Maybe the craziest thing about former Montrose frontman Sammy Hagar’s 1978 live album All Night Long—the most-played album in my collection the summer it came out, between sophomore and junior year in high school—is how much better it was than the three studio albums that preceded it.
All three—Nine On A Ten Scale (1976), its self-titled follow-up (January 1977), and Musical Chairs (October 1977)—showcase an artist who can’t seem to settle on what kind of music he wants to make, mixing hard rock anthems with the mid-tempo r&b he’d played pre-Montrose, while adding radio-ready guitar-pop and melodramatic power ballads. You want to say it demonstrated range, but the end result feels fragmented to the point of incoherence.
Part of the issue may have been the man at the boards. The producer of all three of Hagar’s initial studio albums—and co-writer of a number of early Hagar tunes—was John Carter, who during the same era helmed albums by Bob Welch and The Motels, and seemed to view all of his acts through the same AM radio, mainstream guitar-pop lens. Whatever the case, Carter has never been known for the genre that Hagar ended up making his home for the remainder of his long and successful career: riffy hard rock.
The scattered musical approach that characterized Hagar’s first three albums would eventually resolve, but is still very much present on Musical Chairs.
Opener “Turn Up The Music” is a driving rocker that became an early Hagar standard, full of party-hearty exhortations and energetic hooks that earned it the side-one-closer slot on All Night Long. Here, though, it’s followed by a song that’s almost a microcosm of this album’s multiple musical personalities. “It’s Gonna Be Alright” stacks synths, horns, and blues-rock guitar on top of a mid-tempo r&b groove; Hagar then tops off this hot mess of an arrangement with a lyric expressing optimism and patriotism in the most bland, vague terms imaginable.
Next up, “You Make Me Crazy” is a straight-up pop/r&b-lite number that feels like it was cribbed from an old Jackson Five album. 
Watching Hagar sing it on The Midnight Special is almost painful; with no guitar to play and nowhere to run onstage, he has no idea what to do with his hands. The skinny kid just three years removed from Montrose gives the lead vocal his all, to be sure, but the song is pure fluff and he acts like he knows it.
In a neck-snapping tonal shift, Musical Chairs follows with “Reckless,” a headlong hard rock stomper featuring wailing guitars and a patented Sammy scream. Wha? And then they snap your neck back in the other direction with the swooning, string-laden piano ballad “Try (Try To Fall In Love),” which is worth maybe one listen for novelty’s sake, if you can even get through it. It’s that out of place and off-putting, and that’s without even mentioning Hagar’s brief attempt at falsetto...!
Side two opener “Don’t Stop Me Now” is more like it, at least for about 45 seconds, the length of time it takes to get through the pumping hard rock opening verse before it jump-cuts to a sugary, bouncy pop chorus that feels spliced in from not just another song, but another genre entirely. (If you told me Hagar wrote the verses and Carter the choruses—they’re credited as co-writers—I’d believe you.)
“Straight From The Hip Kid” is a cover of a contemporary single by UK rockers Liar; it’s got a nice pulse and push to it, despite a genuinely silly chorus (“So-ci-ety, so-high-ety / So high brow / But so low down”). A musical cousin to “You Make Me Crazy,” the gently grooving “Hey Boys” aims for airy sincerity—bells and acoustic strums and handclaps—but no matter how many times Sammy sings “A change is gonna come,” he’s never gonna be Sam Cooke.
And then we get to Hagar’s other early-career fixation: sci-fi. First comes the solid but unremarkable guitar-rock tune “Someone Out There,” which could have featured on an aliens-visit-Earth episode of The X-Files. Then, closing things out, we get faux-Floydian space-rock number “Crack In The World,” which spends a bloated 5:12 exploring a dystopian future that comes about in the year… 2025 (not kidding, check the lyrics).
One of the most puzzling things about Musical Chairs is that it features the identical band lineup as the subsequent, far superior All Night Long: Montrose veterans Denny Carmassi (drums), Bill Church (bass) and Alan “Fitz” Fitzgerald (keyboards), plus debuting lead guitarist Gary Pihl, who would serve as Hagar’s musical other half for most of a decade, before Hagar joined Van Halen and Pihl joined Boston. It’s as if these thoroughbreds were held in a pen for Musical Chairs before being set loose to run free for All Night Long.
When the latter arrived a year later, featuring one poppy new single (“I’ve Done Everything For You,” later a hit for Rick Springfield), one ballad (“Young Girl Blues”), and six pounding, anthemic hard rock tunes, it felt like a declaration of independence, and indeed, John Carter never worked the boards for a Hagar studio album again.
Musical Chairs marks the point in his career where Hagar seemed to recognize he had a problem, one that would eventually be resolved by distancing himself from both Carter and Capitol to sign with upstart rival label Geffen Records. Musical Chairs is an album that has its moments, but mostly feels like the work of a talented performer bumping into furniture, searching for a sound.