Sammy Hagar believes “the best was yet to come” from Van Halen.
The 77-year-old rocker – who was frontman of the ‘Jump’ band from 1985 to 1996, before returning in 2003 until 2005 – was in touch with late guitarist Eddie Van Halen before his death in October 2020, and was keen to work with him again after learning he was playing the cello and experimenting with different instruments.
Speaking on Detroit’s WRIF radio station, Sammy was quoted by Blabbermouth as saying when asked if he has any regrets: “Oh, hell no. Oh, no regrets whatsoever.
“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.”
Sammy loved his songwriting partnership with Eddie.
He reflected: “Eddie and I wrote some great songs together, and I think the best stuff was yet to come; it could have been yet to come, because Eddie was really reaching out on instruments.
“Last time I talked to Eddie before he passed, I said, ‘Man, what are you playing?’ 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.’”
The Red Rocker went on to claim that his arch-nemesis, David Lee Roth – who Sammy replaced as frontman in 1985 and had three tenures with the legendary group from 1974 to 1985, 1996, and 2006 until they disbanded in 2020 – wouldn’t give Eddie the space to experiment like he did.
He said: “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.
“And when I walked in the room with Eddie, he showed me two guitar songs when I joined, on [the] 5150 [album] – he showed me Good Enough and he showed me Summer Nights. Those are two riffs he had. And then what did he do? He went and sat down at the piano and he started playing all this stuff.
“And I’m going, Whoa. What? He starts playing the riff to Dreams. He’s sitting there playing Love Walks In. He’s just playing all these things on keyboards, and I’m going, ‘Whoa, I had no idea he was that good of a keyboard player.’ So, he really wanted to expand as a musician.”
Sammy believes Eddie had only touched the surface of what he wanted to achieve musically, because he was held back by the people at the top.
He concluded: “To me, I think that’s what his dream would’ve been.
“And it was always held back by the record companies and the people around him. I think we would’ve broken out of that within a year and started doing some really crazy stuff.”