The one Van Halen song Sammy Hagar wishes he wrote: “That’s a badass tune”
For most artists, it can’t get any better than inspiring someone to do something great with their own art. It’s one thing to have something that reflects your state of mind at one moment, but when there are millions of people talking about what it means to them and how it helped them understand themselves, there are few feelings greater in the world. While Sammy Hagar does have many Van Halen songs of that ilk under his belt, he remembered getting fired up for all the wrong reasons when listening to ‘Panama’ for the first time.
Before Van Halen was even an idea, though, producer Ted Templeman saw a future for them with Hagar at the helm. They had barely secured a record contract with the David Lee Roth lineup of the group, but Templeman felt that if they wanted to truly go over the top, they needed the ‘Red Rocker’ at their disposal.
While that would have meant missing out on some of the greatest music the group would release in the late 1970s, it’s easy to see where he’s coming from. Despite Roth’s electric stage presence, Hagar was a more natural fit for a frontman, complete with serious chops on rhythm guitar and having worked alongside fellow guitar legend Ronnie Montrose just a few years before.
Once they settled in with Roth, though, albums like Women and Children First and Fair Warning remain some eclectic classics from their catalogue. While not every song was cut out to be a single, hearing them go from being a party band to the heaviest riffs ever made this side of Black Sabbath is still one of the boldest transformations a group has ever undergone in just a few years.
When listening to 1984, though, you’d swear that the group had sold out. Eddie had started performing with Michael Jackson, and with a lead single like ‘Jump’, it was no surprise that people were thinking that they had lost their way just a little bit. As soon as ‘Panama’ hit the airwaves, fans could all shut the hell up, complete with AC/DC-like swagger and one of Eddie’s greatest licks for the chorus.
Even when he started fronting the group, Hagar remembered being angry that he didn’t get to that song first, saying, “I love ‘Panama.’ That’s a badass tune. The first time I heard ‘Panama,’ it pissed me off. That’s how good it is. I was watching a live Van Halen clip the other day, from ‘95. We were doing ‘Panama’, and it was frickin’ great.”
That’s not to say that Hagar didn’t have his heavy tunes, either. Yes, many people like to clown on Van Hagar for being the more middle-aged version of the group, but for as much power that Roth had at his disposal, no one else was going to be able to make a song as goofy as ‘Poundcake’ sound heavy or create a borderline progressive tune on ‘Cabo Wabo’.
But that’s what all healthy competition is about in music. Hagar may not have liked the fact that ‘Panama’ was a Roth-era song, but if he couldn’t claim to have written it, he was bound to make a handful of other tracks that would handily outdo anything that Roth put out.
