The one genre Sammy Hagar never wanted to join
When Sammy Hagar first got the call to join Van Halen, he had a lot more to consider than stardom.
He had already been a solo star in his own right, and if he was going to be a part of the biggest band in the country, he wanted to do more than be the pinup star at the lip of the stage. There needed to be a lot more depth to what he was doing, and from the moment that 5150 started, it was like the band had completely reinvented themselves from the ground up on every track.
While ‘Good Enough’ and ‘Get Up’ could have been perfect vehicles for David Lee Roth’s style of singing, that was never how Hagar operated. ‘The Red Rocker’ made a name for himself being one of the most intense rock and roll vocalists in the world, and even if he had a screech that was a lot different from ‘Diamond Dave’, most people would have been blown away by a song like ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ or ‘Dreams’ no matter who was singing.
Then again, there were more than a few drawbacks to that era when you look a little bit closer. They didn’t have to settle for the doofy behaviour that Roth did every single time they played a show, but their sound was actually a lot closer to dad rock than what they were used to. They had been a party band for so long, and now that they had lyrics about the human condition and dissecting what it meant to be in love, they were a lot closer to what bands like Boston were doing than anything coming out of California.
But as far as Hagar was concerned, that was only a good thing. As much as Van Halen tore up the stadium circuit before he was in the band, Roth’s schtick of being one of the most iconic frontmen who ever lived wasn’t going to last forever. That was practically like watching a Vegas act that happened to have a pretty kickass rock and roll band in Hagar’s mind, and since the rest of California was following Roth’s lead by being as glamorous as possible, Hagar wanted to move in the opposite direction.
He certainly had respect for the early days of glam like David Bowie, but he wasn’t about to start putting on spandex and singing songs about sex all the time, either, saying, “There’s no question that with Roth, Van Halen was unique and that got the band off the ground, but it had this glamorous, dated image about it. When I joined, I wasn’t into that whole heavy metal fashion thing. I wasn’t a leather king or doing the glam thing like Roth and Van Halen were before the Van Hagar era.”
In all fairness, the look did work to a degree when Roth was in the band. ‘Diamond Dave’ was made for MTV when the channel was in its infancy, but by the time it had reached the video for ‘Panama’, it was starting to get a bit ridiculous. And when you look at what was happening to rock around the turn of the decade, Van Halen may have been counting their blessings that they weren’t being treated like a glam band.
Anyone else in Van Halen’s shoes would have easily crumbled after the grunge wave came in, but when they took out a band like Alice in Chains on tour, hearing tunes like ‘Right Now’ didn’t feel out of place. They had ascended to the same level as their heroes like Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, and there was no chance that they were going to be associated with bands like Poison.
That was all part of the early stages of Van Halen, and when Hagar joined the group, it was about more than getting a new singer that had a half-decent voice. The ride was already turning, and ‘The Red Rocker’ was the one who helped push them beyond the Sunset Strip and closer to rock and roll history.
