Red

by Sammy Hagar

  It may sound like my dad was a bastard, but it’s not that simple. He was the weirdest guy, and when he wasn’t picking fights, he also had this big, soft heart—at least when he wasn’t drinking. He would sit there and look at the mountains or the ocean and say, “Isn’t that beautiful?” When he was sober, this tough, crazy bastard would say those kinds of things. I used to always think that was strange. I thought, “Wow, my dad’s soft.” It would rub me wrong when I would hear him say something was pretty or he would act real loving with me. I thought he was like a big, tough guy, and now he’s acting like a sissy. I didn’t know how to relate to that. It turned out he was real sensitive, too, but he never had a chance to show it. Back where he came from, the sensitive guy got his ass kicked. He had to be tough. But I think he wasn’t that way at all. I think he was like an artist. I got it from somewhere. He was a good singer. He used to sing to the radio. He’d yodel his ass off. He was a trip.

  Mom didn’t leave him for good until I was about ten years old. It didn’t happen all at once, and it started with a car. Somehow, between picking fruit and berries with us kids, ironing and who knows what else, my mom bought this old ’36 Ford for thirty bucks, and she hid it on the other side of town. My dad didn’t know. Then, when we left him, we could sleep in the car, instead of the orange groves. My mom would drive to orange groves and park in the middle somewhere where cops couldn’t see you. Once in a while the police would come, but they weren’t pissed off. They would just say, “Lady, this is dangerous, you sleeping here with these kids. Please go park in a neighborhood or something.” That’s how personal the whole thing was in Fontana in those days.

  The final straw came when my dad set the house on fire. It was following a gray year when Mom had taken a real stand and rented a house on her own. It was this fucked-up old house, basically a chicken coop somebody converted, and it was only a block and a half away from where Dad lived. But that was the first time she said, “I’m staying here—we’re done with this guy.” A lot really happened in that gray year. She took a real job—went to night school to learn how to type and landed a job as a shipping clerk at a hosiery factory. Instead of ironing or picking fruit, she would work all day, pick us up from school, and take us to the field, where we would all pick fruit or whatever until sundown.

  For a while there, it was back and forth, back and forth between the two houses, but then Dad fell off the wagon after a long time sober. It was payday. My mother came back from shopping with the money and he was gone. Uh-oh. He came home in the middle of the night. We scrambled out the window. Sometimes she would let him fall asleep and she would climb back in the window once he conked out. She’d spy on him and, when she was sure he’d passed out, she’d bring us back inside so we could sleep in our beds instead of sleeping in the cold outside. We were living in this two-story house, and my dad fell asleep in the bedroom on the second floor while he had a lit cigarette. By the time we came home to see if he’d passed out, we saw the smoke and went back in the orange groves. The fire department showed up and ran upstairs carrying hoses. My father woke up and started kicking everybody’s asses. They had to put the fire hoses on him before they could put out the fire. The cops came and took him to jail.

  He stayed in the burned-out house. That was the last of his having a house. Bit by bit, my mom would come in during the day, or when he passed out, and take our stuff out of there. This time, she was gone for good. She was taking furniture. She took everything that we could use, everything that was ours. We were living in this chicken coop and my brother would walk to school past the old burned house. It only lasted about a month before my dad finally hit the streets. They threw him out of the house. But the last time my brother saw him there, he snuck up to the window and peeked in the living room without my dad knowing. He said Dad was parked on a wooden crate, sitting in that empty room in the burned-out house with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  2

  MOBILE HOME BLUES

  Ed Mattson taught me how to play guitar and drive a car.

  Ed was three years older and had gone to school with my brother. In high school, Ed had been this fat kid with a big nose. Everybody made fun of him and beat him up. His mother was a slumlord. She had about ten houses in bad neighborhoods. She had three on the street where they lived in Fontana. I never met his father, who was a steelworker in Gary, Indiana. They didn’t live together, and, after meeting his mother, I could understand why. His mom was a Russian Jew and completely crazy.

