Why Sammy Hagar lost confidence during one album: “I didn’t know who I was”
Not every album will turn out the same way an artist hears it in their head. They can try their hardest to figure out what they want to say, but it’s anyone’s guess whether that will result in the next Dark Side of the Moon or one of the most perplexing album experiences ever made.
While Sammy Hagar may have hit the ground running as soon as he joined Van Halen, he admitted that his solo smash Nine on a Ten Scale was a mess from the very beginning.
For a band of Van Halen’s calibre, what Hagar did seemed practically impossible. Since he had to fill the shoes of David Lee Roth, not only did he have to have onstage charisma to match him, but he was also able to click with the rest of the group and write the kind of songs that could resonate just as well as ‘Jump’ and ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’.
It didn’t take long for Hagar to jump at the opportunity, though. After having modest success in his solo career with songs like ‘I Can’t Drive 55’, he knew that he could become even bigger by working off of Eddie Van Halen’s signature riffs, having gotten a tip from Eddie’s auto mechanic that he should audition.
Before Hagar had played a note of music with them, though, the band were already big fans of his former outfit, Montrose. Coming out a few years before Van Halen cut their debut, the California hard rock outfit was the building block between the bluesy rock and roll of the 1970s and the glamorous scene that was about to come out in the 1980s, featuring a still-teenaged Hagar on vocals.
At that stage in his career, Hagar seemed caught between two identities. He had already proven he could front a hard rock band with enough swagger to compete alongside the biggest acts of the decade, but he also wanted to be viewed as a more thoughtful songwriter rather than just another high-pitched screamer. That tension runs throughout Nine on a Ten Scale, which constantly shifts between polished soft rock ideas and moments where Hagar sounds desperate to kick the doors down with a massive chorus.
Part of the reason the record feels so conflicted is that the late 1970s were an awkward transition point for rock music in general. Arena rock was becoming slicker, singer-songwriters were dominating radio, and punk had started tearing apart the excesses of the previous decade. Hagar was trying to navigate all of those worlds at once, which may explain why the album never settled into a consistent identity despite containing flashes of the melodic instincts that would later make him such a natural fit in Van Halen.
After Hagar left the band, albums like Nine On a Ten Scale were Hagar opening up and delivering a more sensitive side of his sound. While it may have worked at the time and still work now, Hagar thought that his need to switch genres was a major misstep in his career before Van Halen took off.
When talking about the album later, Hagar was embarrassed by his attempts to sound like Van Morrison on the record, saying on his Instagram, “The first thing I remember about that is all I wanted to do was not be like Montrose. That’s a fucking mistake in itself, and I wanted to be like a heavier version of Van Morrison, one of my favourite songwriters of that time. So that’s a neglected record. I can’t say I was lost, but I certainly wasn’t found. I didn’t know who I was.”
Even though Hagar could still deliver rockers in the back half of his career on tracks like ‘There’s Only One Way To Rock’, Nine on a Ten Scale practically made the blueprint for his more sensitive songs. He may not have been proud of it at the time, but the softer moments on the record are practically a test run for some of the ballads that he would create with Van Halen, like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Love Walks In’.
Then again, whenever Hagar hit the stage with Van Halen, he knew what you were coming to see. From doing justice to songs like ‘Jump’ to his signature scream of “hello baby” on ‘Good Enough’, Hagar was reminding people that Van Halen could still rock without Roth. Nine on a Ten Scale may be lost to time in certain circles, but Hagar’s struggle to find his sound resulted in some fairly decent music regardless.
