(Credits: Far Out / Sammy Hagar)
When it comes to Van Halen, there’s never any one person that should take the blame for their multiple breakups.
Any band of that size is going to have a lot of clashing personalities, and even if there are some moments where things don’t work out, a lot of their troubles usually come down to the fact that they have grown apart after years in the business. It was completely logical for them to move on past David Lee Roth, but Sammy Hagar had a certain bone to pick when he was asked to leave the band.
For a little while, ‘The Red Rocker’ felt like everything the band could have needed at the time. Roth was one of the finest rock stars in the industry, but the dude definitely had an ego about him, and since Eddie was more interested in the music, it didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world to find a new singer after 1984 wrapped up. But even with Hagar’s solo success, he fit like a glove in the band.
Not only could he play guitar and play a bit of his own tunes, but his range was far beyond anything Eddie had worked with before. He was the kind of trained singer most artists dream of having in their corner, and while tunes like ‘Love Walks In’ were a little bit harder for people to digest after coming off of ‘Panama’, Hagar wasn’t in there to be a hired gun. He was going to help them reach the highest heights that they could, but like all band decisions, it all turned sour when talking about money.
While For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge helped give them one of their greatest career resurgences, the death of their manager Ed Leffler rocked the core of the band. All of them had seen their old manager as a father figure in many respects, and since Hagar had been working with him his entire life, the idea of bringing in Rush’s manager Ray Danniels into the mix was triggering alarm bells well before he had even looked at a contract.
Balance had been one of the most comically inaccurate album titles that the group ever came up with, but music was far from their number-one priority in the first place. They wanted to make sure that they were getting the highest paychecks that they could, and when looking at the rest of the deal, Hagar knew that Danniels was nothing but trouble from the moment he first began working with him.
And when the frontman got the call that the band would be parting with him, he pointed the finger squarely at Danniels, saying, “Ray Danniels made the brothers think they’d been screwed. They thought Leffler and I had fucked them. We didn’t. We saved them. [Ray] didn’t do shit for me. He wasn’t my manager. I would find my own manager. I did not like the guy. I wanted to bite his face off. And he was scared of me. He didn’t want to come into a room with me. He stayed away, always holding meetings with Eddie.”
If Danniels was really to blame for all of the internal drama, it didn’t take long for the rest of the band to realise their mistake, either. There were a lot of questions surrounding what they would do next, but since the next album featured some of the worst writing of their career with Gary Cherone, it’s safe to say that Hagar had made the right call by jumping ship when he saw what was happening.
Did Danniels have the band’s best interests at heart? Maybe, but when it comes down to band dynamics, everyone’s happy when they’re not talking about money, and the minute that he insisted on trying to get more money out of Hagar was his fatal flaw. And with ‘The Red Rocker’, Eddie entered one of the darkest periods of his life before finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel when doing a reunion tour with Roth.
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