“It starts rocking”: The albums Sammy Hagar called the greatest in rock history
Sammy Hagar didn’t come into this business looking to be one of the greatest singers in every genre.
He had rock and roll surging through his veins ever since he played those first Montrose shows, and even if he had a lot more work to do when he went solo, he was determined to keep his star rising with every single record until he had reached the top of the charts. And while there were a few bumps in the road, he did have to admit when he was working with the legends behind the finest rock albums he had ever heard.
But ‘The Red Rocker’ was never tied to one strict style of rock and roll throughout his career. He may have helped Van Halen out of a bad spot when David Lee Roth left the fold, but even if those massive rock tunes dominated FM radio for the next few years, there was no way that he was going to stay in that space for too long. Because even on his solo records, he was already starting to reach for other sounds well before he got the call from the greatest guitarist in the world.
He was influenced by everyone from Donovan to James Brown, and you can feel both sides of that spectrum fighting with each other throughout some of his best records. Not every one of his songs needed to be an absolute showstopper, but even when he broke out the acoustic guitar, his ballads could fit somewhere between the folky tenderness of someone like James Taylor and the more grizzled acoustic work that you would find on a lot of Zeppelin’s best unplugged moments.
That might not have suited Van Halen, but when he began working with his other outfits, there were no rules to where he could go. All that he wanted seemed to be the exact opposite of Van Halen when he was fired from the band, but getting the gig performing with a band like Chickenfoot wasn’t anything to shake a stick at, either. Despite the ridiculous name, Joe Satriani was about as close to a Van Halen substitute as Hagar would ever get, and he would do everything he could to make the best record he could pump out.
And while Brendan O’Brien had one of the best production resumes at the time, Hagar had his arm twisted when the band suggested working with Andy Johns. Hagar already had a history with Johns and had watched him wreck one of his favourite vocal performances on one of Van Halen’s records, but it’s not like he could really argue when looking at the man’s track record behind the scenes.
He had worked on some Stones and Zeppelin albums, and no matter what his personal hangups were, there was no way to say no to that kind of studio legend, saying, “As much as I wanted to kill him, and eventually fired him from the Van Halen record, he made the greatest classic rock records ever, Led Zeppelin III and Exile on Main St. Joe had worked with him, too. We both knew he came with a lot of personal problems but when [he] sets microphones up around the drumset, it starts rocking.”
And if you listen to the kind of musicians that were in Chickenfoot, it’s not like Johns was outside of his wheelhouse by any stretch. He had been used to running microphones for John Bonham on Zeppelin records, so having someone like Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers behind the kit was like a breath of fresh air compared to someone who had been known as one of the biggest animals in the music industry.
Despite Hagar being a little bit lukewarm on Johns’s first time around, the fact that he delivered one more time was proof of the kind of magic that he was working with. No one had the ability to make a record sound the way that he did, and when looking through his track record, anyone who helped capture the sound of a song like ‘Tumbling Dice’ deserves to be enshrined in the rock and roll heavens.
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