(Credit: Far Out / Abby Gilladi / Sammy Hagar)
Few musicians have ever seemed more at odds than David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar.
Even though they both worked with the greatest singer the world has ever seen, it wasn’t hard to see the difference between the show that ‘Diamond Dave’ had and the exact words that ‘The Red Rocker’ brought to the table whenever they worked with Van Halen. But even if they were different people when they sang, there were things they agreed on when they started talking about the great singers who came before them.
But judging by what Roth was doing in his solo work, it’s not like he was trying to be real compared to what Hagar was doing. ‘Van Hagar’ only worked because the singer had been known for a long time for bands like Montrose, so when he started turning Eddie’s songs into live songs, it wasn’t that difficult to add a few words that Roth probably wouldn’t have been able to sing even if he had practiced for years to get it right.
And it’s not like Roth saw that as a setback for him, either. He was born to be an entertainer in every sense of the word, and looking at the various raps he did between shows, many of Van Halen’s early groups were like watching the best rock and roll outfits ever made to have a hype man like Sammy Davis Jr as their singer. But Roth could still find a few musicians who had a lot of taste behind what they were doing.
If you break it down, Roth was always a blues singer in his truest form, and many of the best blues singers before him relied on swagger. Mick Jagger did not claim to have the best voice, and Screaming Lord Sutch was able to make records with a lot of connections with one of the worst voices in the world, but when ‘Diamond Dave’ listened to Rod Stewart, he finally found a singer who could sing anything he wanted and make it sound good.
Whether he was working with The Faces, singing those sad songs, or translating the Great American Songbook, Roth felt that Stewart was one of those rare talents who could make anything work, saying, “Rod Stewart, probably one of the best singers in the history of any genre, absolutely. It’s a trivial thing. His songs, you can get other people to sing them, but it becomes something else. “
Of course, almost anything Roth said about the music business would have been off-putting to Hagar, but even he had to admit that Stewart was one of the few musicians he looked up to when he worked with Montrose, saying, “Montrose was a heavy metal band; I was a blues, R&B singer, and then I got thrown into the band.” this heavy metal. really was a big fan of Rod’s He was a great player and I dug the way he sang and he had a lot of humor and Faces.
Depending on how they both sing, however, you can hear bits of each aspect of Stewart’s work in their performance. Roth always went for the showman angle whenever he copied some of Stewart’s styles, but when you hear the many other songs he did with The Faces, there’s no doubt that Hagar would have done a decent version of ‘Stay With Me’ with Van Halen.
So even though Roth and Hagar may not be best friends every time they see each other, it’s not like finding common threads between them is completely impossible. At the end of the day, they’re both still rock and roll fans, and they’d do anything to find that one artist who made them as happy as hearing some of Stewart’s big hits in the early 1970s.
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