(Credits: Far Out / Abby Gillardi / Sammy Hagar)
Sun 29 March 2026 19:30, UK
There aren’t many singers who have ever seemed more at odds with each other than David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar.
Even though they both worked with the greatest guitarist that the world had ever seen, it wasn’t hard to see the difference between the showmanship that ‘Diamond Dave’ had and the vocal precision that ‘The Red Rocker’ brought to the table whenever they worked in Van Halen. But even if they were polar opposites of each other when they sang, there was always some common ground there when they started talking about the best singers that came before them.
But judging by what Roth was doing in his solo career, it’s not like he was trying to be anything too authentic compared to what Hagar was doing. The ‘Van Hagar’ only worked because the vocalist had spent a lot of time gaining traction in bands like Montrose, so when he started to shape Eddie’s melodies into fleshed-out songs, it wasn’t that hard for him to add a few vocal leaps that Roth probably wouldn’t have been able to sing even if he rehearsed for years to get it right.
And it’s not like Roth saw that as a disadvantage to him, either. He was born to be an entertainer in every sense of the word, and when looking at the various raps that he was doing in between shows, many of Van Halen’s early sets were like watching one of the best rock and roll outfits ever made that just so happened to have a hype man like Sammy Davis Jr as their singer. But Roth could still find a handful of musicians who had a lot more taste behind what they were doing.
If you break it down, Roth was always a blues singer in his truest form, and a lot of the best blues singers before him were relying on swagger. Mick Jagger didn’t claim to have the best voice, and Screaming Lord Sutch managed to make records with a boatload of connections and one of the worst voices in the world, but when ‘Diamond Dave’ laid ears on Rod Stewart, he had finally found a singer who could practically sing anything he wanted to and make it sound great.
Whether he was working with The Faces, singing those heartbreaking ballads, or reinterpreting the Great American Songbook, Roth felt that Stewart was one of those rare talents that could make anything work, saying, “Rod Stewart, probably one of the best vocalists in the history of any genre, altogether. That’s a no-way division thing. His songs, you can have other people sing them, but it becomes something other.”
Naturally, almost anything Roth said about the music business would have been alien to Hagar, but even he had to admit that Stewart was one of the few singers that he modelled himself after when working with Montrose, saying, “Montrose was a heavy metal band; I was a blues, R&B singer, and then I got thrown into this heavy metal band. And I became it, and I dug it. I started trippin’ on guys like Rod Stewart – I was really a big fan of Rod’s. He was a great performer, and I dug the way he sang, and he had a great sense of humor with the Faces.”
Judging by how both of them sing, though, you can hear bits and pieces of every part of Stewart’s career on how they perform. Roth was always going to go for the showman angle whenever he copied some of Stewart’s moves, but when you hear some of the more guttural songs that he made with The Faces, there’s no doubt that Hagar could have probably done a decent version of ‘Stay With Me’ with Van Halen.
So while Roth and Hagar might still not be the best of friends every single time they see each other, it’s not like finding common threads between them is completely impossible. At the end of the day, they are both still rock and roll fans, and they were going to do anything to find that one singer that gave them as much of a thrill as hearing some of Stewart’s biggest hits in the early 1970s.
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