The singer Sammy Hagar couldn’t stand being with: “He was the worst guy”
Sammy Hagar has always seemed like one of the most fun-loving guys in the history of rock and roll. Say what you want to about his music, but whenever he plays a show, he won’t rest until he’s sure that everyone in the crowd is having the absolute best time possible when he’s singing. He may have parted with Van Halen to continue his solo career, but when he was asked to come back, he loathed the idea of working with David Lee Roth.
If you’ve seen Roth for over five minutes, though, you’d probably understand why Hagar would be a little reluctant. Roth is among the best frontmen of all time, and his back catalogue speaks for itself, but there’s a fine line between being the life of the party and coming off like the obnoxious party guest who won’t take the hint that the party’s over.
Still, Van Halen was never Roth or Hagar’s band to begin with. It belonged to the Van Halen brothers, and if Eddie and Alex thought that an idea was good enough to work, why not try to give the audience the literal best of both worlds with both singers playing at different points in the show?
Whereas Hagar was ready to put in the work, Roth seemed to become the diva behind the scenes. It’s not like he and Eddie had split on good terms the first time around, so Roth was playing the rock star card and had no time for anyone backstage, especially Hagar.
Looking back on his time touring with Roth years later, Hagar believed that most of those shows were miserable because of how he acted, saying, “When we did the tour, I thought it was gonna be so much fun…He was the worst guy to be around. He wasn’t ever around. He hides out. You never see him. He puts on this whole big front and comes out, ‘I’m here. David Lee Roth is here,’ and then he goes and hides again.”
Hagar’s frustration is less about ego than it is about momentum. For him, the whole point of a reunion was the communal rush, the sense that everyone involved is pulling in the same direction to give the crowd something they cannot get anywhere else. When one half of that equation disappears behind closed doors and only re-emerges for the spotlight, it turns a working band into a rotating cast, and that is the kind of atmosphere that drains the fun out of even the best setlist.
It also underlines why the idea of “both worlds” was always more complicated than it sounded on paper. Van Halen could accommodate different singers, but they could not accommodate two entirely different philosophies of what it means to show up. Hagar’s version of rock stardom is open-door, sleeves-rolled-up, and relentlessly present. Roth’s is theatre, mystery, and a controlled burn. Neither approach is automatically wrong, but on the road, the gap between them becomes the story, and it is usually the music that ends up doing the extra work to bridge it.
There’s no shame in having a ritual before you deliver onstage, but chances are that both singers’ personalities were just incompatible. Roth had relied on his tongue half the time and put on that larger-than-life personality, whereas Hagar was always just one of the guys, feeling proud to be able to make an audience go crazy for a few hours.
Granted, Hagar does have a few more chops on Roth by comparison. Each of their vocal styles is pretty unique, but Roth isn’t normally going for as many high notes these days as Hagar can, still being able to deliver that kind of fantastic scream on tracks like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Right Now’.
Once Van Halen had to make a choice, though, they sided with Roth, eventually striking out on the road as a revitalised version of Van Halen with Eddie’s son Wolfgang filling in for Michael Anthony on bass. Hagar may have taken his dismissal in stride as he moved on to bands like Chickenfoot, but that tour would be one of the last times that fans would hear ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ with Eddie and Hagar onstage together.
