“Goosebumps on my arms”: the performance that left Sammy Hagar in tears
Rock and roll has never prided itself on being a sentimental genre. It might be about giving people a good time, but most people understand that they leave their emotions for the songs and leave any personal matters at the door whenever they get up onstage. That’s what the professionalism in rock and roll was all about, but Sammy Hagar was never afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve if something touched his soul during a show.
Then again, Hagar was one of the hardest-working people in rock and roll who would never give anything less than a stellar show if the people demanded it. Even in the early days of Montrose, he would have times when he would be hanging on by a thread, but he would be a dead man in the ground before he decided to cut something for his audience because he couldn’t cut it live one night.
And when he joined Van Halen, he had no real room to recover for any reason. Replacing David Lee Roth was going to need some Olympian-level strength to pull off as a frontman, but since he had a guitar behind him, Eddie had a partner in crime that he could throw licks at and even toy with onstage. Even if some Roth purists were mad, though, no one could deny that the records sounded fantastic.
It was certainly a change of scenery in many respects, but the ‘Van Hagar’ years saw them incorporating far more heavy synths into the mix. The last thing that people wanted to do was see their resident guitar god behind a keyboard, but as it turned out, tunes like ‘Right Now’ and ‘Dreams’ could fit nicely alongside ‘Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love’ in the setlist. But right when the band should have been celebrating the most, things went dark.
“I abandoned all my idealism and vowed simply to enjoy the hell out of the moment.”
Sammy Hagar
As the band were being considered for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Van Halen brothers had been cutting ties with Hagar. He had signed on for a couple of tunes for one of their greatest hits albums, but since they were trying their best to make amends with both him and Roth, things went sour the night they were inducted by Velvet Revolver. The brothers may have had the name, but Hagar wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to celebrate his arrival in rock Valhalla.
Although it was bittersweet not to have the same guitar genius at his side, Hagar remembered getting misty-eyed getting through the final tunes of the night, saying, “I abandoned all my idealism and vowed simply to enjoy the hell out of the moment. It was a wonderful experience. Keith Richards sat in the front row and gave me the thumbs-up; I had tears in my eyes and goosebumps on my arms.”
Then again, anyone would have considered a thumbs-up from Keith Richards like the equivalent of being blessed by a rock and roll prophet at that point. The Stones represented everything that rock and roll was supposed to be, and while ‘Satisfaction’ had been a mainstay of the genre for years, this was also validation that Hagar’s era of Van Halen was as important to their history as their early years.
Everyone might like to claim that the band had hit a perfect hot streak and then fumbled it when Hagar came in, but it was never a case of being a lesser group. They had simply changed, and while Roth wasn’t the eternal party master at the front of the stage, that didn’t mean that the party had to officially end.
