The one Van Halen song Sammy Hagar hated working on: “That sucked”
It’s a wonder how someone like Sammy Hagar managed to pull off a miracle when he joined Van Halen.
The fact that the band could have continued on at all after losing David Lee Roth would have been a miracle, but when they came back with ‘The Red Rocker’ in tow, they managed to have even more hits and a much broader musical palette to deal with. But after a few more years into their career, that friendship started to erode once they started fighting amongst each other in the studio.
Then again, the studio wasn’t always the best place for ‘Van Hagar’. That band belonged onstage from the minute that they began, and judging by the fact that most of their first music videos were nothing but live footage, it’s safe to say that was the place where they were most comfortable. But while 5150 was a knockout from cover to cover, OU812 already saw the wheels coming off to a certain degree as well.
None of the band members were producers by any stretch, and the idea of them trying to man everything themselves for their second record together is probably why they went screaming back to Ted Templeman for For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. Templeman knew that band like the back of his hand, and songs like ‘Right Now’ and ‘Judgement Day’ are the true masterpieces from that era. But in the era of grunge, Balance was the first time they seemed to be really off their game.
The alternative revolution didn’t crush them by any stretch, but compared to every album they released before, songs like ‘Can’t Stop Lovin’ You’ were some of the more forgettable singles that the band ever made. All they really needed was a break, but when Hagar was told to come back into the office to work on the song ‘Humans Being’ for the movie Twister, he found himself blocked out of the room before he could even start jotting words down.
Eddie may have been the one coming up with the insane riffs, but Hagar was always the storyteller, so seeing the guitarist put his foot down about certain lyrics was already a step over the line. ‘Don’t Tell Me What Love Can Do’ already suffered the same fate when they were working on the last record, but Hagar felt that it was like torture trying to make Eddie happy without using too many weather metaphors.
As Hagar tells it, the original lines that Eddie had were awful, and even when he started restructuring everything, all that magic that he had during those first Van Halen sessions was officially gone, saying, “He wanted me to chant something like, ‘Bah, bah, bah. I hate this, I hate that, you dirty rat.’ I looked at Eddie and told him that sucked. He just said, ‘Well, do something. All they need is a minute and a half; otherwise we’ll just make an instrumental out of it.’ I wrote those verses in about 10-15 minutes on the hood of a car with Bruce. It was so cheeseball the way it was done.”
It might have been hard to argue with the guy who had slapped his name in front of the band, but it’s not like Hagar didn’t have a point. Eddie was always a fantastic musician, but his strong suit was never in songwriting, as evidenced by Van Halen III where half of the songs sound like an absolute mess with him throwing every single lick that he could think of into every single tune.
All of his licks are far better than anything Hagar could have come up with, but the important lesson to learn here is the importance of song structure. Eddie could have easily made a record full of licks and still made it to number one, but if he wanted to be remembered for making great tunes, he needed someone to help guide him in that direction.
