“Fuck you!”: The album that made Sammy Hagar storm out of the studio
Sammy Hagar is probably the last person most people would expect to be a diva onstage.
He was a breath of fresh air when he first joined Van Halen, if only because he wasn’t the kind of ego-driven presence that David Lee Roth seemed to be every single time they played, and having someone that down to Earth was bound to be a lot more fun to play with. But when Hagar wasn’t getting his way in the studio, it didn’t take him long to start going off on anyone who stood in the way of him making a great record.
But long before he even joined Van Halen, he was already having trouble getting the sound he heard in his head. Montrose was always going to put Ronnie Montrose’s decisions before everyone else’s, but even when Hagar had a surefire hit on his hands, not everyone was willing to take a chance on him since he was put in the hard rock category. Back then, it didn’t feel like a “heavy metal” guy could make a hit record, but if Rick Springfield could take ‘I’ve Done Everything For You’ to the top of the charts, why couldn’t ‘The Red Rocker’, especially when he wrote the damn thing?
That stigma would eventually become a thing of the past when ‘I Can’t Drive 55’ became one of the biggest hits of his career, but joining Van Halen was another matter entirely. There was no question that the Van Halen brothers ruled that band, but when they first got together to make 5150, they seemed like old friends before they even made a mark. ‘Summer Nights’ was one of the best songs that they could have hoped to start out with, and even when they decided to tour without any videos, it didn’t matter if they had tunes like ‘Dreams’ under their belts.
But the next few years had more than a few bumps in the road. Aside from the band trying to throw a bit of shade towards Roth whenever they could, they weren’t always making the best decisions when they entered the studio. OU812 was suffering from a lot of underproduction on their part, and while For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge does have a decent pun at the centre of it, it didn’t get off the ground as they were first getting started with producer Andy Johns.
Then again, Johns should have been a slam dunk for the band. His brother Glyn Johns had already been behind some of the greatest records of the 1970s, and he was no slouch, either, having turned the knobs for some of The Rolling Stones’ best records and the best records Led Zeppelin ever made, but once he decided to wipe one of Hagar’s vocal takes, it didn’t take him long to want him gone.
There isn’t one right way to approach the studio, but Hagar remembered storming out of the studio the minute that he heard that one of his favourite takes had been chopped up, saying, “Eddie needed a partner in crime and that was Andy. He was bombed a lot of the time. There started to be a little tension. Then [he] erased one of my vocals. That was it. I wasn’t working with the guy anymore. I stormed out of the studio. [I said] ‘Fuck you Andy, that’s it. I’m done with your ass.’”
That may have ended up being a blessing in disguise when the band got their original producer Ted Templeman back in the studio, but it’s not like Johns was the wrong man for the job. He could be a bit wild, but getting that kind of bite to the band’s sound was everything they needed when they started working on some of the more heavy hitters on the record like ‘Judgement Day’.
It took a long time for Hagar to come back around on Johns when he eventually started working with his supergroup Chickenfoot, but that initial dust-up might have had more to do with the tension among the band as well. It would only be a few more years before Hagar called it quits from the group, so these kinds of fights were certainly a sign that all was not well with the Van Halen camp at the time.
