The “beautiful” song Sammy Hagar needed to make
Sammy Hagar didn’t really want to sweat being in a band like Van Halen when he first joined.
He knew that he was comfortable with his solo career, and even if anyone would have given their left arm to play with Eddie around that time, he knew that he would be fine whether it worked out with the band or not. And while there were some tunes that were clearly written with David Lee Roth in mind, ‘The Red Rocker’ knew when they needed to run down a classic when he heard one.
But not everything that Hagar could do really meshed with Van Halen’s style all of the time. When everyone heard that he was going to join the band, it was easy to visualise it a little bit, but there was still that big question of whether he was big enough to fill ‘Diamond Dave’s shoes. Roth was a masterful performer, but the reason why Hagar worked so well was that he was the opposite of what everyone expected from Van Halen.
He was a far more natural singer every time he sang one of their songs, and while he wasn’t going to be singing tunes like ‘Hot For Teacher’ whenever he got up onstage, ‘Dreams’ was a perfect substitute when they started working on some new material. They were a far more musical band when Hagar joined, and that all came down to Eddie growing more fond of working on a keyboard.
Most of the guitar fans would have felt cheated knowing that one of their heroes was playing the keyboards instead of a guitar, but Eddie could have had any instrument in his possession and be equally dangerous. He was never trying to make anything too flashy by any means, but if Roth had a problem with the piano on some of their older material, Hagar was going to make it a core part of their identity.
That’s not to say that Eddie completely put his guitar down or anything. Most of the songs on 5150 are composed of some truly epic guitar solos and effects that make you wonder what the hell he was even doing, but there are also tunes like ‘Love Walks In’ that seemed too good to be true. No one expected Van Halen to be the kind of band that could pull off a ballad, but Hagar was in love the first time that he heard what Eddie was playing.
Those keyboard lines weren’t going to fly with Roth, but it was just what they needed to make something new, with Hagar recalling, “I remember he started playing ‘Love Walks In,’ and I’m going, ‘This is a beautiful piece of music. Why the fuck have you not used this?’ He said, ‘Man, I’ve been sitting on this for like three years.’ Dave just didn’t sing like that – he probably couldn’t bring something like that home.”
The band weren’t going to make a full 180-degree turn towards keyboard music or anything, but hearing this side of them did give Hagar’s era a lot more depth. Everyone could still listen to tunes like ‘Good Enough’ and ‘Get Up’ on that first record, but if ‘Love Walks In’ managed to find the audience it needed, there was no reason to think they couldn’t take a chance when making tunes like ‘When It’s Love’ or ‘Right Now’ later down the line.
Because, despite Van Halen being a rock and roll band, Hagar didn’t want them to be defined by simply one genre of music. He had a lot more eclectic influences, and if Eddie had a lot of music deep inside of him, it wasn’t that insane to think that they could pull off a second act that could have rivalled anything that the band had done back when Roth was at the helm.
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