The one Van Halen song Sammy Hagar thanked God for: “Never felt so hard to sing”
There was never a second Sammy Hagar took for granted ever since he started making music.
He has always been a fan of rock and roll since his teens, and whether it was playing with Montrose when he was first starting or carving out a new path in his solo career, he was more than happy to express his gratitude to every fan who got him to the heights very few people have been able to see. But nothing was going to compare to the contribution that he made to Van Halen back in the day.
If you look at the kind of job that ‘The Red Rocker’ had at the time, though, it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, either. He had a lot of great moments in his solo career, and while the idea of playing with someone like Eddie would have been great, replacing someone like Davud Lee Roth wasn’t really something that he wanted to take part in. That was rock and roll done up as a circus, and he wanted to have more of a hand in being a songwriter.
Then again, that’s why he was a perfect match for Van Halen. All of them were far from a fan of Roth’s antics, and it’s no surprise that a lot of their albums with Hagar had a bit more depth to them. They weren’t trying to outdo songs like ‘Panama’ or ‘Ain’t Talkin Bout Love’, but if they knew they could make songs like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ into even bigger hits, there was no reason to recycle their old material.
Even though things got more than a little bit bumpy towards the end of their tenure on Balance, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge is the perfect middle ground for the ‘Van Hagar’ years. Is it more than a little bit silly that they turned their album title into a dad pun? Absolutely, but with songs like ‘Poundcake’ and ‘Judgement Day’ kicking off the record, they hadn’t lost an ounce of the fire that they had back in the day.
By Van Halen standards, though, there wasn’t much that was going to compare to the song ‘Right Now’. Most people would have been happy to have a melody that hooky in their arsenal, but the existential lyrics about living every day like it’s your last is one of the most thoughtful lyrics to ever turn up on a Van Halen album, even if it is undercut by a song about sex before it called ‘Spanked’.
But after learning of Eddie’s passing, Hagar singled out this song as the one track he was forever grateful for writing with the guitarist when performing it after, saying, “A Van Halen song never felt so hard to sing and play in my life. What I felt playing, especially a song like ‘Right Now’ that is so timeless, that I felt, ‘Wow, thank God for this.’ We’ll never play it with Eddie again, but thank God for this.”
There are many fantastic musicians that have played the part in Hagar’s backing bands in the past, but even with Michael Anthony playing with him in recent years, there are certain things that Eddie could do that no one could match. The tapping licks that he made all came out of a place of fun, and where all of the other guitar virtuosos make the whole thing look like work whenever they play, Eddie seemed to be having a blast every time he showed off his bag of tricks live.
And given the fact that Hagar was having talks with Eddie about possibly making up in the final years of his life, a tune like ‘Right Now’ was also a bit of a cautionary tale. Nothing was going to bring him back, but even if no one can change the past, it’s better to celebrate the song as one of the many great moments that the guys had together before everything turned sour in the late 1990s.
