Sammy Hagar fronted Van Halen after the departure of David Lee Roth from 1985 to 1996, and then again during a brief stint between 2003 and 2005. Hagar sang on everything between 5150 released in 1986 and Balance in 1995, all of which Wolfgang Van Halen feels deserves a little more respect.
In an interview with Guitar.com, Van Halen spoke on the upcoming vinyl reissue of Live: Right Here, Right Now and the fact that Van Hagar (as it's known) generally doesn't get any respect.
"That era [of Van Halen] doesn’t get any respect, I don't think," he said. "And there's a lot of amazing songs and just obviously brilliant guitar playing on a lot of that — on all of that stuff — and I think people don't give it a chance 'cause they fall into that just exhausting 'this singer is better, this singer is better' crap, when it's, like, just give it a chance. There's some really good stuff in there."
While Van Hagar might be a point of contention among Van Halen fans, its popularity is undeniable. 5150 was the first Van Halen album to his No. 1 on the Billboard charts, which was something the band got accustomed to pretty quickly – all four Van Hagar albums reached No. 1 on the Billboard pop music charts.
That era of Van Halen also spawned 17 singles that cracked the Top 15 of the mainstream rock tracks chart, and the band even won a GRAMMY in 1992 for Best Hard Rock Performance with Vocal thanks to their For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge album. So yeah – objectively there's "some really good stuff in there," considering its massive popularity.
Van Halen would go on to reunite with David Lee Roth for the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards show, and eventually recruited Gary Cherone for the ill-received Van Halen III album in 1998.
