The one band Sammy Hagar didn’t want to turn into: “Every cheese ball band”
Keeping a band like Van Halen together wasn’t going to be the easiest thing in the world for Sammy Hagar.
There was no doubting the fact that Eddie and Alex were calling the shots every single time they went into the studio, but even if they were coming up with a lot of the central riffs, ‘The Red Rocker’ was the one trying to turn all of them into songs, all while trying to make a name for himself outside of David Lee Roth’s shadow. That’s a difficult tightrope to walk, but aside from the musical front, Hagar wasn’t going to make sure the band wasn’t falling into territory that was too cheesy for them to take on.
Because while there were a lot of ‘dad rock’ songs throughout their catalogue, Hagar didn’t want to get to the point where things got too sentimental. They had their emotional moments like ‘Right Now’, but given how long Hagar had been in the music industry, he didn’t want the band to be known as some corporate rock band throughout their later years. If anything, that would have been their kiss of death in the 1990s.
You have to remember that grunge not only killed hair metal, but it also killed a lot of legacy bands along the way as well. No one wanted to associate with some of the dinosaurs of rock and roll, and since Eddie had already embarrassed himself when going backstage and saying hello to Nirvana, Hagar had the foresight of taking a band like Alice in Chains out on tour with them when they kicked off the decade.
After their manager died, though, the idea of getting someone new and cranking out a greatest hits album didn’t sit well with Hagar. The fact that they were working on new material that fell on deaf ears meant that they needed another good record to come out, and in his mind, the band were going to become a parody of what rock and roll bands were supposed to be if they tried to make a ‘best-of’ collection.
The eventual record was a good one-stop shop for all things Van Halen, but given what Hagar had seen throughout his years in the industry, he didn’t want to see the band turn into the bands he despised, saying, “They were going to do every cheese ball, fucking thing that a band could possibly do. But here’s a band, the biggest band in the world coming off five number one albums in a row and they willingly put out a greatest hits record. Come on man! Chicago does that. There’s one original member. The record company does that with bands like that. They did it to me on the Unboxed record.”
That’s kind of a low blow on Hagar’s part, though. Chicago were definitely a decent rock and roll band when they had people like Terry Kath in the group, but after his passing, the idea of them turning into a cheese ball rock and roll band is a lot more accurate than many fans would admit. They could still play like no one else, but you only need to look at the difference between ‘25 or 6 to 4’ and ‘If You Leave Me Now’ side by side to realise that they had become a different band altogether.
Maybe Eddie wanted to have that kind of legacy in terms of being a great player, but even if it was a small issue in the grand scheme of things, it did destroy the band in more ways than one. ‘Humans Being’ was what eventually ended the band for good, but after coming back to work on this collection, Hagar was blindsided when he got the call from Eddie saying that they needed to move on to better things.
He didn’t think that anything had gone haywire, and he was more than willing to work with them at some point, but Eddie had already made his decision. He figured that he could have used more creative freedom behind the scenes, but losing ‘The Red Rocker’ may go down as one of the most ill-advised moves that any rock band has ever made when you look at the record they made with Gary Cherone one album later.
