The album Sammy Hagar called “the best psychedelic record ever made”
There aren’t many frontmen in rock and roll who have felt more infinitely human than Sammy Hagar.
As much as a few people like to consider him the moment when Van Halen changed for the worse, ‘The Red Rocker’ was the one who was always the most humble guy in the world working with Eddie, usually playing his talent off and seeming like the kind of person you could grab a beer with after any show. But before he started earning his rock and roll chops, Hagar was a student of all strands of rock and roll.
And looking at where he grew up, that meant being a child of the 1960s era of rock and roll. The idea of the same person who wrote tunes like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Love Walks In’ walking around with flowers in his hair isn’t the first mental image that you’d think of, but you also have to remember the other major rock acts dawning at the end of the 1960s.
It was a sad day when The Beatles decided to call it a day, but there had also been people like The Rolling Stones and Cream pointing the way forward. Hagar was clearly going to gravitate towards tunes that were a bit harder-edged, and it wasn’t out of the question for him to be studying every single lick that Clapton ever played to get the sound that he wanted to hear out of his own playing.
And let’s not forget about Zeppelin, either. Hagar’s entire dream was to be in a group like Zeppelin, and even if he did throw in covers of ‘Rock and Roll’ during Van Halen and even worked with Jason Bonham later in life, hearing Van Halen with him in it was the closest thing to a modern version of Zeppelin that we were ever going to get.
But that melodic side was always part of Hagar’s DNA. He knew that what hooked everyone in when listening to a great song was a knockout chorus, and while Montrose had their fair share of great Zeppelinesque thunder, Hagar always found himself going back to bands like The Beatles because of the quality of the tunes. And even at the height of their powers in the 1960s, Hagar felt that no one else could even come close to competing with what they made on Sgt Peppers.
Despite being one of the biggest hard rock singers of all time, Hagar had no problem calling The Beatles’ 1967 masterpiece one of the finest psychedelic records he ever heard, saying, “I used to sit up all night and into the morning with some of my buddies, doing acid and listening to Sgt. Pepper. I mean, the record itself took you on a trip – you didn’t need anything else to get you there. Without a doubt, it’s the all-time greatest psychedelic record ever made.”
And it’s not like the Fab Four didn’t have their fair share of musical thunder in their music, either. Countless hard rock bands might like to cover tracks like ‘Helter Skelter’ to show the Fabs’ heavier side, but the title track to this record is one of the most intense guitar parts they ever laid down, and when looking further down the record, the guitar solo on ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ has a lot more fire behind it than most people would have expected.
Sure, the album wasn’t going to be the first thing on the turntable in between Van Halen rehearsals, but Hagar knew that it was better for him to have a pop record that he could always go back to. Because when you think about all the great pop tunes that have ever been created, most songwriters are always going to be chasing after what The Beatles started whether they intend to or not.
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