{"id":47147,"date":"2025-09-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/untitled-15\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T11:20:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T11:20:07","slug":"untitled-15","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/untitled-15\/","title":{"rendered":"Untitled"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe the craziest thing about former Montrose frontman Sammy Hagar\u2019s 1978 live album All Night Long<\/a><\/i>\u2014the most-played album in my record collection the summer it came out, between sophomore and junior year in high school\u2014is how much better it was than the three studio albums that it followed.<\/p>\n

All three\u2014Nine On A Ten Scale<\/i> (1976), its self-titled follow-up (January 1977), and Musical Chairs<\/i> (October 1977)\u2014showcase an artist who can\u2019t seem to settle on what kind of music he wants to make, mixing hard rock anthems with the mid-tempo r&b he\u2019d played pre-Montrose, while adding radio-ready guitar-pop and melodramatic power ballads. You want to say it demonstrated range, but the end result feels fragmented to the point of incoherence. <\/p>\n

Part of the issue may have been the man at the boards. The producer of all three of Hagar\u2019s initial studio albums\u2014and co-writer of a number of early Hagar tunes\u2014was John Carter, who during the same era helmed albums by Bob Welch and The Motels, and seemed to view all of his acts through the same AM radio, mainstream guitar-pop lens. Whatever the case, Carter has never been known for the genre that Hagar ended up making his home for the remainder of his long and successful career: riffy hard rock. <\/p>\n

The scattered musical approach that characterized Hagar\u2019s first three albums would soon resolve, but is still very much present on Musical Chairs<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Opener \u201cTurn Up The Music\u201d is a driving rocker that became an early Hagar standard, full of party-hearty exhortations and energetic hooks that earned it the side-one-closer slot on All Night Long<\/i>. Here, though, it\u2019s followed by a song that\u2019s almost a microcosm of this album\u2019s multiple musical personalities. \u201cIt\u2019s Gonna Be Alright\u201d stacks synths, horns, and blues-rock guitar on top of a mid-tempo r&b groove; Hagar then tops off this hot mess of an arrangement with a lyric expressing optimism and patriotism in the most bland, vague terms imaginable.<\/p>\n

Next up, \u201cYou Make Me Crazy\u201d is a straight-up pop\/r&b-lite number that feels like it was cribbed from an old Jackson Five album. Watching Hagar sing it on The Midnight Special<\/a> is almost painful; with no guitar to play and nowhere to run onstage, he has no idea what to do with his hands. The skinny kid just three years removed from Montrose gives the lead vocal his all, to be sure, but the song is pure fluff and he acts like he knows it.<\/p>\n

In a neck-snapping tonal shift, Musical Chairs<\/i> follows with \u201cReckless,\u201d a headlong hard rock stomper featuring wailing guitars and a patented Sammy scream. Wha? And then they snap your neck back in the other direction with the swooning, string-laden piano ballad \u201cTry (Try To Fall In Love),\u201d which is worth maybe one listen for novelty\u2019s sake, if you can even get through it. It\u2019s that out of place and off-putting, and that\u2019s without even mentioning Hagar\u2019s brief attempt at falsetto…!<\/p>\n

Side two opener \u201cDon\u2019t Stop Me Now\u201d is more like it, at least for about 45 seconds, the length of time it takes to get through the pumping hard rock opening verse before it jump-cuts to a sugary, bouncy pop chorus that feels spliced in from not just another song, but another genre entirely. (If you told me Hagar wrote the verses and Carter the choruses\u2014they\u2019re credited as co-writers\u2014I\u2019d believe you.) <\/p>\n

\u201cStraight From The Hip Kid\u201d is a cover of a contemporary single by UK rockers Liar; it\u2019s got a nice pulse and push to it, despite a genuinely silly chorus (\u201cSo-ci-ety, so-high-ety \/ So high brow \/ But so low down\u201d). A musical cousin to \u201cYou Make Me Crazy,\u201d the gently grooving \u201cHey Boys\u201d aims for airy sincerity\u2014bells and acoustic strums and handclaps\u2014but no matter how many times Sammy sings \u201cA change is gonna come,\u201d he\u2019s never gonna be Sam Cooke.<\/p>\n

And then we get to Hagar\u2019s other early-career fixation: sci-fi. First comes the solid but unremarkable guitar-rock tune \u201cSomeone Out There,\u201d which could have featured on an aliens-visit-Earth episode of The X-Files<\/i>. Then, closing things out, we get faux-Floydian space-rock number \u201cCrack In The World,\u201d which spends a bloated 5:12 exploring a dystopian future that comes about in the year\u2026 2025 (not kidding, check the lyrics).<\/p>\n

One of the most puzzling things about Musical Chairs<\/i> is that it features the identical band lineup as the subsequent, far superior All Night Long<\/i>: Montrose veterans Denny Carmassi (drums), Bill Church (bass) and Alan \u201cFitz\u201d Fitzgerald (keyboards), plus debuting lead guitarist Gary Pihl, who would serve as Hagar\u2019s musical other half for most of a decade, before Hagar joined Van Halen and Pihl joined Boston. It\u2019s as if these thoroughbreds were held in a pen for Musical Chairs<\/i> before being set loose to run free for All Night Long<\/i>.<\/p>\n

When the latter arrived a year later, featuring one poppy new single (\u201cI\u2019ve Done Everything For You,\u201d later a hit for Rick Springfield), one ballad (\u201cYoung Girl Blues\u201d), and six pounding, anthemic hard rock tunes, it felt like a declaration of independence, and indeed, John Carter never worked the boards for a Hagar studio album again.<\/p>\n

Musical Chairs<\/i> marks the point in his career where Hagar seemed to recognize he had a problem, one that would eventually be resolved by distancing himself from both Carter and Capitol to sign with upstart rival label Geffen Records. Musical Chairs <\/i>is an album that has its moments, but mostly feels like the work of a talented performer bumping into furniture, searching for a sound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":35261,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-47147","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/47147","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=47147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/47147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=47147"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=47147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}