In a new interview with OC Weekly, Sammy Hagar talked about playing Van Halen songs live with his band The Circle.
When asked about the band, he said (Transcribed via Blabbermouth):
“[It’s] my favorite band ever — a band that can play everything I’ve ever done in my life, and play it so well that I’m happy. It’s not, like, ‘Well, we’ve got to play a few of those songs, but it’s not going to be as good as the original.’ With THE CIRCLE, we play ‘Rock Candy’ better than MONTROSE. We play the VAN HALEN songs as good as VAN HALEN ever played them, and I mean that.
He further added:
It’s just such a magical band. The chemistry… Jason [Bonham, drums] just sent me a live YouTube thing from Wolf Trap [a venue in Vienna, Virginia], and some guy in the audience was just holding the camera up the whole damn show almost, and I’m watching and going, ‘Look how good we were.’ I know we’re just up there doing it, but man, when you hear it and see it back, you go, ‘This band…’ We love each other, and we love playing together, and that’s the difference when you’re playing the song — not just playing the parts, but playing with the other people. That’s the difference in this band — we’re playing with each other. It’s very loose, but the level of musicianship is so high in this band that we can take it out a little bit and not step on it. It’s really, really cool. I love this band.”
When asked how it differs from Van Halen, he said:
“Being in a band is a full-time job. It’s just like a marriage — it really is. It’s even worse because, in a marriage, you can go to work and come back home, but in a band, you go to work with your partners and try to create together. It’s so deep. It’s really hard to say, but if you don’t get along, it’s stressful, and it makes them work harder.
On Van Halen, he said:
“VAN HALEN, we got along great for so many years — it’s just was toward the end where it became like, ‘I want black.’ ‘No, I want white.’ ‘Okay, I’ll go for white now.’ ‘No, I think I want black now just because you want white.’ It was so much of that that it was really stressing me out. I didn’t realize it at the time — I just thought, ‘It’s just another band. This is what bands do.’ After I left VAN HALEN, I said, ‘I’ll never play with people that I don’t really love to play with again — that I don’t like personally. If you’re not getting along personally, I’m not going to play music with those kinds of people, even if I have to take lesser musicians.’
1 comment
You people that don’t like Sammy Hagar are idiots. He is the greatest man in R&R!