The reason Sammy Hagar thought Eddie Van Halen was dried up
Anyone expecting their favourite artists to write classic songs until their dying day is really fighting a losing battle. No one has that impressive a hot streak, and even if someone manages to get better with age, there are usually some roadblocks along the way that fans either don’t like to talk about or have been blocked out of the room because of how much the artist is embarrassed by them. While Van Halen admittedly never had many of those issues, Sammy Hagar had enough sense to realise when it was time to call it quits when making music with his guitar maestro bandmate.
But compared to every other guitarist in the world, Eddie was never someone trying to follow trends or make the same kind of riff over again. Looking at his track record, he was the closest thing to Jimi Hendrix as rock and roll had been in his prime, and even if he was working the keyboards or tapping his way through a solo, he never forgot about the sense of melody behind his stuff. It was about serving the song, but some songs were harder to serve than others.
Trying to work things out with David Lee Roth on 1984 was already a headache, but after a few years with ‘The Red Rocker’, Balance saw those same problems again. They made it through the record without much trouble, but since Hagar’s lyrics and Eddie’s melodies were clashing, it was either time for them to break or break things off altogether. And after being called in one last time to make a movie soundtrack song, Eddie had had enough of Hagar and asked him to leave.
But that wasn’t a problem, right? They had replaced singers before, and they could do it again, but Gary Cherone obviously wasn’t the right fit when Van Halen III came out. He remains a fantastic vocalist in his own right, but having him sing like Hagar on many of the tunes was more than a little disheartening. It was the first time that Van Halen failed on a major scale, and while they needed to course correct, Hagar wasn’t exactly thrilled when he came back, either.
The years of excess had started to take a toll on Eddie, and looking at the shape he was in on the reunion tour, he seemed like a husk of himself. The years of wear and tear on his body had left him strung out most of the time onstage, and while he could still play his instrument perfectly, it never seemed to work out when he looked too ill to do so and wore his hair in a ponytail in an attempt to look like some rock and roll samurai.
And while Hagar has fond memories of Eddie following the guitarist’s tragic passing, he stands by the fact that he was past his prime when he eventually made the comeback album A Different Kind of Truth, saying, “He had used that guitar neck up. He did everything and anything that neck could do, and changed his amps, and got his sounds. So, that’s why he stopped writing, I think, because he just ran out. Shit, how much do you need? How much can you squeeze out of the dude?”
That might be a cruel blow, but it’s not like Hagar doesn’t have a point. A Different Kind of Truth was a fine way for Eddie to bring things to a close with the Roth lineup, but since half of the record was made up of riffs and songs that the band had made back in the late 1970s, it’s not like they were looking to break new ground outside of Eddie’s son, Wolfie, arranging things a little differently.
But maybe Hagar was a lot more out of the loop when it came to Eddie’s backlog of fantastic songs. Alex Van Halen has already talked about releasing an entire album of previously unheard Van Halen riffs, so maybe there’s a lot more in Eddie’s vault that could change the way that most of us see guitar.
