The song that got Eddie Van Halen banned from the studio: “He wouldn’t even let Eddie in”
There are bound to be some punch-ups in any band that has been around for a while. Any musicians can fight like siblings half the time, but if that doesn’t result in great music coming from the jam sessions, it’s easy for people to become needlessly petty behind the scenes for no reason. And for a band that was as iconic as Van Halen, it’s strange to think that someone like Sammy Hagar was butting heads with someone that he had come to know as a friend for so long.
But any frontman was always bound to be shown up when Eddie picked up his guitar. There are many ways for people to entertain a crowd, but when you have a guitar genius shredding the equivalent of Mozart licks on his guitar whenever he plays, there’s no simple banter with the crowd that will remedy the situation. If there’s anything that any frontman needed to know in that band, it was to realise his place in the group, and Hagar was happy to go along with it for a while.
He knew to leave space for when Eddie needed to take a solo, and listening to them perform songs like ‘There’s Only One Way to Rock’ live, it’s clear that ‘The Red Rocker’ was always having a bit of fun with Eddie whenever he broke out his guitar chops. When someone is on tour for too long, things can get testy, and when they should have logically taken a break, Hagar remembered Eddie being temperamental the minute he got back to the studio.
There had already been the fiasco of getting Balance to work, so when they were putting together material that would be used in the film Twister, it was already a hard sell for anyone to get back into the studio. And when they came out with ‘Humans Being’, a lot of the aggression on the record didn’t need to be forced all that often.
According to Hagar, it was Eddie’s way or the highway at this point, and the producer was even letting them within spitting distance of each other, saying, “I want to set the record straight. Everything Eddie has said about me is the total opposite of what happened. Eddie says I wouldn’t listen to him, but he just never listened to me. Eddie says I wanted to be a solo artist. He felt so sorry for me and the situation I was in, he wouldn’t even let Eddie into the same room with me when I was singing. He couldn’t get anything done with Eddie hanging around the control room because he was interfering so much.”
If it’s true that Eddie indeed wanted a solo album, then Van Halen III is probably the clearest example of why that was a bad idea. Eddie is more than capable of making fantastic music behind the scenes, but since Hagar and David Lee Roth helped flesh out his material into songs, what we’re left with on his solo record is a lot of mindless jams that occasionally have a great guitar riff sprinkled in.
Since Eddie said in the past that Hagar could be temperamental towards the end of his time in the group, we’ll probably never know for sure where everything went wrong, but if there’s one thing ‘Humans Being’ proved, it was that movie soundtracks are often lethal for bands. It killed Guns N’ Roses when they made ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, it complicated Aerosmith for years with ‘I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing’, and even if Van Halen kept going, they were about to enter the roughest stage of their career.
