“Magical”: The musician Sammy Hagar always wanted to be like
Few second frontmen have been able to command such a fan affection as Sammy Hagar.
While bested by AC/DC’s seamless singer swap for Back in Black, Pasadena hard rock outfit Van Halen came a close second. Paving the way for the MTV glam metal explosion, the Van Halen brothers, guitarist Eddie and drummer Alex, scored a shimmering counter to the Californian punk and new wave simmering away by the 1970s’ close.
Yet, as soon as they had reached stratospheric stardom with the namesake year’s 1984, preceded by the mammoth ‘Jump’ single, aerodynamic frontman David Lee Roth called it quits to pursue a solo career. In came Hagar. Bringing with him a more brawny and rugged dimension to the pop-rock stylings, Van Halen found their second lease of life, enjoying another US album number one with 1986’s 5150 and soldiering on, through internal fractures and financial dramas, to 1995’s Balance.
Hagar was no eager young recruit, however. Packing an extensive CV, Hagar counted a multitude of solo albums, Montrose records, and the one-off Hagar Schon Aaronson Shrieve supergroup stretching back to the early 1970s. He’d been in the business a long time, albeit only finding moderate success, but it was the 1960s counterculture that shaped him, as it did everyone of his generation eager to make it in the music world. Casting his mind back to his teens, Hagar highlighted one of the UK’s biggest names in psychedelic folk as leaving a deep impression.
“I wasn’t in a band yet, but me and this other guy were kind of working on playing songs together,” Hagar recalled to Classic Rock in 2015. “I heard Donovan and thought, ‘Yeah, man, I wanna be like that.’ As a young singer and songwriter, I was really inspired by him, even more than [Bob] Dylan, whom I do love, too. But Donovan seemed magical, whereas Dylan was edgy, so there was a clear difference to me”.
While largely known for his ‘Mellow Yellow’ hit, Scotland’s Donovan, for a time, was an esteemed figure of the decade’s rock and pop revolution, winning fans and admirers from The Beatles to The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, and counted a young John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page as collaborators before their Led Zeppelin fame.
Hearing 1965’s ‘Catch the Wind’, Hagar enthusiastically nabbed its What’s Bin Did and What’s Bin Hid album, but it was the following year’s Sunshine Superman that impressed him greater. “That’s when he brought everything together and went electric, just like Dylan. I said, ‘OK, I can do that.’
Donovan’s gentle lysergia has cast a serious spell on Hagar, prompting him to cover his ‘Young Girl Blues’ on 1976’s Nine on a Ten Scale and the defining ‘Catch the Wind’ on the following year’s eponymous effort, long before his Van Halen fame. Witnessing Donovan live as a teen in Los Angeles’ The Trip club, Hagar’s life path was set there and then: “I thought he was so cool and elegant […] I freaked out. I wanted to be that guy”.
