The one band Sammy Hagar said Van Halen could equal: “My favourite rock band ever”
There was no telling what Van Halen could create when they first met up with Sammy Hagar.
The idea of replacing someone like David Lee Roth was no tall order, and even if the ‘Red Rocker’ had an impressive shout on him, there was no telling whether the chemistry was going to strike from the first time they started playing. But once everyone heard 5150, fans realised that they could take their favourite band off of life support and watch them get back to legendary status all over again.
Then again, this was going to be a much different band than the one that had started all the way back in 1978. Roth was an all-star frontman, but Hagar simply wasn’t the same kind of entertainer that he was. He wanted to make the band focus squarely on the music, and when listening to tunes like ‘Summer Nights’ and ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’, it seemed like they turned into a well-oiled machine.
Everyone knew that Roth was far from the greatest singer in the world, but when listening back to the band for the first time, Hagar figured that this was about far more than a simple chance to jam among friends. Eddie may have been one of the most unassuming people that he ever met, but when he listened to all of them jamming together, he figured that they were good enough to go up against the biggest names in music.
From the moment that the band played their first songs, Hagar felt that they were capable of matching anything that Cream did, saying, “I realised it was Cream all over again — my favourite rock band ever. There was something about it that was slow, confident, almost majestic. My rock had always been more intense. They were relaxed into this groove thing, even if it was uptempo. Alex laid back, like Ginger Baker always did. Eddie played the way Clapton played, deep in the pocket.”
Just saying that would have been enough to get Eddie on the same page with Hagar. Clapton was the peak of musicianship for him when he was growing up, and while he didn’t care for the easy-listening stuff that ‘Slowhand’ played at the time, getting Hagar in the band gave them the same precision vocalist that Jack Bruce had when he was singing ‘I Feel Free’ when they were kids.
If there was one thing that the band also had in common with Cream, though, it was the dysfunction. Eddie and Alex may have been the tightest members of the group, but dealing with Hagar was always going to be different from dealing with Roth. Both frontmen had the power to control a crowd like no one else, but there were also certain moments behind the scenes where the Van Halen brothers weren’t considered saints, like asking Hagar to leave the group in the 1990s after one too many arguments.
But even though the breakup and eventual reunion years got incredibly heated between Eddie and Hagar, it’s not like either of them completely lost their gifts. Eddie would have his off nights from time to time, but there are also plenty of examples of him in his later years proving to everyone why he was still one of the most gifted musicians to ever pick up the instrument.
And now that everything is water under the bridge now that Eddie is no longer with us, chances are Hagar only has fond memories of the times when they had nothing better to do than create great music. Roth was always a handful for the band to work with, but with Hagar in their ranks, they were finally able to become the musical juggernauts that Eddie thought was alluding them for years.
