Oh I forgot about this one! I need to change my previous answer.
As a long-haired teen in the 80s, VH was my favorite band. Looking at my teen years, re-evaluated by aged enlightened grey-haired appreciation:
Roth-era: Mean Streets (present me), Fools (teen me)
Hagar-era: Why Can’t This Be Love (both mes)
DLR - Ice Cream Man
SH - Right Now, though I’m not nearly as big a Van Hagar fan.
Eruption!
What’s that you say, no vocals in that one? Huh, you’re right. Imagine that.
My favorite Van Halen song of all time is…
Ice Cream Man!!
Dammit, you ninja’ed both of mine!
By the way, I loved DLR’s showmanship, and was prepared to hate Van Hagar. But Sammy worked so hard, and added a fresh power and… ok, just now figured it out: he added sincerity. When he sang “Why can’t this be love?” you believed he was trying to convince a woman.
“Ice Cream Man” for me too. Just a rollicking good jam.
“Why Can’t This Be Love” for Sammy’s VH.
Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love followed by And the Cradle Will Rock…
No Sammy for me.
DLR: Ice Cream Man
SH: can’t think of anything, so another DLR is Panama
In my opinion, 1984 was really more of an Eddie album. It’s a banger for sure, but Diver Down was the quintessiential Dave album in my book.
IMO the real problem with Van Hagar was nothing to do with Hagar. He was fine. But he didn’t balance out Eddie’s influence like Dave did. Without that, there was nobody to prevent Eddie from going off the deep end with all the goofy synthesizer shit. Trying to make “Jump” happen again I guess, or maybe it was just the 80’s and everybody was doing synth. Plus Hagar simply wasn’t the sexy rock-and-roll rodeo clown that Dave was, which IMO was a huge part of Van Halen’s appeal.
IIRC, Dave actually named Van Halen. Eddie wanted to call it “Mammoth” or something. To me that anecdote encapsulates all of the VH tension. Dave had a showman’s instinct, he saw what Van Halen was and what they had, even more than the actual Van Halens did. I love Dave’s solo work 10x more than anything Van Hagar ever did, but I wish they’d stayed together.
Agreed. And, weirdly, I have a lot of love for “Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)”. It’s an odd choice for inclusion (although perhaps less so than “Happy Trails”) but I’ve just now read that it was Eddie and Alex Van Halen’s dad Jan playing clarinet on it and now I love it more. Roth (who picked it for the album) clearly has an affection for older stuff, given his later cover of the Louis Prima classic “Just A Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody”.
I can’t say I have a fave Hagar-era song. It’s all fine but nothing grabs me in particular.
It is 50% covers and that was a source of friction between Eddie and Dave at the time. More than 50% if you exclude the instrumentals.
Dave seems to enjoy performing much more than writing. This worked out really well on his first solo EP – which was solid.
Jamie’s Cryin
Poundcake
I don’t have a Hagar favorite. And I never had a van Halen LP when I had 200 Lps. But for David, and I don’t even listen to the lyrics, Ain’t talking about love beats Jump, just barely. I like riffs. Not as many riff based songs as The Rolling Stones, but all were good. I will let the radio play Poundcake if it comes on. It’s OK. Flipping through tracks… I guess Right Now for Sammy.
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Roth - Mean Streets
Hagar - Right now
Roth was a fantastic showman, but a horrible singer. Read Ted Templeman’s book sometime (their producer) if you want to read about how hard it was to get usable vocal tracks out of Roth. Hagar can sing circles around him. Roth had to essentially be recorded line by line and it took a very long time.
Having said that, when it comes to overall creativity, the early Van Halen stuff was probably the band at its best.
Roth - Everybody Wants Some
Hagar - I really don’t like anything I’ve ever heard from the man. Something about his delivery simply rubs me the wrong way.
How did that work in concert? Did the audience just not care?
At most concerts in the DLR era, the audience would have been baked anyway. Apart from that, I guess it’s just a thing for music fans to expect some bands to have better studio output than live output. My brother, a huge fan of Smashing Pumpkins, told me once that Billy Corgan is notorious for requiring several takes in the studio to get his vocals right. He said that hearing him live was just an atrocious experience.
I’d suggest that for the most part, the singing is kind of marginal for most metal bands. A good singer helps but isn’t that important. IMO too much polish can work against a metal band, and I think this is one reason I don’t care much for Hagar. Wrong finish level for Van Halen.
To my understanding, 2 things are true here:
- I saw a show on their 1996 show and it was indeed terrible. It was explained to me that this is because Smashing Pumpkins had functionally fallen apart as a band, and shouldn’t have been touring at all, but the dates were already committed.
- From what I’ve read, Corgan overinvested in getting the studio album sound exactly the way he wanted, to the point that at times he played the guitar and bass tracks himself because he didn’t trust his bandmates. Obviously that can’t work live, since no man can sing and play rhythm, lead, and bass guitar at the same time.
For the live show I saw, the overall performance was such a train wreck that it would’ve been unfair to critique Corgan’s vocals based on that alone. But on later performances on TV and whatnot, where it should’ve been well-prepared and engineered, his vocals really whiffed in my opinion. It definitely gave the impression that his voice was amateur, nasal, and reedy, and that he likely couldn’t nail high notes or busy intervals without a bunch of takes in the studio.
That’s unfortunate, but I’m not gonna discount a good studio album just because it was too overengineered to be performed live. Specifically I’m thinking of Siamese Dream which was a great studio album, and a testament to Corgan’s taste and vision.
It’s impressive when a band can manage both live and recorded quality, but the fact is that most music is heard as a recording. Everybody can’t be Pink Floyd. I just wish bands like SP would have the humility to accept it when they’re obviously studio bands and not live bands, but Corgan isn’t particularly known for humility or self-awareness.
I don’t think the audience cared much. I saw Van Halen at the US Festival in 1983. Two songs into the show, a very drunk Roth says to the crowd, “I’m so drunk, I forgot the fucking lyrics.” Everyone cheered. His vocals were so horrible that we left after the next song to beat the traffic. It was really disappointing. But I’ve also heard a lot of people say how great they thought they were that night.