The one musician Sammy Hagar picked over Bob Dylan: “He’s a great poet”
Sammy Hagar might be one of the greatest singers of all time, but he was always about more than screaming.
Plenty of artists have reached the top of the charts for their dynamic range or being able to hit notes that only dogs could hear, but ‘The Red Rocker’ always put the song before everything, whether he was working with Van Halen, playing with Montrose, or working up one of his solo tunes. And since he came up in the golden age of rock and roll, he knew a fair bit about what he was learning from.
After all, many of whom are known as the greatest songwriters in rock history were all putting out their classics by the time a young Hagar was first falling in love with the genre. Anyone his age would have remembered where they were the first time they heard records like The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper or Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced, and Hagar was always willing to praise the true giants that came before him.
It’s not like that praise ever ended, either. Hagar knew that the key to immortality was to keep listening to what the new kids were doing, and even if his peers were working with new techniques like Peter Gabriel, he was equally enamoured with what bands like Tool were doing to push the envelope forward in the metal world. Then again, there wasn’t much in rock and roll that couldn’t be said with an acoustic guitar and a song on your heart.
Hagar had plenty of those kinds of tunes in his arsenal, but that came from listening to the long history of folk singers. Bob Dylan may have blown the doors wide open for every single kid that had a message that they wanted to send with their music, but if Dylan was telling people how to live their lives, Donovan was the one teaching Hagar how pretty melodies could be with as little adornment as possible.
Dylan still held a firm place in Hagar’s heart, but he was far more infatuated with what Donovan was doing, saying, “Around the time of Dylan, I also got turned onto Donovan and to be honest, I was more of a Donovan guy than a Dylan guy. Donovan had the same feelings as I had about lost love and had a romantic streak I identified with. I actually cut a version of his song ‘Young Girl Blues’ on my first solo album. I’ve met him and I still love his music. He’s a great poet.”
Although that’s not exactly the first thing that comes to mind when listening to Hagar’s music, that kind of romanticism is certainly there if you know where to look for it. 5150 might be packed to the brim with classic rock tunes, but there are also tracks like ‘Love Walks In’ that take the same mentality that Donovan had and switch out the psychedelia for an extraterrestrial look at romance.
And in his later years, Hagar did have a few moments that seemed to fit more in line with the mellow groove that Donovan was working with. He could still tear up any song that he had to sing, but given his history with working with The Waboritas on a handful of records, he was clearly into making music and having a good time rather than focusing on getting more heavy in every subsequent release.
So even though Hagar doesn’t have the same sound that Donovan did in the beginning, it does turn up in the finer details of his work. He was never meant to be the same kind of folksy artist that his heroes were, but if Dylan was speaking for the people, Hagar was the kind of songwriter that was another everyman looking to have a good time.
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