Sammy Hagar believes Van Halen still had more greatness ahead of them, especially with Eddie Van Halen pushing musical boundaries in his later years.
The 77-year-old rocker, who fronted Van Halen from 1985 to 1996 and briefly again from 2003 to 2005, shared his thoughts in a recent interview with Detroit’s WRIF radio station.
Asked if he had any regrets about his time with the band, Hagar was quick to respond. “Oh, hell no. Oh, no regrets whatsoever,” he said. “I regret that we broke up, just to see what else we could have done. I would’ve loved to have made another record or two with Eddie writing.”
Hagar described his songwriting chemistry with Eddie as special and hinted that their best material may never have seen the light of day. “Eddie and I wrote some great songs together, and I think the best stuff was yet to come,” Hagar said. “It could have been yet to come, because Eddie was really reaching out on instruments.”
In their final conversation, Hagar said Eddie revealed he had been playing the cello, a major departure from the band’s guitar-driven sound. “He said, ‘Oh, man, I’ve really been playing a lot of cello.’ And I’m going, ‘Cello? Holy shit.’ [Laughs] ‘Play me something, dude. I’m ready to write a song with you on cello.’”
Hagar took a subtle jab at David Lee Roth, the original Van Halen frontman, claiming that Roth limited Eddie’s creative freedom. “As artists, Eddie and I were really capable of doing a lot of stuff that he couldn’t do before me because the other guy didn’t want keyboards,” Hagar said.
He recalled joining the band and Eddie immediately showing him two guitar riffs: “Good Enough” and “Summer Nights.” But then things changed. “He went and sat down at the piano and he started playing all this stuff,” Hagar said. “He’s playing the riff to ‘Dreams,’ he’s playing ‘Love Walks In.’ I had no idea he was that good of a keyboard player.”
According to Hagar, Eddie had only scratched the surface of what he was capable of musically. “I think that’s what his dream would’ve been,” Hagar said. “And it was always held back by the record companies and the people around him.”
He believes that with time, they could have broken free from those restrictions. “I think we would’ve broken out of that within a year and started doing some really crazy stuff.”
In the end, Sammy Hagar Van Halen might have been a phase in rock history, but for Hagar, the journey was far from over.
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