It's interesting. VH went form being perhaps the biggest band in the world to literally just another band when Sammy joined. For some reason, the DLR Era doesn't captivate people that weren't there for it the way other bands seem to do. It's odd because the DLR Era was so exciting and fresh. I'm always a bit surprised that people that came after that cannot see that.
I don't know, man, VH was still pretty huge during Sammy's run. I think all four albums went to number 1, they were still all over MTV, and the rise of grunge and alt rock had no negative effect on VH's popularity.
But it wasn't the same. I've written about this before. VH with Sam was a rock band. I have all the albums, they're good, but they're a rock band, albeit one with a pretty good guitar player. VH with Roth was a thing unto himself. Maybe it was my East Coast upbringing, but Van Halen were Gods among men, very similar to the way Kiss was in the early days. It's not a coincidence or a random thing that the grunge movement was predicated on simply walking on stage in your street clothes. There was nothing about David Lee Roth that was "street clothes" in any sense of the word. I know as a young kid picking up a guitar, I could plunk out Smoke On The Water. Or Detroit Rock City. As I got better later, I could even play those songs all the way through, and make them pass. To this day, I can play snippets of Van Halen, but I don't, because I don't have that attitude, that swagger, that punk. They were one of the few bands - the VERY few bands - that appealed equally to men and women; the guys all wanted to be Dave and Ed, and the girls all wanted to be WITH Dave and Ed.
I was at a party once in Brigantine New Jersey, and the dude had set up his stereo with one speaker on each side of the room. The early Van Halen was panned really wierd, so you could walk to one side of the room and hear almost an isolated guitar track and walk to the other side of the room and it was a working dialogue from the Master Of Ceremonies, David Lee Roth. It's hard to talk about becuase that SOUNDS absolutely horrendous, and it was in a sense, but it was so illuminating, because you sort of got this "essence" of Van Halen that couldn't be duplicated.
My answer: A Different Kind Of Truth. It's my second favorite VH record (behind Fair Warning), and I think it was a crying shame that there was nothing that came after. That is a BRILLIANT record.