David Lee Roth on the songs Van Halen stole from him: “Half of that album”
No band members are going to be calling up their old bandmates after they’ve broken up to reminisce about old times. There might be the odd occasional where someone leaves on good terms, but the idea of any group choosing to leave one of their own behind is usually fodder for people to grow either bitter or start bad-mouthing their old bandmates in the press whenever they get the chance. And while David Lee Roth had the right to be pissed off when Van Halen kicked him to the curb, he couldn’t help but become a bit more angry when he saw them carry on.
If you think about it, Roth’s exit should have spelt death for Van Halen. The whole point behind the group was to have an electric frontman at the helm, and since Roth was about as electric as one could get, it would be easy to think that no one could replace him. As fate would have it, though, the key to getting a new frontman after Roth was to go in the opposite direction.
That’s not to say that everything Sammy Hagar did was the antithesis of Roth’s work. He could belt to the rafters and scream as well as his predecessor, but his approach was far more down-to-earth than what Roth was supposed to be. ‘Diamond Dave’ was the cartoon character that strutted up and down the stage, but ‘The Red Rocker’ was the everyman who would have happily stuck around with the audience to grab a drink if he could.
And listening back to the songs on 5150, it’s not like he didn’t have the chops to pull it off. It would have been daring to lead off any post-Roth record with ‘Good Enough’, but the minute that Hagar comes screaming in with the line ‘Hello, BABY’, it was clear that the band were not going to slow down for a second. Then again, some parts were a little bit familiar compared to what they had already been doing.
“It was much easier for them to reconstruct.”
David Lee Roth
While it should come as no surprise that Eddie was still in top form, certain sections felt like successors to many of Roth’s greatest tunes. It’s easy to chalk this up as a transitionary period between the group’s two eras, but even if their debut with Hagar is aces from back to front, Roth felt the reason why was because he practically designed the template for it.
Despite having his solo career awaiting him, Roth felt that much of 5150 was stolen from him, saying, “It had been easier for them to put a new album together because I had worked with Edward on half of that album already. [They] brought in a new singer, went right to all those old tapes and started with that as their go point, so it was much easier for them to reconstruct.”
There are moments where you can see where he’s coming from, but listening to the album in full, there are some cracks in that theory. Roth may have been a phenomenal vocalist, but there was no way that he was going to come close to hitting the notes in ‘Dreams’ or ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ if he tried. And that also begs another question: If he wrote the template for this Van Halen record, how come none of his solo hits like ‘Yankee Rose’ sound anything like that record?
There were still spaces where there would be an identifiably Roth-ian guitar riff, but Hagar was never meant to be someone coming to replace ‘Diamond Dave’. He was an all-star in his own right, and after 1984, the band were about to embark on a total rebirth with their new singer intact.
