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Dreams and Love Walks In lowers your sperm count and increases your estrogen levels.
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No! You can't have the keys to the wine cellar! -
Sammy once again claiming his solo career was as big as CVH was:
While speaking to Fox News Digital, Hagar shared his thoughts on why his debut album with Van Halen became a massive hit.
"I think there's a lot of reasons," he said. "Number one, my career at that time. I was doing double arenas as a Sammy Hagar solo artist. They were doing double arenas. You know, we were pretty much on the same level. They just had that huge hit with ‘Jump.’"
Hagar continued, "But that combination — I brought a new audience to Van Halen. You know, it's not like they joined my band and brought me the new audience, which would have been great. Then I wouldn't have had to stop being a solo artist for 10 years. But no, I brought a lot of new people in there. And when Dave left, it wasn't like they all went with him. You know, it was like, Eddie was the grounding person in that band."
"Everyone knows that," he added. "Looking back now, it's even more obvious, even though, the frontman, myself and Dave, in our eras, we always got a lot of attention. But really that band was built around Eddie Van Halen's guitar playing. And so, you know, the songs we wrote together and all that were good. That's why ‘5150’ made, it because I brought in a new audience."
"The old people that were in doubt, they heard [imitates keyboard riff notes] 'Why Can't This Be Love?' And they just went, ‘Whoa, this is a new sound for Van Halen.’ You know that keyboard riff sounded like a guitar riff. Where previous stuff like ‘Jump’ sounded like a synthesizer, you know? So some of the hardcore guitar people rebelled a little bit, but they got a whole new audience with that. And we just satisfied them, and they stayed. And we just went out, and every show sold out minutes, and we went out and just killed it."Comment
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The dates and venues for both Van Halen's 1984 tour and Hagar's 1984-1985 VOA tour are available.
Van Halen were often doing the larger capacity venues in any given state, whereas Hagar was often doing venues with a slightly smaller capacity, usually smaller by a few thousand seats. There was some overlap of the same venues played. Van Halen had a dozen or so dates on the 1984 tour where they were doing multiple nights in one venue - with a few of those being 3 night stands - whereas Hagar had (if memory serves) two or three dates on his VOA tour where he did multiple nights consisting of no more than two gigs.
I did a mildly deep dive on the stats a decade or so back specifically to contrast the attendance for those two tours when the venue data and dates played was posted online, mostly just to find out for myself if Hagar's claims re: Hagar solo being 'on the same level as Van Halen' were true on a factual basis. From what I remember, I think Hagar on the VOA tour had two dates at the Philadelphia Spectrum and...I think he had two dates at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Which made sense, in that he hailed from San Francisco, and maybe he had a lot of fans in the Philly area the way KISS post-Alive! always used to sell out Cobo Hall in Detroit even when their career was at their nadir (I dunno...maybe Hagar had written a ballad about a Philly Cheesesteak Sandwich or something).
The upshot of it all being that Hagar's solo career - which commercially was at its career peak with his VOA album - was on an upswing in 1984-1985 but it wasn't on par with Van Halen's, not in terms of the amount of albums sold nor the size of the venues Van Halen and Hagar were playing. Left unsaid by Hagar is that Van Halen in 1981, 1982 and 1984 were doing multiple nights in front of arena-sized crowds, which certainly wasn't the case with Hagar's solo tours prior to the VOA album. Thus, Van Halen were as big as they ever got commercially before Roth left.
And that's fine, which is to say that Hagar's career was what it was just before he joined Van Halen: he was coming off a platinum album and a tour where he played to respectable-sized crowds...just not crowds that were as large as Van Halen's on the whole. And, you know, just be content to say that. Everybody knows Hagar got a career boost to some degree when he joined Van Halen.
I'd agree it was true that Van Halen's audience changed when Roth left and Hagar joined. Doubtless, Hagar had his fans before he joined Van Halen. Doubtless, some of those said fans ended up checking out Van Halen when Sam joined who may not have been inclined to have done so otherwise. Flip side of the coin being doubtless Van Halen lost some fans when Roth left and the band underwent a stylistic shift. Stands to reason, as it wasn't the same band anymore, regardless of how much the band did was built around Eddie's guitar playing on a hypothetical percentage basis. Shit, when CVH was active and I was into them the main draw for me certainly was Eddie's playing, but that was never close to the whole magilla for me and after Dave left...it just...Van Halen never really worked for me once Dave left. While no doubt what Hagar chose to sing about and the synth pop stuff was part of it not working for me, in retrospect I can't really think of anybody else other than Hagar the band could have replaced Dave with where it would have worked. It was that specific personal chemistry, same as with many rock bands I liked.Scramby eggs and bacon.Comment
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"Good luck getting Eddie and Al sign that"Comment
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He reached bottom a long time ago. He's been digging into it for a while... What an ass.
posted by Ellyllions Men say, "I'll never understand women." That's a very lonely place to be if you're a woman because we don't understand half of what we do either.posted by ALinChainz Katy, Pipe down, pump off, and fly back to your cave you old bat.Comment
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Sam has sunk so low he eats crab turds at the bottom of the ocean.No! You can't have the keys to the wine cellar!Comment
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I can't recall Dave having said a single word about Ed's kid - good, bad or otherwise - since [Dave's] last tour with Van Halen in 2015.
About the only thing I can recall Dave having said about Hagar since the Sam and Dave Heavyweights Of Rock co-headlining tour in 2002 was...I dunno, 4 years ago or so. Maybe a year or two before Eddie had died. Dave said something in an interview along the lines of it standing to reason that Van Halen made different music when he left and Hagar joined because obviously he and Hagar were different people with different perspectives, and Roth left it at that rather than even bother blathering out the usual 'I'm better than he is' stuff that he and Hagar had been directing toward each other in interviews since 1985.
Which was just as well, because what's left to be said from Dave's perspective about Hagar that hasn't already been said a million times, anyway? I'd presume Dave wouldn't bother commenting about Ed's kid one way or another going forward just out of decency...who knows, maybe Dave doesn't feel Ed's kid is worth talking about publicly or the subject of Ed's kid may well plain not enter Dave's mind often enough anymore...I never got the feeling Dave and Wolfgang hung out much outside of their working capacity even when they were both in the band for those 10-odd years. It wouldn't surprise me much to find out that -outside of whatever transpired re: the proposed tribute to Ed - Dave and Ed's kid have had virtually no contact since Van Halen's last tour in 2015 ended.Scramby eggs and bacon.Comment
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