The project Sammy Hagar considered a musical miracle: “The coolest on the planet”
Sammy Hagar could never really be tied down to just one band. Even before working with Van Halen, he already had a stellar solo career under his belt and had an impromptu solo supergroup in HSAS to focus on when he got the fateful call from Eddie to join the rock legends. If it wasn’t for Montrose kicking everything off, though, there’s a good chance Hagar wouldn’t be here to tell his tale today.
When coming up as a musician, Hagar never really wanted to play anything other than rock and roll. He could certainly appreciate all types of music, but the tracks that he was writing in the early days, like ‘Make It Last’, had a lot more to do with meat-and-potatoes rock and roll than the funk-leaning acts that he was working with at the time.
And it’s not as if his first songs were setting the world on fire, either. The foundation was undoubtedly there, but it needed someone to inject it with the right rocket fuel, and Ronnie Montrose was the perfect person to do that. Operating almost in the same vein as Free’s Paul Kossoff, Montrose took that blues fire and turned it up to 11 whenever he played songs like ‘Bad Motor Scooter’ or ‘Rock the Nation’.
Even though Hagar was still in his late teens when he joined the group, the first Montrose record is still a great time from cover to cover. It’s hard to fault Hagar for his lyrics at this stage in the game, but listening to what he would do later, this was priming the rock world for introspective songs like ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ or ‘Dreams’.
Looking back on it, Hagar believed that there was something celestial that brought him and Montrose together, telling Louder, “I thought he was the coolest guy on the frickin’ planet. And he was. I saw the last show he played with the Edgar Winter Band at Winterland in San Francisco. This was after those other guys told me they didn’t want to play the songs I’d written. When I look back, I think it was a miracle.”
While Montrose never registered with the public after their first two records flopped, Hagar’s solo career was bound to be even bigger. Throughout albums like VOA, the ‘Red Rocker’ took the lessons of that debut album and turned it into something much bigger, to the point where producer Ted Templeman had suggested getting Hagar into Van Halen before they even recorded anything with David Lee Roth.
Even when looking at the biggest bands of the 1980s, Montrose is still coated in every one of their tunes. Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe had initially named his first act Rock Candy after a Montrose song, and any other sleaze rock act that relied on bluesy riffs to get their foot in the door owed a lot to what Montrose did behind the fretboard.
Hagar was destined to go on to bigger and better things, but those days in Montrose are still an interesting case study of an artist about to explode. It would take a while before the rest of us caught on, but Hagar was spreading his wings as an all-star frontman in the making.
