meant a few of Beck’s classic records would have been somewhat sabotaged. It’s hard to say whether an album like Blow by Blow would have been improved by bringing in a powerhouse such as them, but if they had spent all their creative energies on that, there’s a chance ‘Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers’ would have turned into a pale imitation of the version that we know today.
So, really, the fact that neither Plant nor Hagar fulfilled their dreams is actually a blessing in disguise in lots of ways. Because no matter how many times they think about what could have been, it’s for the best that we can listen to everything from ‘Freeway Jam’ to ‘Rock and Roll’ to ‘I Can’t Drive 55’ all in the same musical timeline.
