The 1986 song that made Van Halen fall in love with Sammy Hagar: “They got all excited”
Van Halen had their work cut out for them the minute that David Lee Roth left the building.
The fact that he was a living Looney Tunes character every single time he walked onstage was one of the reasons why their stage shows came alive, and even if they got one of the single greatest artists of all time behind the microphone, everyone would have been complaining that they weren’t exactly as good as what ‘Diamond Dave’ had to offer. But the reason why Sammy Hagar worked so well was that he was never trying to be a Roth clone whenever he stepped up to the microphone.
If anything, ‘The Red Rocker’ wanted to take the band in a bold new direction when he first got the call to work with them. Anyone in their right mind would have killed to have worked with Eddie around that time, but if Hagar was going to put his own stamp on Van Halen, he was going to be coming from a more musical angle. Because when you look at it, Hagar was a much better vocalist than Roth most of the time whenever he sang live.
No disrespect meant to Roth by any stretch, but a lot of his greatest moments onstage have come from him being a natural ball of charisma half the time. That was all well and good, but Hagar related to the audience in a much more natural way as a frontman. He wanted to give the audience a great show, but he also wasn’t going to shy away from hitting those blistering high notes whenever he sang. And once Eddie realised that Hagar had that kind of vocal power, he realised they could take things anywhere.
A lot of what ended up on 5150 had been around for a while before Roth left, but there was no way that he was going to be on board with making a bunch of keyboard-driven songs work. Roth knew not to mess with the formula, and even if he felt that some tunes like ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ was way too far out of his range, Hagar endeared himself to the band the second that he started belting out the beginning of the song ‘Summer Nights’.
They were still just spitballing ideas at this point, but the fact that Hagar could make up something like that off the top of his head was the greatest blessing Eddie could have hoped for, with Hagar recalling, “I started singing to it, making up words, and right off the bat I sang, ‘Summer nights and my radio…’ They all got excited. ‘Oh man, this guy can sing!’ And Jan [Van Halen] was diggin’ that I could scat like a jazz singer.”
And if Hagar was going in a more melodic direction, that gave Eddie more avenues to go down when making some of his tunes. Roth was always going to be a bluesy singer, and while Hagar could sing that style to, it wasn’t that hard for them to throw in a few ballads here and there as well, especially when they started working on the more synth-heavy tracks on the record like ‘Love Walks In’.
Hagar was the one who helped structure a lot of those songs in the beginning, but his biggest asset to Van Halen is being able to change with the times. Roth was forever going to be known as one of the biggest frontmen on the Sunset Strip, but even if the 1990s weren’t kind to the band, the fact that they could manage one more massive hit with ‘Right Now’ was proof that they weren’t a simple party band everyone took them for.
They had a lot more to offer, and even if the Hagar years fit pretty snugly into dad rock territory nowadays, that doesn’t mean that the songs are poor by any stretch. Hagar gave them opportunities to move in different directions, and they weren’t about to sit around and keep putting out blander versions of their debut record just for the hell of it. They had a new singer and more energy, and they were bound to show the whole world that they never needed Roth to succeed.
