Music WI: A different Van Halen

A lot of people know of Van Halen as a good-time party rock band during the David Lee Roth years, especially with the first two Van Halen albums and 1984, but around the time of Women and Children First, the band starting straying from the formula of party music and hard rock covers of old 60's Kinks and 70's disco tunes and going in a more strange and perhaps diverse direction with their music. After W&C1st, tensions between Eddie and Dave were starting to mount and Eddie started writing material for a solo album. One day, Dave found Eddie's material and started writing lyrics to it reflecting his recent trip to an inner-city in Haiti and its tales of violence, prostitution etc... The result of all this came the album "Fair Warning" released in 1981.

Fair Warning was a fairly unusual album as it was a lot funkier than anything VH had put out previous, but it was also very dark lyrically and sonically. Due to this different musical direction, the album sold poorly (for VH standards anyways), and prompted Warner Brothers along with David Lee Roth to put pressure on the band to put out a very commercially viable album with choc full of covers and "happier" sounding originals. Being that the band was exhausted by this time from non-stop touring, they relented and the result was a very watered down album called "Diver Down" which sounded almost completely opposite of Fair Warning.

After Diver Down, VH put out the highly successful (and very pop-oriented) 1984 leading to massive commercial overkill, and a clash of the egos between Eddie and Dave leading to the latter's departure in 1985.

But what if...

Van Halen ignores the poor album sales and soldiers on in the direction of Fair Warning basically telling their record company to get bent?

Do they break up shortly after and everyone goes into solo projects?

Do they become a more underground act?

Is this even feasible?
 
Well this might save Sammy Hagar from his current reputation of being "That other Van Halen Singer" and would hopful not cut his fantasic solo career short.
 
Another note, Eddie auditioned to replace Ace Frehley in Kiss shortly after the release of Fair Warning.

Gene Simmons talked him out of leaving Van Halen, but what if Gene tossed Eric Carr and took BOTH Van Halen brothers into Kiss?

As to Van Halen staying together and continuing on, I think the only way they could get to the point where they had the weight to make albums like 5150, OU812 and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge was by making an album as insanely successful as 1984 and the only way they could get to that was to make Diver Down.

If Eddie and Dave could have checked their egos and Dave stayed, I think a very similar 5150 and beyond would have followed, trading on the commercial viability they showed with 1984 that would have gotten Warner Bros. to back damn near anything they wanted to do creatively.

I always thought Fair Warning got a bad rap, truthfully. It's a pretty solid album, just not what people expected from them at that time.

Perhaps they could have shelved the darker elements of Fair Warning for the time being, taken songs like Unchained and So This is Love and made an album like Diver Down instead, followed up with 1984 and then used the darker material they'd written for Fair Warning and used it for 5150.
 
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