40 Years Ago: Sammy Hagar Finally Breaks Through With ‘VOA’
When VOA arrived on July 23, 1984, Sammy Hagar stood on a career precipice that neither he – nor anyone else paying attention – could possibly have understood. Heck, everyone probably thought Hagar was simply releasing his eighth solo studio album.
As history would soon carve indelibly in stone, however, VOA would mark the line in the sand that has since defined his long and colorful career: The line between "before Van Halen" and "after Van Halen."
Of course, reducing decades of work to a single event – however momentous this one may be – is a huge oversimplification. After all, Hagar built his solo career the old-fashioned way, by earning it. Year by year, concert by concert, and album by album, beginning with his 1976 solo debut Nine on a Ten Scale – not to mention his previous stint as the singer for Montrose – Hagar had painstakingly established himself as a force to be reckoned with.
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Then, after a handful of solid, but modestly performing LPs, Hagar really hit his stride as the '80s got underway: swapping Capitol for Geffen Records, scoring his first platinum album with 1981's Standing Hampton, and making his maiden voyage into the Billboard Top 20 with 1982's gold-certified Three Lock Box.
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So, there was great optimism as Hagar and his faithful backing band (guitarist Gary Pihl, keyboardist Jesse Harms, drummer David Lauser and bassist Bill Church – a fellow Montrose survivor – dove headlong into recording the eight tracks that would drive VOA into the music-buying public consciousness higher and faster than any Hagar product preceding it.
"Drive" being the operative word, of course, since it was VOA's first song and single – the irrepressible "I Can't Drive 55" – which accelerated Hagar onto the rock radio airwaves like never before. (It should be noted that 1983's "Your Love is Driving Me Crazy" went higher on the pop charts.) Thanks to the rising reach and influence of MTV, the song's high-octane video made him a household name as well.
Follow-up focus tracks like "Two Sides of Love" (an expertly designed power ballad) and VOA's title track (named after the State Department's international "Voice of America" radio broadcasts) kept the Hagar chatter going, convincing many new fans to take a chance on buying his new LP. There, they found a virtually filler-free selection of rockers, including the fierce "Rock is in My Blood," the chuckle-inducing "Dick in the Dirt," another ballad-to-die-for in "Don't Make Me Wait," and a cleverly worded tribute to New York City graffiti artists named "Burnin' Down the City."
Sammy Hagar's VOA would crown a decade of dedicated hard work and self-improvement. One can only guess how much further this momentum may have carried him, if not for the freak series of coincidences that brought him to Van Halen instead.
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Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso
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