{"id":46994,"date":"2024-10-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-17T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/sammy-hagar\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T11:20:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T11:20:07","slug":"sammy-hagar","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/sammy-hagar\/","title":{"rendered":"Sammy Hagar"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a tumultuous two years as the founding lead vocalist of Montrose<\/a><\/u>\u2014authors of one of the great debut albums in hard rock history\u2014young Sammy Hagar had his work cut out for him establishing a career as a solo artist.<\/p>\n

Landing with Capitol, Hagar soon issued Nine On A Ten Scale<\/i> (1976), a spirited but uneven solo debut featuring six rock-focused Hagar compositions of varying quality, along with three mostly mellower covers (of Van Morrison, Bob Welch, and Donovan). The album did enough business for Capitol to greenlight another, but not much more than that.<\/p>\n

Whatever else you want to say about Sammy Hagar\u2014and so many people have said so many things about the man over the years\u2014there\u2019s no denying that he has always been both ambitious and determined. When his self-titled second album appeared a year after Nine<\/i>, the template was similar\u2014six originals and four covers\u2014but everything felt just a little bit sharper and more sure-footed.<\/p>\n

With Montrose pals Bill Church and Alan Fitzgerald returning on bass and keyboards, respectively, joined this time by studio hands David Lewark (guitar) and Scott Mathews (drums), Hagar sounds more comfortable and confident, nowhere moreso than on leadoff track \u201cRed,\u201d a concert staple for most of his first decade as a solo artist. This loud-and-proud ode to Sammy\u2019s favorite color is rambunctious, riffy, and catchy as hell, and wouldn\u2019t be the last time the self-proclaimed Red Rocker showed an instinct for marketing. (Hell, when I started this review, I initially noted the album title as Red<\/i>\u2014just look at that cover\u2014before being reminded that it was actually self-titled.)<\/p>\n

The biggest downside to the album arrives almost instantly, though: sequencing. After that boffo beginning, we segue right into a ponderous run through another Donovan ballad; this time the victim\u2014er, selection\u2014is \u201cCatch The Wind.\u201d It\u2019s a fine song and Sammy has a fine voice, but there are reasons why he soon stopped trying this sort of thing; this big, melodramatic, string-laden ballad just feels out of sync with the rest of the album. Next we move on to another of early Sammy\u2019s weaknesses\u2014goofy, borderline-juvenile lyrics. That said, \u201cCruisin\u2019 & Boozin\u2019\u201d makes good on its title\u2019s promise, with a ringing riff carrying you through its singalong chorus.<\/p>\n

The next track might be the most surprisingly successful cover of Hagar\u2019s early career: Patti Smith\u2019s \u201cFree Money.\u201d The piano, sax and strings opening might be out of sync tonally with Hagar\u2019s past and future, but he sings the hell out of it, and when the full band kicks in halfway through, the song blasts into the stratosphere. Speaking of tonal shifts, you\u2019d be hard pressed to find sharper ones than \u201cCrusin\u2019 & Boozin\u2019\u201d into \u201cFree Money\u201d into \u201cRock & Roll Weekend,\u201d which finishes off side one of the original vinyl in a haze of fist-pumping heavy rock chug, with a lyric that makes you dumber line by line even as you catch yourself singing along.<\/p>\n

Side two opens with a cover of the British band Pilot\u2019s \u201cFillmore Shuffle,\u201d an amiable nod to Hagar\u2019s roots as the singer in a blue-eyed r&b cover band\u2014roots that he promptly turns inside out with a hard rock treatment of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil\u2019s \u201cHungry,\u201d originally a hit for Paul Revere & The Raiders. (Weird as that sounds, it\u2019s actually a solid track.) Hagar\u2019s own \u201cThe Pits\u201d feels like a continuation of this theme, a horn-accented, r&b-flavored original whose lyric comes off like a Jenga-stack of \u201970s cliches today, but that I remember felt kinda fun back in the day.<\/p>\n

The album closes out with two more tracks previewing future Hagar tendencies. \u201cLove Has Found Me\u201d leads with heavy verses before veering into a brighter, hookier chorus. And \u201cLittle Star\/Eclipse\u201d presents a six-minute-plus sci-fi-themed progressive mini-epic; the first third is all piano, organ and snyths before the band erupts into a much heavier sequence with some genuinely fiery guitar, before falling back to a beefed-up reprise of the opening, capped off by a spacy instrumental outro.<\/p>\n

Like its predecessor, Sammy Hagar<\/i> suffers from a lack of focus; unable to choose between being a party-hearty hard rocker, a big-voiced balladeer, an r&b swinger or a space-rocker, Hagar once again picks them all. The result is another album with abrupt shifts in tone and approach that whipsaw the listener again and again. The good news is that in every other respect, Sammy Hagar<\/i> is an improvement over its predecessor\u2014better song choices, better arrangements, better production and stronger performances. It was early days yet, but Sammy Hagar\u2019s trajectory was pointing in the right direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":35116,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5845],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-46994","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-sammy-hagar","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46994"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}