The one song Sammy Hagar said helped save Van Halen: “I smell money!”
Even for a band as big as Van Halen, getting Sammy Hagar to join their band was going to be no easy feat.
Although there had been countless artists who would have killed to jam with Eddie, ‘The Red Rocker’ had an uphill battle in front of him when thinking about taking the place of David Lee Roth. It’s never an easy decision for anyone to make, but the minute they had the magic in the studio, all they needed to do was convince the bigwigs to give them the shot they deserved.
Then again, any A&R man would have had the same uneasiness as most fans did when they heard about Van Halen getting a new singer. Roth was no fly-by-night artist. He was a major part of the band’s sound throughout their time together, and if he left, it was bound to leave a gaping hole in every single thing they did afterwards. But Hagar’s greatest trait was that he was often the polar opposite of what Roth was.
Say what you want to about him as an entertainer, but it’s not like Roth had the most incredible voice by any stretch of the imagination. He was a fantastic showman every time they went out onstage, but when Hagar started working with everyone in the studio, they weren’t used to someone with that much range. ‘Summer Nights’ was the moment where everything clicked, but they needed a little bit more time before they realised that they had honest-to-God hits on their hands.
On 5150, there were already a ton of songs that could have been made with Roth at the helm, like ‘Good Enough’ and ‘Get Up’, but there are also tunes like ‘Love Walks In’ that showed everyone that they could write a hell of a ballad when they wanted to. And out of all their early songs, ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ took everything that made ‘Van Hagar’ great and put it into one package.
It certainly was a rock and roll tune, but Eddie was already going well beyond what he had done with Roth, especially with the strange noises coming out of his guitar and the various keyboards on the track. So by the time that Hagar started matching the melodic lines of Eddie’s guitar, it didn’t take a lot of convincing for the rest of Warner Bros to convince themselves that there was life after death.
Hell, this was a new rebirth for the band, and Hagar knew it, saying, “They walk in, it’s me on guitar and Eddie on keyboard, and they’re, like: ‘What the fuck are you guys doing?’ But we played ’Why Can’t This Be Love?’ live, right there for them. And after we’d done, Mo Ostin raises his finger in the air and says: ‘I smell money!’”
Now that they had momentum, though, the band also managed to get to the top of the charts without having to make a single music video. The songs spoke for themselves, and while the occasional live video of them playing ‘Dreams’ would become legendary on MTV, the fact that they could let the album pick up steam organically was a breath of fresh air from Roth playing up the sleazy teacher’s pet in the video for ‘Hot For Teacher’.
Van Halen’s time in the spotlight may have seemed numbered by this point, but ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ was a reminder of why you should never count any band out, even when things look the most grim. Because if they gathered all the right ingredients, they had the potential to go even beyond what they had built with Roth.
