“They scared me”: The band Sammy Hagar called the future of music
Sammy Hagar has been through more than enough generations of rock and roll to know when things are changing.
There were many times where he could have stayed with one sound for the rest of his life, but even if you put everything that he does under the rock category, it’s hard to compare some of the more laid-back stuff he did with the Waboritas to anything that he worked on in Van Halen or the hard rock side of his solo career. He had many facets of his musical soul, but he could also tell when the kind of music that he was working on wasn’t exactly the most stylish music to be making, either.
Then again, most of the rock world prides itself on making music that many people weren’t ready for. The Beatles never asked whether the US was ready to hear some of the best bands of the British invasion, and even when the Fab Four started to fracture, that didn’t mean that Led Zeppelin or David Bowie were following the proven formula for making money whenever they got up to the microphone.
But even for a genre that goes outside the usual rulebook, ‘The Red Rocker’ seemed pretty content making commercial rock and roll when he started. Montrose sounded hungry right out of the gate on that first album, and even when Hagar heard that the band was folding, he was going to do everything he could to leave his old band in the dust. In his record collection, though, not everything relied on big guitars and singers that were belting to the rafters every time they played.
He was a lot more mellow than a lot of people realised at the time, and even when he joined Van Halen, the band weren’t doing songs as soft as ‘Love Walks In’ until he joined. At the end of the day, he was an average hippy who loved Jeff Beck just as much as he loved Donovan, but anyone who wanted to preach the word of free love was going to be sent packing the minute that 1977 started.
While disco was just starting to rear its head on the pop charts, it was denying what punk did for the rock genre once it started. Hagar wasn’t a prog rocker by any means, but bands like Sex Pistols and The Clash were breaking down what rock and roll was supposed to be. It wasn’t about the amount of flash you put into a song anymore, and Hagar was convinced that he was looking at musical history being rewritten when he first saw them performing live during their early club shows.
The clientele was certainly nothing that Hagar had seen before, but he would have been a fool to think that they were a flash in the pan, either, saying, “When I saw the Sex Pistols at the Winterland cutting themselves, spitting on each other, they scared me. I couldn’t be farther away in outlook. But I immediately thought ‘This must be the future.’ What I think went wrong was that they were discovered too early. They needed to develop more. But what mattered was the ‘You’re all full of shit’ rawness. That was what they were selling, and it was simple and real.”
That kind of future might not have prioritised someone like Hagar, but he definitely knew how to roll with the punches from time to time. He was already becoming one of the greatest working men in hard rock, and even when he saw the rock and roll world changing again with the arrival of grunge, he was more than happy to champion bands like Alice in Chains when he took them out on tour with Van Halen in the early 1990s.
Any other rock star would have been a bit too protective when their subgenres start to falter, but Hagar wasn’t about to try to stop the clock for any reason. Music must change if it was going to evolve, and even if he didn’t like the Sex Pistols, he could tell that he was watching a movement that was going to be around for a long time after they played their last notes.
