Sammy Hagar thought one tour killed Van Halen: “That’s when it really got bad”
Any band breakup usually doesn’t happen overnight.
Some of the biggest groups in the world can feel like a marriage after a while, and if you can’t find a way to iron out your differences, there’s bound to be the divorce papers coming out when the lead singer decides the guitarist isn’t listening to them anymore. Although Van Halen managed to bounce right back after their stint with David Lee Roth, Sammy Hagar pointed to one tour as the moment when everything started going wrong for his version of the group.
Then again, can we take a step back and realise that Van Halen did the impossible with Hagar? Replacing someone like Roth feels like it should never have worked, yet Hagar’s massive range and everyman mentality endeared him to the group and the audience almost immediately the minute 5150 came out.
After going in different directions on records like For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, Balance was the first time the group started to reach a breaking point. There had been infighting between everyone before, but the creative tension between Hagar and Eddie wasn’t getting any better, with Eddie normally putting his foot down if he said he didn’t like something and Hagar flat-out ignoring him.
Part of the issue was that both men had very different ideas about what Van Halen should sound like moving forward. Hagar leaned towards bigger melodies and more polished songwriting, while Eddie was becoming increasingly restless, looking to experiment and push the band into unfamiliar territory. Those opposing instincts made collaboration more difficult with each passing session.
What had once been a productive tension slowly turned into a fundamental disconnect. Instead of sharpening the songs, their disagreements began to stall progress, with neither side willing to fully compromise. By the time Balance was finished, the cracks were no longer something the band could ignore, setting the stage for the conflicts that would follow.
While the sessions for the next song, ‘Humans Being’, saw Hagar leaving with one finger in the air, he did let bygones be bygones when working on the next tour in 2004, The Best of Both Worlds. When Hagar actually got on the road, he realised that this version of Van Halen was very different from what he had known.
Coming off of the disaster that was Van Halen III, Eddie also had to deal with tongue cancer and was in incredibly bad shape throughout most of the tour. Despite still having the chops to play many of his classic songs, his wilderness period during this tour did nothing to endear him to the rest of the band, usually struggling to get through an entire show without a few flubs.
Looking back, Hagar said that he considered that tour the moment when everything crumbled for his time in the group, telling Howard Stern, “That’s when we bumped heads. That’s when it really got bad. Ed was sick. I didn’t realise… no one realised how sick he really was, obviously, until it was over. It’s a shame. If there’s anything that I regret, it’s ever going through any hardships with Eddie.”
Eddie was eventually on the road to recovery for years before his cancer came back, but this would be the final time that he would grace the stage with Hagar. For the last years of his life, every Van Halen performance saw Eddie team up with Roth all over again, finally patching things up and even releasing one final album with A Different Kind of Truth.
It’s hard to see someone like Hagar leave Van Halen on such a sour note, but he eventually got the chance to at least mend the bridges with Eddie before he passed away. If you weren’t around to see them back in 2004, though, you would never have heard a song like ‘Dreams’ in its intended form ever again.
