Everybody Wants Some (19 page)

Unmistakably, the two men’s concepts of self-fulfillment made Roth and Sammy polar opposites. Roth liked standing head and shoulders above everyone in the center of the room, serving as a shining example to make other people feel good. Hagar was completely different—a populist who communicated with crowds by showing how much he was just like them. The main question remained whether Van Halen’s sense of humor, fury, and passion could remain intact with Hagar as vocalist.

While the world reserved judgment, Van Halen’s former singer was not inclined to be charitable. He mocked his former bandmates in the press, helping to spark one of rock’s greatest ongoing rivalries. “I don’t know if there’s a Van Halen without David Lee Roth,” he declared immodestly, “but I know that nobody cares about Van Halen without David Lee Roth.”

One week before Van Halen were due to begin recording their first album with Sammy Hagar, longtime producer Ted Templeman called with bad news. He remained committed to David Lee Roth, who was still a Warner Bros. artist, and scheduling conflicts between the two projects meant he wouldn’t be able to record with Eddie, Alex, Mike, and Sammy. The news was not all bad—the producer and the wunderkind guitarist were wearing on each other’s nerves anyway.

With Templeman out of the picture, Eddie decided to produce the next album himself with Donn Landee at the 5150 studio. But already troubled by the uncertainty surrounding the loss of Roth, Warner Bros. banged its iron fist and refused their boys full creative latitude. A search began for a producer from a top-shelf list of candidates, including Chic mastermind Nile Rodgers, Tina Turner’s private synthmaster Rupert Hines, and Quincy Jones. The band chose Mick Jones, an acquaintance of Sammy’s, whose radio candy while creative leader of Foreigner had sold millions. Pop metal like Def Leppard had seized the day from the lightweight rockers, but Foreigner’s
Agent Provocateur
album still went double platinum in 1985.

Officially
5150
was made during four weeks between November 1985 and February 1986, though in truth Jones only needed to polish the tracks that Alex and Eddie had begun long before he arrived. The album cover artwork depicted Atlas, the Greek Titan who the band claimed spent 5,150 years holding the earth aloft on his shoulders. It was a fitting depiction of the work Van Halen still had ahead of them.

Hagar leered, “Hello, baaaby!” at the start of album opener “Good Enough,” and the comparisons were off and running. While not an unknown quantity, the grinning “I Can’t Drive 55” Hagar was an unlikely replacement for the larger-than-life Roth. Essentially the band had substituted the edgy, unattainable parade marshal with a versatile and approachable everyman.

The focus of
5150
was obviously on polish, not on kicking ass. Not by accident, “Good Enough” resembled the soundtrack music Eddie had done for
The Wild Life
and
The Seduction of Gina
—in fact, the song was developed from incidental music in
The Wild Life
. Eddie recorded his guitar track in a single take. As an introduction to a new band,
5150 
was like being invited to the party of the year and arriving to find a few close friends and a warm welcome instead of a raging bash.

The new era of Van Halen began in force with “Why Can’t This Be Love?” a midtempo pop song with a lively synth melody and some of Van Halen’s most processed playing to date. Roth had largely curtailed keyboards in the band since before
Diver Down
. Now Eddie’s objective number one was to shake off Diamond Dave’s criticism and hit the keys. “There’s no more governor telling me what I can’t do!” Eddie yelped. He had been vindicated when the keyboard-driven “Jump” became the band’s biggest hit. “Why Can’t This Be Love?” also rose up the charts to become the hit of
5150
, reaching number 3.

“Get Up” offered some of Hagar’s most obvious boxing lyrics over a double-time countrified stampede of Eddie’s swerving guitar. Alex’s speedy electronic drums sounded like a spitting robot, as sampled drums supplemented his trademark taut snare. Since early 1983, he had integrated hexagon-shaped Simmons electronic drum trigger pads in his kit—a sign of admiration for Bill Bruford, the seventies fusion and progressive rock basher who had already switched to electronic drums. Though they had the warmth of a microwave oven, they had the logistic advantage of being easier to route directly through the soundboard.

Hagar stated often that he had dropped his next solo album and tour when the call came from the band, yet he was careful not to impose himself immediately on the mighty Van Halen. The key to keeping the band’s sound was letting Eddie write all the music, then melding the songs together organically by jamming on the ideas. Hagar brought lyrics and for the time being left his music at home. As always, the songs were credited as group compositions, though Eddie described Mike’s input as spare: “He usually goes along with everybody else and doesn’t have any strong preferences.”

