The one band Sammy Hagar and Eddie Van Halen both called the greatest
One of the most difficult pieces of any Van Halen lineup usually came down to the frontman.
As much as Eddie could play the greatest licks that he knew how for the rest of his life, there was bound to be a rub between him and David Lee Roth whenever he got into his wild antics onstage. And even if Sammy Hagar had his own fair share of problems behind the scenes, he and Eddie could always find common ground when it came to referencing some of their favourite bands.
Which isn’t really something that ‘Diamond Dave’ could really say all that often. Roth may have been a perfect showman and could lead Van Halen to stardom, but his taste in music was much different from where Eddie’s head was most of the time. The guitar genius was more interested in the music than anything, but his claim that Roth only wanted to be a star instead of a musician did hold at least a little bit of water, considering all of the early showbiz tunes that he would throw into the mix, like ‘Big Bad Bill’.
Those tunes did give Eddie a bit of a change of pace, but he would have been just as happy riffing on his favourite blues licks behind the scenes. He was still itching to learn more whenever he heard someone new on the scene, like Allan Holdsworth, but when he was first coming up as a kid, there was no one who could possibly match what Eric Clapton was doing when he first joined Cream.
‘Slowhand’ had slowly started to become a legend ever since leaving The Yardbirds, but once he left John Mayall to join Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, something clicked that no one could have predicted. Whereas Bruce and Baker were trained in jazz, the common vocabulary they had with Clapton was unmatched by anyone in their field, to the point where even one of Clapton’s most notorious screwups on ‘Crossroads’ is considered one of the greatest guitar solos of all time.
And for Eddie, that kind of showmanship was all you really needed half the time, saying, “I’ve never been much of a fan of bands outside of Cream. I was more of a fan of their interaction live. They were an example of ‘What’s the difference between jazz and rock and roll? We just play louder’. That’s all. We get 12 notes…do what the fuck you want with ‘em.” They were a band for the real musicians of the world, and that extended over to Hagar as well.
You have to remember that ‘The Red Rocker’ had history working in bands like Montrose, and when he still in his teens, he had the same kind of musical conversion when he heard Disraeli Gears for the first time, saying, “I loved Fresh Cream, but Disraeli Gears was the album that really got me into digging into Eric Clapton. I wore it out. I played it over and over learning those guitar solos, and let me tell you, every solo on the record is spellbinding.”
Although Van Halen belongs in a totally different discussion compared to Cream, it’s not like the ‘Van Hagar’ couldn’t wear their influences on their sleeve every now and again. There are a handful of tunes from that era that are a bit more bluesy than their normal output, and when Hagar and Eddie would trade guitar solos live on ‘There’s Only One Way to Rock’, hearing them throw in some massive bluesy bends were practically borrowed from what Clapton had done back in the day.
Hard rock may not have had a clear definition by the time Cream had formed, but Eddie and Hagar were only but a few of the acolytes that took what they did one step further. They were the ones to truly make rock and roll sound heavy, and they ended up leaving an entire genre at their feet by the time they released Goodbye.
