The artist that made Sammy Hagar want to leave hard rock
There’s no accurate way to sum up the kind of charisma that Sammy Hagar has had over the years.
Many people like the idea of having the frontman that wows people onstage and gives everyone the kind of experience that they want to see, but ‘The Red Rocker’ never saw himself as above any of his fans whenever he performed. He was simply one of the guys hosting one of the greatest parties in the world, but he did at least have a healthy respect for when someone was absolutely killing a set.
As much as Hagar liked being the regular Joe performing, it’s impossible not to bow with reverence at whatever James Brown was doing whenever he started performing. He clearly set the standard for what everyone was going to have to aspire to in show business, and when looking at how Hagar related to his audience, he wasn’t above throwing in the occasional move from Brown’s repertoire.
But that’s hardly the only road that he wanted to go down, either. The Beatles had sent him on a ride when he first heard them, and even though the likes of Led Zeppelin and Cream were opening up his mind to the possibilities of rock and roll, Hagar was always a sucker for whenever a good melody hit his eardrums. After all, the public listens to the melody before the words, but there’s nothing wrong with an artist being able to tell a story over a few minutes.
And while this might sound apocryphal, Hagar was dangerously close to becoming a singer-songwriter as well once he started working on his own solo material. He had the occasional shout-out to artists like Donovan on his records and could have made for a convincing James Taylor knockoff if he wanted to, but his true passion was seeing what Van Morrison could do.
While Morrison has always been his own unique animal even by singer-songwriter standards, records like Astral Weeks are absolutely beautiful for a damn good reason. Aside from being one of the most impressive feats from a songwriter that was ad-libbing pieces of his material, Hagar figured that in case his gig in Montrose didn’t work out, there was always room for him to crib from Morrison’s playbook as well.
When talking about his influences, Hagar said that he saw himself trying to chase after what Morrison had done, saying, “All of a sudden, I got into Van Morrison. I was totally into the rock thing, but the mystical singer-songwriter vibe was very appealing to me. I considered being that kind of artist. Moondance was a big album for me when I was really learning how to write, sing and play guitar.”
That did eventually come in handy when making his own music, but that also might have been how Hagar summoned the confidence to play guitar with Eddie Van Halen onstage. Because for all he knew, it was about the kind of emotion that you could make with an instrument as much as it was about the kind of scales that you could tear through.
David Lee Roth may have been a more pure showman in every sense of the word, but Hagar knew that not everyone needed to be a natural ham to earn their living in the music industry. You could easily take the listener on a journey, and after years of practice, Hagar has earned his right to have one foot in the rock world and the folksy world as well.
