The 1995 album half of Van Halen couldn’t stand making: “I always hated the words”
Working in a band like Van Halen was going to be a tricky tightrope for Sammy Hagar to walk.
He loved the idea of making the best record that he could whenever possible, but there was a good chance that the fans wouldn’t accept him when they heard that they had to kick David Lee Roth out of the band after working on 1984. But even if ‘The Red Rocker’ fit in like a glove whenever they made 5150, their career trajectory lasted almost as long as they did with ‘Diamond Dave’ back in the day.
Nothing was necessarily wrong at the time, but you could tell that a power struggle was going on once they started finishing up the tour for For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. The music world had changed dramatically since they had last been in the studio with grunge taking over the world, but when working on Balance, they were about to go through some of the toughest recording sessions they ever had to face.
There hasn’t really been another record that has managed to have a more ironic title than this one, and when Hagar talked about it later, he felt he wasn’t being given the time of day half the time. Eddie was already trying to micromanage every single one of his lyrics whenever he walked into the studio, and since Michael Anthony’s bass was being blocked out of the mix half the time, Hagar felt like the guitarist was becoming a little too domineering over every single track.
With most of the sessions running for eight straight hours every single day, he felt that the entire record felt like Eddie trying to put the entire band through the wringer, saying, “Mike would put a bass part down, and Ed would go in there and listen to it, kind of under a microscope. [It was] ‘Wait, go back, let me hear that again,’ and Bruce would go, ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’ He wanted to crucify me.”
It goes without saying that Eddie should have had a say in what was on the record considering it’s his name on the record, but the story about them taking a hatchet to Hagar’s tribute to Kurt Cobain on ‘Don’t Tell Me What Love Can Do’ is just sad to look back on. Then again, there were more than a few times when Eddie seemed to be in the right about getting some of the lyrics changed behind the scenes.
‘Amsterdam’ may have had a fun riff and a knockout performance from Hagar, but since the whole thing was about them getting baked in the Van Halen brothers’ homeland, you can see why Eddie wasn’t exactly a fan, saying, “I always hated the words ‘Wham, Bam Amsterdam’ from ‘Balance’ because they were all about smoking pot-they were just stupid. Lyrics should plant some sort of seed for thought, or at least be a little more metamorphic.”
And that’s before even getting to the touring behind everything. The band had already changed management after their manager of many years passed away, but after their new higher-ups decided to get more money out of Hagar, all of the camaraderie that they had together over those years seemed to be gone in an instant, to the point where Eddie either called Hagar up to fire him or convince him to leave the band depending on which version of the story you choose to believe.
You can definitely hear a lot of that frustration throughout most of Balance, but the real tragedy was the fact that Hagar and Eddie never got a proper reconciliation on record. The end of his time in Van Halen during their reunions felt like going through the motions, and while Balance will stand as the final hurrah for ‘Van Hagar’, that doesn’t take away from the classic tunes they made together.
