‘Just A Gigolo’: The song Sammy Hagar couldn’t stand hearing
Working with a band like Van Halen isn’t something that Sammy Hagar was just going to pass up.
Anyone would have given their left arm to be able to sing over Eddie’s licks at the time, and even if there were a lot more avenues for ‘The Red Rocker’ to explore, there was no way that he was going to turn things down the minute that they hit on a song like ‘Summer Nights’. It was love at first sound in many ways when they started playing, but Hagar was also going to lay some ground rules before they even took to the stage.
For one thing, he was a solo star, and there was no way that he could have got away with playing all of his own tunes whenever they performed live. They might have become a little bit more laid-back in their later years when they played tunes like ‘Only One Way to Rock’ or even a handful of Montrose licks every now and again, but if you’re jumping into a rock and roll monster, you’re going to have to play by their rules first.
But they already had a plan for how to introduce someone like Hagar to the world. It took a lot of balls for them to release no official music videos for 5150, but they earned their audience back the right way: by playing live onstage. A lot of the best moments in their career came when they started giving it to the fans directly, but for any dyed-in-the-wool Van Halen fans, there were more than a few classics that were conspicuously absent.
And there’s a good reason: Hagar was no David Lee Roth. His onstage schtick was about relating to the audience in a more meaningful way, and while Roth put on his best imitation of a rock and roll version of Sammy Davis Jr, that kind of performance was far away from what Hagar wanted. He was in it for the music rather than the applause, and it seemed like Roth was going in the opposite direction when he first started to break away from the band.
Crazy From the Heat may have seemed like a fun diversion when ‘Diamond Dave’ made it, but he was clearly testing the waters for what his solo career could be. The over-the-top versions of tunes like The Beach Boys’ ‘California Girls’ and Louis Prima’s ‘Just a Gigolo’ were novel for the time, but according to Hagar, he wouldn’t have been caught dead singing any of those songs with Van Halen.
There was certainly room for them to have some fun when they were playing, but Hagar had no problem saying that those tunes were terrible, saying, “Well, [Dave’s] got a real good band — the second best players in the world, ha ha. I don’t know him personally… I listened to his record, and I think it’s pretty good, except I can’t stand ‘That’s Life’ and ‘Just A Gigolo’ and all that shit — that’s vaudeville.”
And to be fair, Roth did get the best players that he knew to work on some of his best records. Having a bass player like Billy Sheehan and a guitarist like Steve Vai in your band is never a bad thing, but when they were being forced to make cheesy schlock every time they walked into the studio, it wasn’t exactly the same rush that people got when listening to tunes like ‘Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love’ or ‘And the Cradle Will Rock’ for the first time.
Roth may have been trying to reinvent himself as a hard rock version of a crooner, but that was never in the cards for Van Halen. They were an all-out rock and roll band, and by the time that Hagar started working on tunes like ‘Dreams’, they knew to stay far away from anything that had to do with the glamorous side of the genre.
