Sammy Hagar on who was the main problem in Van Halen: “He flipped out”
There’s never an easy way to keep any band together. Even if every musician is the best of friends and splits everything evenly, it only takes a few too many yes-men telling them they are the greatest part of the band for everything to start going haywire. And while Van Halen had already dealt with their fair share of diva behaviour from David Lee Roth, Sammy Hagar remembered his final days in Van Halen being more of a firm split rather than anything happening over time.
That’s not to say that everyone in the band was getting along like they used to by the 1990s. There were still some raw pounds that came with working together for a long time, and even if the band could compromise on an album like For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, Balance might be the most ironic album title they ever made, considering how much Eddie and Hagar were clashing when it came to how the songs should sound.
But anyone can have those few records where they aren’t on the same page as their bandmates. Sometimes, things fall flat, and even though Hagar could still write melodies for the group, he was convinced that all they needed was a break from each other for everyone to sort themselves out. Once they got new management and started working on the movie Twister, though, things began to fall apart.
Their former manager, Ed Leffler, was practically the fifth member of the band as far as Hagar was concerned, and after his passing, drafting Ray Danniels was never a good fit for him. Even though Danniels has done great work managing acts like Rush, while the Canadian icons never had to argue about their finances throughout their career, Hagar felt that a significant change happened the minute that Eddie started taking charge.
There was no question that people were still turning up to Van Halen shows to see the guitar legend at work, but by the end of the 1990s, Eddie had begun to make more suggestions about how the songs should go. Outside of writing some of his own lyrics on Balance, he also insisted that Hagar begin writing a certain way, even telling him that the Kurt Cobain tribute song ‘Don’t Tell Me (What Love Can Do)’ needed to have some more attitude behind the lyrics.
Even if Hagar tried to work with Eddie on different agreements, he pointed the finger at him as the reason why the group collapsed before the new millennium, saying, “The only thing I won’t get into in this article is burning on Eddie, but he deserves it because he is the problem. He changed at the end of our era. He flipped out, and I don’t know what happened. They all got greedy. They thought, we’ll bring Roth back and we’ll get Sammy to go along with it. Fuck you, I said. Get out of here! We don’t need to be doing anything cheap to our fans.”
While Hagar did manage to roll over for a tour, his final years with the band only feel tragic in retrospect. Eddie had still been going through his fair share of demons, and even if he wasn’t willing to build bridges with Hagar after ‘The Red Rocker’ left, it’s even worse knowing that were never able to play together again before Eddis’ untimely passing.
Still, that doesn’t do anything to diminish the massive hooks that both of them gave us when they were working together. Hagar may have still felt burned seeing Eddie push him out of the room, but sometimes artists find themselves drifting to the point where they aren’t on the same creative page any longer.
