The one rock song Sammy Hagar called “the coolest ever”
A lot of what Sammy Hagar does to this day always comes back to celebrating rock and roll.
This was the genre that changed his life when he first joined Montrose, and while his time with Van Halen may have been a bit shorter than he wanted, he was more than happy to keep trucking through his solo career no matter what happened. But even for as many times as he flirted with singer-songwriter tunes in his back catalogue, he never forgot how rock and roll made him feel.
This was the genre that was meant to give people that certain feeling in their gut that made them feel like a musical titan whenever they played. Jimmy Page wasn’t in the business to be looked at as merely a guitar player. He wanted to take people into new realms with Led Zeppelin, and ‘The Red Rocker’ was a humble student of everyone from Zeppelin to Aerosmith when he first started singing.
There are a few similarities between him and more classic singers like Rod Stewart, but when Van Halen gave him a call to join, he gave them the one thing they didn’t have in their previous frontman: musicianship. Say what you want to about David Lee Roth, but his prowess as a singer was far more about him being one of the best musical party hosts ever, rather than worrying about the actual vocal runs he was doing.
As opposed to Roth’s habit of soaking in applause, Hagar wanted to get out there and have a good time playing music. Songs didn’t only have to be about sex and drugs anymore, either. They could sometimes be about heavier topics like love and the state of the world, and that’s probably what made them a bit easier to digest when the hair metal died its ugly death in 1991.
It also helped that Hagar was an avid fan of the early grunge bands like Alice in Chains, saying, “We took Alice in Chains out with us on that tour because — well, first of all, I thought ‘Man in the Box’ was one of the coolest rock songs ever. But I also wanted to embrace grunge. I’m going, ‘Hey, let’s take these guys out and introduce ourselves to their audience and then introduce them to our audience.’”
Alice may have had to dodge more than a few middle fingers on their first tour with Van Halen, but it’s not like Hagar wasn’t onto something with ‘Man in the Box’. The tune was a lot more moody than anything else on the radio, but by the time that Nirvana blew up and changed the game, Alice was one of the few bands that served as a nice middle ground for the metalheads in the audience that needed music a bit heavier than the hair bands of yesteryear.
And for a grunge band, Jerry Cantrell admitted to having the utmost respect for people like Eddie. He was already shellshocked that a band like them even liked his music, but when looking back on those first shows, he knew that he wasn’t going to be any good knowing that Eddie was sitting in the pit during the show watching him perform.
Although a lot of bands of Van Halen’s generation would have been shaking in their boots listening to people like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, Hagar’s reaction is what a lot of people should have been doing during that time. Not everything had to be stomped out once Nirvana took over the world, and even if ‘Man in the Box’ and ‘Right Now’ felt like they were on two different musical planets, both bands could still play nice together if they wanted to.
