Why Sammy Hagar almost didn’t want to join Van Halen: “I didn’t like that band”
Being the frontman replacing David Lee Roth in Van Halen was no small task. Even though the group could have continued on being one of the most kickass hard rock bands of the 1980s, Roth didn’t like where Eddie was taking a lot of the songs after 1984, later opting out to work with fellow guitar legend Steve Vai. Although not many bands can claim to have undergone a transformation as well as Van Halen did, Sammy Hagar admitted that he wasn’t completely sold on the music that he was about to play.
Sure, Hagar had been one of the biggest solo acts around at the time, but it’s not like he exactly fit the same mould as Roth. He could still sing like a madman and had a searing vocal range that could match Roth’s electric personality, but he was far closer to the sounds of mainstream rock and roll than Diamond Dave’s cartoon persona.
But before Roth even got involved, Hagar was one of the models Eddie and Alex set their sights on. One of their favourite bands growing up was Hagar’s early outfit Montrose, and even when they started recording, producer Ted Templeman was picked as their main man behind the boards because of his work with Hagar.
Just when Roth left the group, Eddie went to the place all logical people go to for life advice: his mechanic. When working on one of his cars, the mechanic suggested having Hagar come down for a jam session, which Eddie took up on the spot by calling Hagar from the repair shop.
While anyone with functional eardrums would probably want to collaborate with Eddie at some point, Hagar remembered being a little reluctant, telling AXS, “A guy like Dave was never someone that I thought, ‘Oh, I wanna be like that’. The Van Halen guys said that they wanted to be like Montrose, but they took a different turn. When I walked into the room, I said, ‘Let’s see what these guys got’. I didn’t like that band necessarily. I liked Eddie’s guitar playing, it’s genius, but I don’t like their image, so let’s see what they want from me.”
Then again, the best thing that Eddie could have done was look for the exact opposite of a Roth clone. There’s no replacing someone like ‘Diamond Dave’, so Hagar took an approach that was a lot more focused on the music. After trying out different ideas, the group started to rebirth themselves from the ground up, creating songs that could live on as a totally separate entity from Roth’s music, like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Love Walks In’.
That mindset of music before everything was also reflected in the way they promoted the record. Instead of making a video, the group figured the best way to hear the songs up close was to play them live, with only a handful of performance spots given to MTV for the record.
The image was still everything in the 1980s, but bringing Hagar on was more of a musical statement than an image change. Yes, the songs were going to be different, and there would be a few more keyboards alongside the guitar, but after being a flashy cartoon rock act, this is where they started to take themselves a bit more seriously.
