The one album Eddie Van Halen was in heaven making: “Everything felt complete”
When it came time for Eddie Van Halen to write some new songs, nothing was ever off the table that much.
Some tunes might be screaming out for a guitar solo while others might be looking for more keyboard-driven tunes, but whenever Eddie got the right idea, it was never that difficult for him to translate that to his fingers whenever he started playing. But after years of playing the same kinds of riffs over and over again, those magical songs tend to come along that stop even the greatest players in their tracks.
But when it came time to write songs, that meant Eddie would start stockpiling everything he could for whatever record they were working on. There are plenty of songs that are in the vaults of the Van Halen estate that might not ever see the light of day, but that’s only because he was writing riffs faster than the band could record him. They had to keep up with him half the time, but David Lee Roth was clearly not the right guy for the job on some of those riffs.
Have you ever noticed how many of the Roth-era Van Halen albums have a lot more instrumental interludes than before? It could have been Eddie’s little feature in between the main songs on the record, but outside of the actual constructed pieces like ‘Cathedral’ or ‘Eruption’, it’s not fair to ask someone like Roth to write for the kind of music that turns up at the very beginning of ‘Hear About It Later’.
Hell, Roth was lucky to have made a decent hook out of the keyboard line in ‘And the Cradle Will Rock’, but when looking at his voice, there was no way that he could manage to reach the high notes that Eddie wanted. He was a great blues belter and had charisma that most other artists would have killed for, but when Sammy Hagar first walked into a rehearsal after Roth’s departure, Eddie realised he had a new language to work with.
‘The Red Rocker’ was a much more seasoned musician than Roth ever was, and while he was great at singing tunes like ‘Jump’ back in the day, they were going to have so much more fun making tunes like ‘Dreams’. Eddie always had to work around Roth, and now that there was no limit on where he could go, the studio practically became his playground, working with Hagar on 5150.
Fans may have been a little sad knowing that the guitars were gone on a few tracks, but Eddie knew he would be a lot happier making any idea that came into his head, saying, “From the first second, Sammy could do anything I threw at him. We could do songs like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Love Walks In,’ and I’m in heaven because now I can write whatever I want and not worry because Sammy can sing it all. All of a sudden everything felt complete. It just opened a whole new door.”
It’s not that the edge had suddenly left the band, either. There are many tunes that have worked as great Roth-era songs that Hagar holds his own on as well like ‘Get Up’, but there are also tunes that serve as the perfect balance between both eras, whether that’s the Zeppelin-esque swagger of ‘The Best of Both Worlds’ or the title track taking a pop-rock song and turning it into one of the most electrifying performances on the entire record.
While many people still called Van Halen had become a completely different band as if it were a bad thing, they hadn’t lost an ounce of polish when making their new tunes. Some of them may have been more pop-friendly, but there was more than enough middle ground for people who loved ‘Panama’ and ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’ to get onboard as well.
