The best Sammy Hagar performance Eddie Van Halen ever heard: “Like nothing he’d ever done”
Any other band not named Van Halen would have been dead in the water if they had lost someone like David Lee Roth.
Half of their live show came down to the way that ‘Diamond Dave’ held court with the rest of the crowd, and even if he was over the top, the idea of him leaving the band behind felt like the end of a grand era for the group. But Eddie felt that he had another ace in the hole the minute that Sammy Hagar walked in the door for their first rehearsal together.
But at the time, ‘The Red Rocker’ was definitely going to be a strange fit for the band. You can definitely hear potential for him being a leader of a band like Van Halen, but it’s not like Hagar had the same kind of stage charisma that Roth had. He was a completely different animal, and that’s half the reason why the band worked so well when he came up with the main melody to a song like ‘Summer Nights’.
They weren’t in the market for a Roth clone when they made a new record, and you can hear Hagar doing his own thing on every single track. It was incredibly ballsy for them to go onstage for the first time and not play anything from the Roth era except for ‘Jump’, but Hagar was definitely the kind of person who could carry that kind of weight. And aside from having his own stage banter, he was also much more musical than Roth had ever been during their prime.
Roth was a brilliant performer every single time he played, but he was never going to have the most versatile voice in the world. He was a blues singer from skin to core, and Hagar had the potential to belt when he wanted to, which freed up Eddie’s musical vocabulary. He didn’t need to write around Roth’s voice every single time he came up with a riff, and you can hear everything coming together across 5150.
There are certainly a few tunes that sound like they are leftovers from the Roth era, like ‘Get Up’ or ‘Good Enough’, but there’s no chance that Roth could have pulled off the keyboard-driven tunes. ‘Jump’ and ‘I’ll Wait’ were perfectly serviceable on 1984, but when you look at the way that Hagar attacks a tune like ‘Love Walks In’, he was able to make the perfect kind of ballad for the band.
And as far as Eddie was concerned, their first record with Hagar was the best thing that he had heard the singer ever make, saying, “Sammy Hagar’s work on this album is like nothing he’d ever done. I think people were afraid that Van Halen would start sounding like one of Sammy’s solo albums. But I knew it wouldn’t happen because I’d be writing the music, and my music doesn’t sound like Sammy Hagar music.” But a lot of that came down to how bloated a lot of their other records sounded after this.
OU812 and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge may have been fun to make, but when you look at the way that the records are paced, a lot of them do have a few clunkers on them as well. Many of Roth’s best records didn’t waste a single note, and while 5150 is stuffed to the gills with music, the fact that it manages to be aces from cover to cover with its elongated runtime is practically a miracle after losing their singer.
Eddie’s relationship with Hagar didn’t necessarily last as long as everyone thought, but at the time, he was much more than just a musical shot in the arm. He was a godsend who helped bring the band back to life, and for the first time, Eddie had someone at the front of the stage who actually felt like a true friend.
