During a recent chat with Steve-O, singer Sammy Hagar talked about one song from Van Halen’s David Lee Roth era that haunted him and why he wished he’d been the one to have recorded it.
Here’s what Hagar said about it:
“It’s about equal now. That’s funny because when you said 46 [million albums], [I was like] ‘No, that’s what we sold.’ But it’s like the thing, we had was these number one albums we came at a point where we got so much more attention, the music was more commercial, not intentionally; I mean, Eddie was writing on f*ccking rocking on keyboards, he loved to play keyboards, and I’d hear this sh*t, and I go, ‘F*ck, that’s awesome.’
‘When It’s Love’ and ‘Love Walks In’ and stuff like that, Eddie [would] go, ‘You like that?’ and I’m going ‘Yeah,’ because I guess Roth didn’t like keyboards. We really kind of spread out and started selling more records instantly. The reason their old catalog sold was they had the f*ccking ”Jump”, that was the biggest song Van Halen ever had.
”People meet me [and go] ‘Oh, you’re the singer of Van Halen,’ and for somebody don’t know sh*t, and they think I sing f*ccking ‘Jump,’ and I’m going, ‘Damn!’ That thing haunts me that was a big, big record so that really allowed them…
”That song still gets airplay today and still allows their old catalog to sell to a younger generation, and mine is still selling too but a younger generation will come along next on mine because it was two different decades.”