The one musician Sammy Hagar said should have never joined Van Halen: “A talented guy”
The art of managing a band like Van Halen was always going to be a little bit tricky.
As much as Sammy Hagar liked the idea of being in the band with Eddie, there was always going to be a certain push and pull that made them what they were whenever they got onstage to play. ‘Van Hagar’ may have been more focused on the music whenever they took to the stage, but when ‘The Red Rocker’ took an outside perspective, he knew when some people didn’t have what it took to be in the band.
At the same time, there were probably a bunch of fans who said the exact same thing when Hagar joined in the first place. There’s no replacing someone as integral to the group as David Lee Roth, and while we were all spared the idea of Hagar doing an impression of him, hearing 5150 ensured everyone that the band would be alright even if they had gone in a completely different direction.
“Different” doesn’t always mean bad, and when looking at the raw numbers they put up back in the day, it’s not like the results didn’t speak for themselves. Whereas most other bands of their era were living off of nostalgia by the 1990s, seeing them holding their own with tracks like ‘Right Now’ was what made them one of the greatest bands of their time. But once management started getting more involved after Balance, things started to take a dark turn.
It was clear that their new manager wanted nothing to do with Hagar, and when he started to push new ideas onto Eddie and Alex, the frontman’s days started to become numbered. It probably wasn’t fun seeing his bandmates turn their back on him so quickly, but he knew that if he was having a hard time, Gary Cherone was going to have his hands full before he even sang a note of music with them.
Cherone was clearly a talented vocalist, but Hagar knew that him joining the band was going to be a huge mistake, saying, “They’d made an album with Gary Cherone–who’d later told me that they had auditioned him while I was still in the band. [Manager] Ray Danniels managed Cherone. First, he tried to get [him] into Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. Gary’s a talented guy. Good singer, good physical shape, a healthy guy, not a druggie, really a cool guy. Wrong guy for the band? A hundred times over.”
And judging by what turned on Van Halen III, it’s easy to hear why as well. Cherone is still showing off his chops, but since the songs are so disjointed, hearing him trying to fit somewhere between his own voice and half-hearted imitation of Hagar wasn’t doing the band any favours, especially when the record ended up being the first major dud of their career since they began in 1978.
But it’s hard to place the blame on Cherone, either. He was put in a position that was nearly impossible to make work, and given the fact that Eddie was already going through a hard time with Hagar, chances are that no one wanted to rock the boat and went along with whatever hare-brained scheme that came into their head when they walked into the studio.
There are still pieces of a good album somewhere in Van Halen III, but the solution to the band’s problem was probably not something they wanted to hear. The record could have been something special if they had refined themselves a bit more, but given how off everything sounds, it would have ended up going over a lot smoother if this had come out under any other name than Van Halen.
