Sammy Hagar on the band that reinvented metal: “They just opened it up”
By the time Sammy Hagar started making music, heavy metal was still pretty green. There were still people wanting to follow in the footsteps of artists like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, but Black Sabbath was probably one of the only identifiable heavy metal artists working at the time, and even then, they were hesitant to use the title all that often. Hagar was still indebted to straight-up hard rock when he was working in Montrose, but he knew something was special with Van Halen before he had even joined them.
Let’s get one thing straight first: Sammy Hagar is not responsible for “watering down” Van Halen. By the time he joined the group, the band was already looking to branch out into a new sound, and if they had tried to just make him try to sing like Roth, it would never have worked.
After all, Hagar always had a much better set of pipes than Roth. Let’s be honest: Roth was always the better showman than a singer, and regardless of his fascinating stage persona whenever he played live, there were always limitations on where he could go when Eddie came up with new licks.
For all of the great music that Hagar made with them, he still felt that Roth’s version of the band was pretty much untouchable. Since Hagar had still been cutting his teeth in Montrose when Van Halen blew up, he was convinced he had seen the kind of band that was going to blow rock and roll wide open.
When talking about seeing them for the first time, Hagar felt that Van Halen would lead the next wave of heavy metal, telling Metal Evolution, “They went out crazy, drinking straight out of the bottle, doing drugs. They just opened it up for Poison and opened it up for Mötley Crüe. Van Halen, in my opinion, was the next generation of reinventing metal.”
This is strange because Van Halen tended to straddle the line of what constitutes heavy metal. Sure, their songs are heavy, but someone would probably look at you funny if you tried to convince them that a piece like ‘Jump’ belongs in the genre of music that has bands like Metallica.
Throughout their catalogue, half of Van Halen’s greatest works are about dialling everything up to 11 and seeing where things go. Even though Hagar gave them a commercial rock sheen on their next albums, they could still make those heavy songs on tracks like ‘Get Up’ and ‘Poundcake’.
And if you’re talking about the beginnings of hair metal, the Sunset Strip would have been barren without Van Halen. Every single teased-haired wannabe wanted to look like David Lee Roth, and if you wanted to have the respect of any of the guitar community, you had to face the music and learn some of those tapping licks that Eddie pioneered. Van Halen didn’t intend to bring an entire generation behind them, but sometimes, when you do something that well, people are bound to follow.
