Sammy Hagar Won't Play Full Van Halen Album

William Lee | 10-26-2019

Sammy Hagar says that he could never see himself performing a full Van Halen album in its entirety because he enjoys mixing up his setlists too much.

The former Van Halen and Montrose frontman was asked about the idea of playing on the hit albums from Van Halen in full live during excerpts published from an interview with Clay Marshall for an OC Weekly feature and Sammy responded, "I'm starting to see so many people do it, I just interviewed Def Leppard for my 'Rock & Roll Road Trip'. They did some shows where they played the whole 'Hysteria' record. Everybody's kind of doing that. REO [Speedwagon] just did it with 'High Fidelity', their biggest record.

"It's such a trend, but man, I don't think I could play a whole night without moving all over my career, because I'm so used to it with The Circle and I'm so happy about it. Every night, we can go, 'Let's play 'Best Of Both Worlds'. No, we played 'Best Of Both Worlds' last night. Let's play 'Top Of The World'.' 'Let's do 'When It's Love' - no, let's do 'Right Now' tonight.' 'Let's do 'Rock Candy' instead of 'Bad Motor Scooter'.' On and on and on.

"There's so much that we can do, and it's so, it's the set list from heaven. Every single song, I look at the audience. When we kick each song off with The Circle, these guys - or a guy and a girl, or two girls - they look at each other and shake their head like, 'Yes. All right. They're playing that one. Oh my God - they're playing that.'

"Song after song, you see that response. I would love to do it, and I kind of do that in Cabo - the only thing I do in Cabo is not a whole record. I've done 'Marching To Mars' in Cabo, and I've done 'Space Between' in Cabo, the whole record. Just those two, oddly enough.

"What we do, a lot of times, we would just go out and start playing Montrose , as many Montrose tunes as we know. The first hour is just Montrose, mixed up shuffle.

"Or we play Van Halen. Many times, I went out with either band and just said, 'Let's play every Van Halen song we know.' Before the night is over, we start mixing it up. It's never one album, but it's, like, 20 Van Halen songs in one night. I've done that before.

"With The Wabos this year in Cabo, one of the nights, it's going to be pure Sammy, no Montrose, no Van Halen. It's going to be deep Sammy tracks, it's going to be pure Sammy. I only get, like, five Sammy songs in The Circle set, and I get a lot of sh*t for it."