‘Eagles Fly’: the Sammy Hagar classic Van Halen turned down
It’s never the easiest thing in the world to spot a hit out in the wild. Outside of a few songs that have the words ‘classic’ almost prestamped on them, there are hardly too many times where people can claim that they come up with one of the greatest songs ever written out of the air. Although Sammy Hagar admitted to having some sort of magic when he walked into the room with Van Halen, he was also ready to go forward with his own material when they rejected it.
Before the ‘Van Hagar’ years even started, Hagar was already making waves as a solo artist. Sure, he may not have been getting those same royalty checks that Van Halen had during their prime, but after working in Montrose and then making his own classics like ‘I Can’t Drive 55’, he was more than willing to do things on his own terms if it meant him having fun whenever he played live.
After all, that’s the whole reason why Van Halen was resurrected when 5150 came out. The whole record never had any official videos made during the golden age of MTV, and while that should spell disaster for anyone who was trying to get a glimpse of the group, the fact that the music did the talking half the time was a testament to what they could do, usually making the best out of their knack for hooks on songs like ‘Love Walks In’ or ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’.
But for as busy as Van Halen could be, ‘The Red Rocker’ was definitely busier. He was a workaholic in every sense of the word, and when he wasn’t working in the confines of his new band, he would still be balancing out his solo career, eventually using Eddie as a bass player when working on his album I Never Said Goodbye. Though his best stuff was getting saved for Eddie, there were times when even the guitar genius didn’t understand what he had brought to the table.
“Dude, don’t you remember what you said about that song?”
sammy hagar
As much as Hagar loved the idea of making straight-ahead hard rock, ‘Eagles Fly’ was a bit of a different beast. Compared to all of the piano-driven stuff Van Halen was doing, this was a smaller affair with acoustic guitars in the mix. And while those softer moments were treated as a novelty back in the David Lee Roth days, they were not going to fly once Hagar entered the picture.
Despite the song being one of Hagar’s finest songwriting jobs, he remembered Alex Van Halen axing the idea before it got started, saying, “I’m at the studio. I’m playing it for Ed, and Alex is standing in the background, and I’m… on guitar, acoustic. And Alex goes, ‘Sounds like John Denver!’… Alex heard it on the record, and he goes, ‘Hey, man, you should have saved that for Van Halen!’ I said, ‘Dude, don’t you remember what you said about that song?’”
At the same time, Alex did have a point. There weren’t as many songs that had the rootsy rock flair that Hagar was going for on parts of this song, but since tracks like ‘Right Now’ were around the corner, it’s strange to think that something that still managed to kick this much ass was seen as lightweight at the time.
Even if ‘Eagles Fly’ occupies a strange place in Hagar’s discography now, the fact that it could have been a Van Halen song has sparked countless ‘what-if’ scenarios. The band were on top of the world throughout the rest of the 1980s, but if this tune had been swapped with another song on OU812, maybe they would have learned that putting too much bloat on an album can make things really boring.