“Dreams,” which would became Hagar’s favorite song with Van Halen, was solid synth pop written with help from producer Mick Jones. Perhaps in response to its similarities to Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone,” the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels later edited a demonstration video of precision fighter jets to this song.

For the feel-good anthem “Summer Nights,” Eddie used a headless Steinberger Trans Trem guitar—a radical redesign intended to bring the guitar into the future. Skeptical hard rock fans simply considered it a castrated guitar. Easing the transition for guitar fiends, he decorated it with trademark black-and-white stripes on a red background. The unique axe had another upside—when he parked his cigarette in the guitar neck, he could lean over and puff without losing an eye to a tuning peg.

Van Halen had expanded musically, adding more dimension than just riffs, rhythm, and Roth. The highly polished single “Best of Both Worlds” was a down-home rocker with a throbbing bass line and bluesy clenched-fist delivery from Hagar. Some of John Cougar Mellencamp seemed to have rubbed off on the Red Rocker at Farm Aid.

Hagar’s lyrics for “Love Walks In,” another keyboard-driven song, were the first in a series of alien-themed ballads. He wrote this one about the “little grey dudes” in the book
Aliens Among Us
by Ruth Montgomery. “I think Edward Van Halen is an alien,” he told MTV. “I don’t know what planet he’s from, but they all play guitar.”

Van Halen were still growing. “You’ve got to realize that being in a band with two brothers can be tough once in a while,” Hagar told
Guitar
Player
. “These two guys think alike. Ed kicks something off, and Al goes gotcha, boom! Meanwhile I’m going, ‘Hmm, what is this—a Dutch tune?’”

Yet Hagar deferred to Eddie in most cases, and that sensitivity led to an imbalance of overly sensitive songs on
5150
. The title track, however, was Eddie at his unrivaled best as a rock guitarist, and Sammy sounded relaxed and throaty—he wasn’t shrieking at the top of his range. The fast, off-kilter riff leading into a racing guitar solo over rapid double-bass drumming could have surfaced on
1984
without seeming out of place.

Beginning with a jaunty guitar intro, “5150” was a brooding rocker with a shifting rhythm and melody in the verse that presaged by several years the coming of Pearl Jam. Eddie had concocted the song in a New York hotel earlier in 1986, while excited about visiting MTV with the new band. He must have been excited frequently throughout the year, because he was still writing way too much material. For instance, the rudiments of what became “316” were done in 1986, though they didn’t surface again for five years.

The album closed with “Inside,” a strange studio vamp played using horn samples on a Fairlight and bass sounds from an Emulator—the most expensive and realistic virtual instruments of the day. The strange synthetic funk rock was as typically eighties as music could be, a mixed plate of rock, pop, and funk that would have fit on a UTFO, Fishbone, or Vanity 6 album.

Overall,
5150
was sonically low-resolution compared to the big, booming rock of the past, but that was the point. Van Halen wanted to become a class act. Fans were polarized and paralyzed. The dashing, debonair leader of the pack been replaced by the easygoing neighbor from down the block. There were even reminders of the new singer’s résumé hanging from the bedposts—the inner sleeve of
5150
contained a concession to Geffen Records telling Van Halen fans where to get Sammy Hagar solo albums.

Yet like a long-suffering abused wife with a doting new husband, Van Halen acted like they had found peace and happiness. The album wasn’t Van Halen with a new singer—it truly was a band reborn. The band members now seemed offended by the whole idea of Roth, and they clucked their tongues at the indiscretions of their early success. “We’re not out to prove anything,” Eddie told MTV. “We’re all musicians. There’s no Vegas trip to it anymore.” They had arrived where they wanted to be, while Roth didn’t have any particular goal except to stay in motion.

The band’s choice of singer was vindicated by the world at large when the “Van Hagar” lineup knocked Whitney Houston out of the top spot, and
5150
became Van Halen’s first number 1 album, certified platinum just eight weeks after its late March release. “Why Can’t This Be Love?” became a Top 10 single, and two other songs charted in the Top 40 without the benefit of music videos. The album soared on the high end of the
Billboard
chart for a year and three months.

