How supergroup that united Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar: “Brilliant pieces of music”
There was always a bit of a touch-and-go relationship between Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar, even in their prime.
They were proud to be one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time, and leaving David Lee Roth in the dust was an added bonus given the mudslinging that had gone on with the original members of Van Halen, but it only took a few more years before the band got tired of what ‘The Red Rocker’ was bringing to the table as well. And even though Hagar and Eddie had their moments where they butted heads, they could always go back to the same starting points that set them on the right track when they were kids.
If we’re being honest, though, Hagar was the more seasoned rock musician out of anyone in the band when he first got started. He had been in the business since his teens, when he formed Montrose with Ronnie Montrose, and even when Van Halen was starting to kick around ideas in the studio with Ted Templeman, the producer suggested getting Hagar into the fold to replace ‘Diamond Dave’ before the band insisted on keeping the band as they were when they started working on their debut.
But compared to Roth’s showman style, Hagar was all about the music whenever he made new songs. He and Eddie clicked the minute that they figured out that Hagar’s range was broader than Roth’s but they weren’t about to reinvent the wheel by any stretch. Eddie was still playing keyboard riffs the same way that he was on 1984, but even when looking at their record collections, none of them could go wrong when playing the heaviest electric blues that they possibly could.
They were all students of the blues scene when bands like Led Zeppelin were debuting, but Cream was really the model that Eddie followed throughout his career. Eric Clapton was forever his god on the guitar, and even when ‘Slowhand’ started to make moves towards being a solo artist, Eddie felt that not even Derek and the Dominos could have measured up to what he did when he was feeding off Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.
Even years after getting behind the keyboard, Eddie still felt that Cream was the best band that he had ever heard when singling out songs like ‘Crossroads’, saying, “[That’s] one of the best live recorded songs ever. It’s funny; when I do interviews and tell people Clapton was my main influence, they go ‘Who?’ Because they’re thinking about Clapton doing ‘Lay Down Sally,’ not the Bluesbreakers or Cream. What I loved about Cream is that everybody had to put out. It was three people making all this noise, and you could hear each person.”
And while Hagar had a healthy amount of respect for bands like The Jeff Beck Group and even more downtempo stuff like Donovan, he couldn’t deny that Cream was a cut above the rest whenever they played, saying, “Cream inspired me to play with the highest caliber of musicians around me. To me, Cream was the first real supergroup. They had a unique chemistry that only those three guys could have. They made music that was like an orchestra; the sound was so big for just three guys. They wrote some brilliant pieces of music. ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ is a top five rock tune for me; it was one of the first complicated guitar solos that I ever learned note for note.”
If you look at the way that they performed, though, the bones of Van Halen are already there if you look at the backbeat. Hagar doesn’t sound a lot like Jack Bruce whenever he sings or anything, but when you hear how Eddie and Alex work off each other, they had clearly studied every single second of Wheels of Fire and spent hours trying to figure out what made those songs work when they started making their classics.
So while Hagar and Alex might have a more strained relationship after Eddie’s passing, there’s no denying that common thread that drew them together in the first place. All of their heroes had the muscle behind every song they played, and they weren’t going to rest until they made something that hit half as hard as what they heard out of their heroes.
