The singer Sammy Hagar said “can barely sing” the Van Halen songs
There wasn’t a “right way” to sing when it came to either of the singers in Van Halen.
David Lee Roth always had his own sense of swagger that didn’t need to revolve around hitting the right notes every single time he sang, and even when Sammy Hagar took the microphone, he had a lot more depth behind his music than anything that his predecessor was doing. That said, it’s not like ‘The Red Rocker’ didn’t have a few choice words for when he thought Van Halen weren’t exactly up to snuff.
Because when Hagar first joined, he wasn’t completely sold on the kind of music that he was being asked to play. Anyone would have killed to get the opportunity to play with Eddie, but the idea of being the fun-loving party animal that used every single show as an excuse to soak in applause wasn’t Hagar’s idea of a good time. He wanted the chance to make something people would remember, and that meant going for something a lot more melodic than what you were seeing out of ‘Diamond Dave’.
As far as he could tell, Roth was an absolute clown who happened to have one of the best gigs any singer could have asked for, and Hagar wanted the chance to take the band further. But right after they had hit their stride and walked away with a classic album in the early 1990s, Hagar was blindsided once Eddie felt that they had come to the end of their rope when working on Balance together.
They hadn’t enjoyed the recording experience all that much, and since they were used to micromanaging each other, chances are Eddie wanted to roll the dice with someone else on the mic. They had done it before, and they were more than capable of doing it again, but before Hagar even heard a note of what Gary Cherone was singing, he figured that he was going about making the tunes all wrong.
Cherone is not a bad vocalist by any stretch, but the idea of making him a Hagar clone was insulting to ‘The Red Rocker’, saying, “The word I got is that they’re trying to sound like they’re trying to make Gary sound like Sammy Hagar. I’m curious, they keep putting the songs in higher keys until he can barely sing ’em. So that he sounds strained and passionate, like the way I sing. I know one thing though, they lost their songwriter, because I was the songwriter in that band.”
And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why Van Halen III ended up sounding terrible. Cherone’s vocals are pushed way too far out of his range to even sound halfway convincing, and when you look through the closest things that the record had to singles, ‘Without You’ is an example of every single piece of the Van Halen formula being disgraced all in one go.
Then again, there might have been a little bit more of a method to why the band wasn’t working right. They had already signed with new management, and since their new higher-up had signed deals with both Extreme and Van Halen, it’s easy to see why he would have wanted to kill two birds with one stone and have Cherone join the group and push Hagar out of the equation more often than not.
Roth and Hagar might not have been the same kind of God-given virtuoso that Eddie was, but what they didn’t have in technical prowess they made up for in style and structure. They were dictating what those songs were going to sound like, and now that they didn’t have that foundation, all that they were left with was a singer that could barely pul off any material that he was given.
