By the mid-1980s, Van Halen seemed to have done the impossible. When working with David Lee Roth, the band pioneered the idea of hair metal in a mainstream context, bringing their signature brand of heavy riffs and singalong choruses to the masses with ‘Diamond Dave’ strutting up and down the stage. Although the band managed to conquer the world with Roth at the helm, his expulsion led to them doing it again with Sammy Hagar on vocals.
For a run of albums, Eddie was working with different synthesiser sounds that clashed with what Roth wanted to do. Rather than try to compromise, Eddie insisted that keyboards have a prominent role on the album 1984, which led to Roth leaving over creative differences once the touring wrapped up.
Although Eddie wasn’t sure where to look for a replacement, he got a tip from his auto mechanic to try Hagar since the mechanic had been working on both of their cars. Immediately hitting it off, Hagar would revitalise the band for their next album, 5150, which brought with it a mixture of synth-heavy flash on ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ alongside Eddie’s signature tapping licks on tracks like ‘Good Enough’ and ‘Dreams’.
As the years wore on, though, Hagar became dissatisfied with his place in the band for the same length of time that Roth had been involved. After falling out with the group during the making of the record Balance, Hagar thought that the band needed to take a break to recharge their creative batteries…only to be called back in to work on a new soundtrack song.
Being attached to Twister, Van Halen was instructed to write several tracks to accompany the action movie. Not being happy about returning to work, Hagar slowly worked through the sessions before coming up with ‘Humans Being’, which would become the signature tune of the era.
Although the band seemed fine on the surface, Eddie was not pleased with what Hagar had shown up with. Being interrupted through his holidays, Hagar initially had various weather metaphors put into the lyrics to accompany the film’s tornado theme before Eddie insisted on changing them.
As the band got back to regroup one more time, Hagar wasn’t a fan of them making a greatest hits album, telling Loudwire, “The new manager that came in wanted us to do a greatest-hits record with both Dave’s era and my era with two new songs from me and, not to my knowledge at the time, two more songs from Dave. We ended up using one of them for Twister, and that was the end of the band. I wanted to do a whole record. I didn’t want to do a greatest hit record. I didn’t think Van Halen was there yet.”
With Hagar out of the band, the band decided to carry on with Extreme frontman Gary Cherone, resulting in one of the most poorly received projects on Van Halen III. Though the idea of Van Halen making a greatest hits album may have made sense at the time, ‘Humans Being’ is a subtle reminder of what happens when management gets in the way of musicians wanting to create what they want.
