The singer Sammy Hagar said was out of everyone’s league: “I got goosebumps on my whole body”
When Sammy Hagar first joined Van Halen, he wasn’t looking to be a David Lee Roth clone.
Eddie had spent years working with ‘Diamond Dave’, and while the band wouldn’t have been the same without him, there was a cartoonish aspect that started to take away from the music more often than not whenever they made videos for songs like ‘Hot for Teacher’. ‘The Red Rocker’ was there to help bring back some credibility, but he did study under some of the greatest performers in the business before he had even started his solo career.
After all, he wasn’t going to get the gig in Montrose back in the day without having a knack for performing. Hagar was barely out of his teens when he started working with Ronnie Montrose, but when you heard him kicking off tunes like ‘Rock the Nation’ or barreling his way through ‘Bad Motor Scooter’, even Van Halen’s producer had to wonder whether it was a good idea to get him in the band before Roth had even sung a note.
Hagar certainly had the charisma to stand at the front of the stage, but he was much more humble than the average rock and roll star. Most singers feel larger than life from the moment they walk onstage, but in Hagar’s case, there’s a good chance that he would have gladly hung out with the first few rows of the audience after the show was over if someone asked politely. When compared to the other singers of the time, though, Hagar’s contemporaries were practically untouchable.
Not all of them were divas in their prime, but when looking at the spectacles that were happening on every other rock and roll tour, it didn’t feel like most singers were human. You didn’t breathe the same air as someone like Jimmy Page or Robert Plant, and it’d be hard to think of what someone like Gene Simmons did during an average day off, but even when talking about the rock and roll gods, there was no one who was going to give James Brown a run for his money whenever he played.
Brown was among the finest to ever touch a microphone, and while there have been many people who have ridden his coattails like Prince and Michael Jackson, there’s a reason he’s still called the hardest working man in show business. He never stopped moving onstage, he could scream to the heavens at every single show, and by the time he was drenched in sweat at the end of every gig, no one could deny that he was one of the best performers in the world.
Hagar may have tried his best to put every ounce of his body into his work, but what Brown did was beyond anything he had ever seen, saying, “Listen to James Brown. Oh, f–k. I got goosebumps on my whole body just now saying his name, because last night I was watching TV, and they showed an ad for a James Brown special they’ve got coming up. And seeing that bad motherf–ker hit that stage and start dancing and giving it up and screaming and leading the band and going down and back up and splits and back up. Man, there was nobody better than James Brown. I mean, he is the man.”
‘The Red Rocker’ wasn’t the kind to talk to his bandmates like Brown did or have someone throw a coat over him at the end of every show, but there are a few tunes that do have some Brown influence to them. Van Halen aren’t exactly the funkiest band in the world by any stretch, but when Hagar reached into that higher register for some of their best songs, you can definitely hear that same kind of reckless abandon that made Brown’s fans go wild when he played the Apollo Theater back in the day.
There was a lot of spectacle to what Brown did, but Hagar learned an important lesson every time he heard him play. It was one thing to take ‘Diamond Dave’s route and be one of the coolest people in the room when the music started, but Hagar figured it was always better to knock everyone out on the strength of the songs rather than straight charisma.
