Alex Van Halen Surprised Sammy Hagar

09-23-2025

Sammy Hagar is surprised that Alex Van Halen agreed to let Van Halen's "Balanced" album be remastered for the special reissue, because the drummer has a long history of ignoring Sammy's era of the band and focuses on the early David Lee Roth years.

When asked about the new remastered edition of "Balance" during an appearance on SiriusXM's Trunk Nation, Sammy said, "Well, Alex had to sign off. And I have no idea why he did it because him and I are still not user-friendly. He tries to act like I was never in the band. We know this, right? In his book, it was like, I mean, come on now, you know, 40, 50 billion records and all the number ones and all that stuff. I mean, I could go on and on about that. That's the only stick I still have up my ass about Alex. It's like, dude, I was in the band. Your brother played some of the best, he wrote some of the best music in his life during my era, whether you liked the songs better earlier or whatever it is. Hey, that's your opinion. You just listened to the music he got. Eddie grew as a musician, as a keyboard player, as an arranger, just, you know, everything.

"The songs, they got more sophisticated. I mean, you know, '5150,' you know, songs like songs like 'Can't Stop Loving You.' Listen to when Joe Satriani plays those songs, he looks at me and shakes his head every time at rehearsal after he plays it, he just goes, 'Wow.' That's what he says, 'Wow.' He don't say that after 'Running with the Devil.' You know what I mean? It's like those songs are cool, they're rock tunes and all is cool. But man, the pieces of music that Eddie was writing that I had to try and write lyrics and melodies to was sophisticated stuff. And Alex should never cut his brother in half like that. Thank you. Got that out of the way now. But the reason they're doing him now is because you can't keep doing the same old stuff. And Warner Brothers insisted, you know, they said, 'There is no more Van Halen.'

"There's not gonna be no, you know, Dave's not in the band anymore. You know, when Dave was in the band, they said, 'Oh, that was their excuse. Well, we want to just put out all the Dave stuff because that's what we're touring with now.' Well, that's all that's changed. And Warner Brothers is saying, 'Hey, we got a gold mine here of stuff that hasn't been remastered.' It hasn't been remixed, it hasn't been, you know, put on vinyl. Some of it, some of it came out on vinyl, but, so that's what happened. And you know, they write a check and Alex signed off on it and Mike and I signed off on it, of course. But we oversaw it, by the way. And let me tell you something, when I put some of those vinyl things on, those remastered things, and I put them on, man, my fur goes up on my body on the back of my neck because it's the way, the way it sounds is the way I remember it sounding in the studio back when it was still on tape. And, you know, when it went to vinyl, it has a different sound than when you digitize it. So, it's really, really, really, they did a great, great job."