The 1995 lyrics Eddie Van Halen wanted to disown: “Depends on the dynamics of the people you’ve been working with”
Eddie Van Halen wasn’t someone who needed to concern himself with having the greatest lyrics of all time.
Van Halen were all about the music most of the time, and even if David Lee Roth was writing the filthiest tunes imaginable, it still wouldn’t have mattered as long as Eddie sprinkled his tapping licks across every one of those tunes. But when they released some of the worst records of their career, even Eddie had to wonder whether he was taking some of their lyrics for granted back in the day.
Then again, he wasn’t known to be Bob Dylan or anything that iconic in the lyrical department. He was more interested in making songs that had a philosophical angle every now and then, but when you look at a song like ‘One I Want’ that made it onto Van Halen III, most people would have probably been wondering why one of their songs actually managed to find commonalities between Superman, the Candy Man, and the Pizza Man all in one.
It was certainly different for the time, but Eddie figured that it was better than having to go back into the fray with Sammy Hagar again. Even after ‘The Red Rocker’ offered something different to what the band had been doing with Roth, he seemed to last about as long as Roth did in the group when he reached the 1990s. They had done all they could do together, and given how Eddie was feeling about the songs on Balance, he wasn’t too broken up about not having some of Hagar’s lines on the record.
Hagar normally didn’t have to worry about everyone else getting in the way of his lyrics, but there were more than a few times where things took a different turn. Eddie was already critiquing the way that he was approaching a song about Kurt Cobain on ‘Don’t Tell Me What Love Can Do’, but in the case of the song ‘Amsterdam’, he may have had a point about Hagar going a little bit too far.
Not all of their songs were meant to make people think all that hard, but ‘Amsterdam’ is particularly boneheaded when talking about the wonders of toking up in the capital city. The idea of making an entire tune about drugs isn’t necessarily out of the question in rock and roll, but the idea of having two members of the band who are actually from the Netherlands on a song like that was always going to be uncomfortable.
Even after Hagar left the group, Eddie kept going back to the song as one of the reasons why he needed to cut Hagar loose, saying, “It also depends on the dynamics of the people you’ve been working with. ‘Wham bam, Amsterdam’ wasn’t my fault! Blame the music on me, but not that other stuff.” But aside from it sounding all kinds of goofy, it also wasn’t where the band’s head was at during this album cycle, either.
A lot of the best Hagar tunes were the ones that dealt with more heavy topics, and even if the public could latch onto the songs about sex like ‘Poundcake’, making a song like this right after a tune like ‘Right Now’ wasn’t going to work. At the same time, going too far into serious territory was never going to fly, either, especially since Eddie ended up making ‘How Many Say I’ sound like cringy street poetry that you would hear on an average day in New York.
So while ‘Amsterdam’ is far from the greatest tune in the band’s discography, it was also the dividing line where things went way too far in the wrong direction for both pirates. Hagar was left without a job, and even though Eddie and Alex were ready to wash their hands of the Hagar years, they probably didn’t plan for having even tougher years ahead of them with Cherone behind the mic.