  Then one day, Ed got a nose job in Hollywood, went on a diet, and lost tons of weight. His mother bought him a brand-new 1962 Chevy Super Sport Impala. Suddenly he was the coolest guy in town and nobody knew who he was. My brother didn’t recognize him. He had this fabulous pompadour. He was going to Hollywood and having his hair razor-cut by Jay Sebring, one of the guys that Charles Manson would eventually kill. His mom gave him money and he always wore cool clothes. I used to see him driving around, usually by himself. He picked me up hitchhiking one time, and we became fast friends. He taught me how to drive. I had a learner’s permit and he let me drive everywhere. He took me to Sebring’s salon and got my hair cut. He thought I was a young guy with some potential and he wanted to help bring it out.

  He played guitar, and, early on, he was listening to Bob Dylan. Ed turned me on to the Beatles and the Stones. Before that, Elvis had been my first real hero, because my big sisters loved him so much. When I was a little kid, my sisters would have parties. They would dress me up, ducktail me out, and every one of those girls would dance with me. I dug the hell out of it. I was a little hard-on, a nine-year-old kid with these girls five or six years older, starting to get sexy, starting to get little titties. All because of Elvis.

  Even though I dug Elvis, I didn’t pursue music. But the Beatles got to me. I was in high school, already had a girlfriend, but I still couldn’t help liking “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” When I heard the Stones, I was gone. Local Top 40 deejay George Babcock brought the Rolling Stones to San Bernardino in June 1964 for the band’s first concert in America, and I fucking went. Ed Mattson and I drove over in his car to the Swing Auditorium with the plan to sneak in. We stood at the back door when along comes this clunky, fucked-up orange school bus, and George Babcock gets out of the bus with the Stones. They walked in the back door, and we walked right in behind them.

  That was when it started for me. That night, I knew I wanted to be a musician. Ed Mattson could already play guitar. I started singing with him, and we would play these Beatles and Stones songs. We knew three or four songs. Ed said we needed two guitars, so he could play lead. By that time, my mom had a job and was doing okay, so I tried to con her into buying me a guitar on her Sears account. She told me that if I learned how to play “Never on Sunday,” the popular foreign film title track played on a bouzouki, on Ed’s guitar, she would buy me a guitar. I learned it in, like, a day or two. She bought it on time. It was $39.95—a Silvertone guitar and an amplifier in a case.

  My first band never played a gig, but we had capes. A couple of my pals and I helped paint a house for one of their fathers. We used the money to buy the fabric and talked one of the guys’ mothers into making them—black velvet, red lining, Dracula collars. We wore them around town one day and people driving down the street would honk their horns and flip us off. We thought we were really cool. We decided we would wear them to the Dick Dale dance in Riverside, but we were too young to drive. We hitchhiked. Nobody was going to pick us up wearing those capes, so we rolled them up and put them on again when we got to the dance. Only they wouldn’t let us wear the capes into the dance, so we rolled them up again and stashed them outside in the bushes. When we came out, they were gone. Somebody stole them. My mother thought the whole thing was hilarious, and she never let me forget it. Years later, when she was interviewed for the local paper about me, she told them, “Oh, his first band—they had capes.”

  Dick Dale was the thing. The King of the Surf Guitar mo
ved his weekend dances from the Rendezvous and Aragon Ballrooms on the coast to the Inland Empire, and his weekly shows at the Riverside National Guard Armory were big events. When Ed Mattson wanted to start a band, we called it the Fabulous Castilles and played surf music. I learned Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” on guitar. We never had a drummer in that band, and we all played through one amp with the microphones. We practiced every day.

  We met Jerry Martin, a fifties oldies-but-goodies, doo-wop dude, but a good bass player. He was way above the level that Ed and I were playing at, but he thought we knew what was going on and would let us come over. I had started having long hair. I started wearing rock-and-roll-looking clothing. To us, he had it made. He had a fifties band that would play nightclubs all over the Inland Empire and L.A. He had his own house, drove a new T-Bird, and even had a single out that they had played on the radio one time. He would play with us in his garage because he thought we were hip and onto the latest things. Soon he started growing his hair and getting hip himself, but I was still astonished when he pulled out a joint and said, “Hey, want to get high?” I smoked a little pin joint with him, but didn’t feel anything. I was too nervous. It took a couple times.

  Once I discovered rock-and-roll and pussy, I barely made it through high school. Especially after I got my first guitar, I was done. I was flunking everything. My teachers would say, “Why don’t you apply yourself?” That was high school. All I cared about was music and girls.