“In a funny way, it doesn’t feel like a new band,” Hagar joked on TV. “It’s really weird, it feels like we’ve been together a long time. I’m thinking about hopping around, joining Journey next, and then the Stones.”

Van Halen now appealed to a whole new audience for whom Roth had always been too obnoxious. This mainstream pop demographic, more familiar with the band through its media notoriety than its music, were surprised to find a likable, smooth Van Halen that wouldn’t get them into trouble with their teachers or coworkers. These were the kids who had sat in school on hot afternoons staring out the window at the corner, where as older Van Halen fans had skipped class and smoked cigarettes—probably while listening to “Runnin’ with the Devil” on a cheap boom box.

The plan was to clearly define Van Halen beyond David Lee Roth. They got rid of their striped overalls and dressed in jeans and simple clothes, and they got sensible haircuts. They also delayed production on any music videos for
5150
—clearly Roth’s medium of choice—although practically speaking, with the loss of so many key people to the Roth camp, Van Halen’s capacity to create videos was temporarily crip-pled. There wasn’t time to film a clip for the first single, “Why Can’t This Be Love?”—even the Alaska and Hawaii kickoff dates for the tour were scrapped while final mixing on the record was completed.

Though Roth had accused the brothers of dragging their feet and no longer wanting to travel, the
5150
tour ran over a hundred shows in 1986. Hours after the release of the album, Van Halen were onstage in Shreveport, Louisiana, before a crowd of ten thousand, introducing Sammy in a town where he had never played before or gotten any radio airplay. The fans were prepared with anti-Roth banners and T-shirts, lots of them picturing a red circle with a red line through Roth’s name—a reference to Sammy’s favorite symbol, a crossed-out 55 mph speed limit sign.

Sammy was not shy or even very diplomatic. Like a political operative at a campaign rally, he pressed the flesh and let the homespun Roth protest banners fly from the stage, adding his own commentary. The audience felt deserted, and he comforted them and was not above donning a shirt that read “Dave Who?” to get the point across. 

Roth claimed to love the attention. “Sammy is my boy, he works for me,” he boasted to Howard Stern. “He’s my bitch, and when he says my name, we just sell that many more records. He reminds people of the glorious past even more.”

As the rivalry intensified, the comparisons between Sammy and Dave began—and never really ended. “Every night, Sammy Hagar has to sing ‘Jump,’ ” Roth fired away, “and I won’t ever sing a Sammy Hagar song.”

At Van Halen shows, Hagar began pulling concertgoers from the crowd to sing “Jump,” patting the breathless fans on the back and saying something about how they did a better job than Roth—until the others in the band asked him to cool it. Throughout this escalating popularity war, Hagar and Roth had still never met. “I doubt he really wants to talk to me,” Hagar told
Rolling Stone
. “I think he’s got more against me than I got against him.”

Van Halen’s two-and-a-half-hour sets also included “Panama” and “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.” The new track “Best of Both Worlds” turned out to be a great foot-stomper, and by and large the new band rocked harder live than on the new album. A couple of nights, they teased the crowd by riffing on their favorite backstage warm-up, Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” mimicking dance moves from the famous music video.

The
5150
stage was a futuristic mini-city of angled metal ramps centered by Alex’s dense cluster of drums. Sammy and Eddie met in the middle and jogged in place happily. Their chemistry was obvious and more wholesome than the volatile energy Roth packed with the band. The Hagar fit made practical sense. If not joyous, they truly looked and sounded happy.

 Instead of aggressive lines and angles, Van Halen now came onstage dressed to party in comfort clothes that looked like beach-wear. Sammy sported an off-the-shoulder zebra-striped sweatshirt. His boxing training served him well for aerobic stamina. Nobody expected an aerial gymnast like Roth, but Hagar remained in constant motion, even jumping off the drum riser—definitely a graduate of the school of thought that the time for standing perfectly still onstage ended in 1969.

The set was light on old Van Halen, substituting Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55” for set pieces like “Ice Cream Man.” With his own material, Hagar came to life onstage—“There’s Only One Way to Rock” from his
Standing Hampton
album became a dynamic high point. “Whether or not you like ‘I Can’t Drive 55,’ ” Eddie said, “I think Sammy’s fans would be disappointed if we didn’t play it.”