The Van Halen album Sammy Hagar called too boring: “I would have quit if it continued”
Every great rock and roll record is about having fun. The worst thing anyone can do in the business is take themselves too seriously, and some of the biggest fumbles in rock history usually come when someone shoots for being a respected artist and comes off as unbelievably pretentious. And while it’s easy for someone to point and laugh when someone like Bono has his ego ballooned to twice its size when an album comes out, Van Halen were never intended to be that kind of band starting out.
Eddie always took his music seriously whenever he wrote licks, but David Lee Roth was the last person to come to if someone wanted introspective material or songs about the greater problems with the world. He wanted to be a superstar like Frank Sinatra wanted to be a superstar, and that meant playing the sun-kissed rock and roll badass whenever he got onstage.
But while Roth could keep the good times rolling whenever he put on those assless chaps, there was always going to come a time when things got irritating. There had to be more avenues to go down, but despite Sammy Hagar showing them more serious approaches to music, that didn’t mean it didn’t come without a few hangups, either.
There were still some lighthearted songs about sex like ‘Poundcake’ in their discography, but by the time of Balance, Hagar felt that everything that he loved about being in the band had been sucked dry, saying, “I got bored on the Balance record. It started becoming work to just write lyrics and melodies to Eddie’s music. I was interested on the next record in trying to break that mould, because otherwise I was just bored with the band, and I probably would have quit in another year or two – if it had continued like that.”
Then again, is Balance actually that terrible? Sure, it’s way too long compared to most Van Halen records, but looking at it next to For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, it’s not like a massive slog of one boring song after the next. It’s perfectly fine, but that might be the biggest problem with it.
Because since when had any of Van Halen’s records ever been considered “fine”? There might be a few that leave people befuddled as to how they even got made, like Van Halen III, but if a band isn’t leaving you with a strong response at all, that’s arguably worse. A tune like ‘Without You’ might be grating on the ears, but sometimes it’s better to have that than having an album full of songs that will leave your head the minute you stop listening.
“I got bored on the Balance record. It started becoming work to just write lyrics and melodies to Eddie’s music.”
Sammy Hagar
That might be a bit too harsh, though. ‘Can’t Stop Lovin’ You’ is a great song, and ‘Don’t Tell Me What Love Can Do’ has a brilliant idea behind it, but outside of the other tense songs like ‘Amsterdam’, there’s hardly any reason for anyone to return to it all that often unless you want to hear the stranger sounds Eddie ever came up with, like kicking the album off with a Gregorian chant on ‘The Seventh Seal’.
There isn’t anything that many people need to get worked up over on Balance, but that’s probably why it gets picked as the least necessary album of the Hagar years. Because outside of the big hits, it was clear that things weren’t working between them anymore and that they needed to make a change to keep themselves moving.
