Eddie Van Halen on the most powerful album he made with Sammy Hagar
Listening to some of the best rock and roll albums can often feel like a musical hurricane hit you. Although it’s easy for someone to take a bunch of catchy tunes and throw them together in a decent order, a band like Van Halen were always trying to make tracks that hit someone in the face the minute they started listening to it. Eddie may have had a keen ear for what jumped out of the speakers, but he felt that one of the most powerful records they ever made came when Sammy Hagar was fronting the group.
Then again, ‘Van Hagar’ had a lot to live up to in the heaviness department once David Lee Roth left. While Roth was far from the biggest hard rock frontman of all time, Eddie’s fixation with bands like Black Sabbath was far more prominent when he was in the band, including making something as feral as ‘Loss of Control’ or turning up the energy when making a track like ‘Mean Street’.
When someone’s already hit the ceiling like that, it’s impossible to go anywhere but down when Hagar got thrown into the mix. To their credit, they did manage to go in a more mainstream direction once records like 5150 came out, but listening to a lot of the band’s music in retrospect, there are moments where they start moving closer to a traditional dad band that happened to have some kickass tunes behind them.
That doesn’t mean that they are inherently terrible or anything. The whole point behind all great dad rock is to make something a bit more introspective, and even if some parts of OU812 can get incredibly boring, the shining moments on tracks like ‘When It’s Love’ and ‘Cabo Wabo’ are more than worth people going back and dissecting what they heard. Even if the punch was missing in places, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge corrected that problem in no time.
It might seem strange to say that about an album that has a song like ‘Right Now’ on it, but bringing in Andy Johns to mix alongside Ted Templeman as producer was exactly what they needed. A track like ‘Judgement Day’ would have a perfectly fine deep cut in any other group’s hands, but listening to them hunker down and play something this heavy had fans reminiscing on the days of Fair Warning.
Even Eddie had to admit that no other Hagar album before it had matched how heavy it could be, saying, “It wasn’t done like our first albums, where we banged all the rhythm tracks out in a couple of days. Interestingly, I think it’s a more powerful rock and roll record than OU812 and 5150, despite that it was conceived over a long period of time.”
Since they did take their time with this one, the tracks feel like they have more energy behind them. ‘Poundcake’ might be a goofy bit of fun to kick off the record, but listening to the rest of the record, there are moments that cover every facet of their career, from ‘Right Now’ being the best ballad they ever made, Eddie’s tribute to his son on ‘316’ or even hearing them play around with strange textures like on ‘Pleasure Dome’.
While over half of the Hagar era was bogged down by albums that stayed a bit too long at the party, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge is the kind of record that never overstays its welcome despite it being one of the longest records the band ever made. It is a lengthy sit, but when the album is this consistent from one song to the next, it’s hard to really complain once you’ve sat through it all.
