The album Sammy Hagar said was Van Halen selling out: “It’s a scam”
Sammy Hagar was no stranger to the concept of “selling out”.
There are no two words more harmful to a rock and roll band’s reputation than those words, and once they start selling themselves like a product and not doing right by their fans, it’s hard not to feel a little bit jaded for fans that want to go back and listen to their music. ‘The Red Rocker’ was determined not to be that kind of artist, but he knew that there were more than a few times when Van Halen crossed that line.
But it’s not like Hagar was going to be calling all the shots once he joined his new friends. The band is named after the guitarist and drummer for a reason, but Hagar at least had the group’s best interest in mind when working on records like 5150. It was always about trying to carve out a new path for themselves after David Lee Roth, and Hagar did give a new look at what the band could sound like with keyboards.
If you look at the career trajectory of both the Roth and Hagar era of the bands, the amount of musical output is almost equal. After a few great albums with ‘The Red Rocker’, there were bound to be a few tensions flaring up, but outside of working on the song ‘Humans Being’ for the movie Twister, Hagar felt that it was time for them to take some time off and recharge their batteries a little bit.
After all, they did the same thing with Roth and came out with 1984 a little while, and it’s not like Hagar had that much bad blood with Eddie. He only needed some time apart to do other things, and if he had had his way, he would have had the band be like the hard rock version of The Rolling Stones that kept continuing on. But when their new manager told them that they needed a greatest-hits record, Hagar was livid.
The idea of recording for Twister already felt cheap to him, but making a record of their greatest hits was always going to be a little bit testy. It may have been some old wounds knowing that Roth’s tunes would be on the record, but the idea of recording two new songs for the record didn’t sit well with him. Many artists like Tom Petty got major hits out of that deal, but Hagar knew it wasn’t right to put their fans through that.
He knew that a lot of their fans weren’t looking to buy a massive double album for two tracks, and the whole thing felt a little too slimy for him, saying, “To get together to write two new songs that our hard core fans have to have and make them buy a double CD set at twice the price because it’s got all these songs on it, Roth tunes, Sammy tunes, it’s a scam…I still had my golden vision of the biggest, greatest band in the world. Don’t ever cop out. Don’t EVER sell out. Don’t EVER fuck your fans. You don’t do it! And these guys just went crazy the other way, so we went separate directions.”
And given how the greatest hits record ended up sounding with Roth coming back, it’s not like the fans were missing out on much. Eddie was in fine form, but hearing his more modern guitar tone does feel a little bit odd with ‘Diamond Dave’ sounding like he hadn’t changed a single thing since 1985.
But that was always bound to happen if the band tried to recapture their past glory all over again. There was a lot of time that had past since the days of 1984, and while it’s nice to have artists make their fans want to relive the good times, a song like ‘Me Wise Magic’ was as clear a sign as any that Van Halen simply weren’t that kind of party band anymore.