  And once I finally got high, it was really all over. One of my pals and I took a joint and drove way down the dirt road in the Jurupa Hills, almost to Riverside. I couldn’t stop laughing. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t do shit. I dug it. After I’d decided I was going to smoke dope, in order to get that dope, you had to find the lowlifes of all lowlifes. These were the dope dealers in Fontana—not hippies but bad-guy heroin dealers—those were the people you went to see if you wanted to buy some weed. It wasn’t even good weed. So there I was, becoming a stoner, smoking dope every day, taking acid, even shooting speed. Shot heroin—didn’t dig it.

  After high school, I wanted to get out of Fontana as quickly as I could. Fontana was a blue-collar town. Nobody would have ambitions like being a doctor, a lawyer, or anything like that. You were either a bad-ass, low-rider Hell’s Angel–type tough guy, or you got a regular job and got married immediately after high school. There were no plans on leaving that town. My father was the town drunk. He was living on the streets. I’d be driving my car around and there was my dad, stumbling down the sidewalk, drunk. Every so often, we’d bring him over to my sister Bobbi’s house and she would clean him up, but it would never last.

  Mom was doing much better. Not only did she have her own real job, she met a guy, Mike Majerovwych. He was a big Russian bear who escaped the Ukraine after the Soviet army slaughtered his family while Mike hid in the basement with his baby. He ran away on foot and gave the baby to a couple in a village on his way. He made it to Canada, where he worked in a coal mine, and eventually moved to California. He was living in Cucamonga and working as a chef at Chafee College when he met my mom at a polka dance. He was a good guy, although he didn’t like my long hair and didn’t mind letting me know. Still, he bought me my first car.

  I was getting ready to make my jump. I was aching to be a musician, but I worked at ABC Stores in the automotive department. I wore my hair in a Bob Dylan Afro and had this girlfriend, Christie Carson, who looked like Twiggy. I started living with her at her grandmother’s house in San Bernardino. I bought a brand-new black 1967 Volkswagen—$1,900 out the door minus $300 trade-in—that my mom cosigned for and I was making payments. I talked the manager of the ABC Store into opening a music department at the Riverside store and I ran it. I ordered all the records. I started getting record players. I started stocking guitars. I built the whole music department. But I was doing drugs. I was smoking dope constantly. I was stoned all the time. I’d wake up in the morning and smoke roaches before I went to work.

  My friend Bucky was really into music, and he liked to play. He was a year older than me, but during the summer, we spent time together. I was always hanging around with tough guys and Bucky was kind of a tough guy. I’d go over to Bucky’s house. He had a swimming pool. I thought they were wealthy. Sometimes I would see his younger sister, Betsy, sitting around in a bikini. I knew her from high school, although she would never say hello to me in the halls. I was always tripping on her, but Bucky would say, “Don’t mess with my sister—I’ll kick your ass.”

  Bucky would come over to ABC Store and buy these cardboard record-filing boxes that sold for $1.39. Little, cheap folders with A-B-C-D-etc. on them and you put your records in there. Only I would fill them up with new albums by Cream, Jimi Hendrix, all the stuff we wanted to hear, charge him for the filing box, put everything in a paper bag, and staple the receipt for $1.39 to the bag for the security guard to check on the way out of the store. Sometimes I would slip in a new album by Donovan or Joan Baez for his sister. So this one time, Bucky’s got the bag with about twenty pounds of records in it, and the security guy goes to grab it. The bag ripped to pieces, the box hit the ground, and all these records went flying all over the place.

  They busted Buck. I got fired. They wanted to fire me anyway. They were watching me and knew I was smoking dope during the lunch hour. But that wasn’t all bad. I went on unemployment. I was getting high all the time and playing guitar.

  I knew this small-time dope dealer in Fontana named Jim, and one day he asked me to drive him to San Francisco to score some LSD and go to this big rock festival in June 1967. I had the car. We drove up to the Haight-Ashbury, and arrived about four in the morning. We crashed in the car on the street. When we got up, Jim knocked on the door and we went into this apartment full of speed freaks. I watched as some guy shot speed in his fucking neck. I was not digging the scene, but Jim scored a bag of windowpane acid. We dropped the acid, bright and early in the morning, and drove down to the Monterey Pop Festival stoned out of our minds.

  The concert took place inside a fenced-in arena, surrounded by a park. Thousands of people were hanging around outside. I spent most of the time out in the park outside the arena. Everyone was sitting under the trees, taking drugs, smoking pot, burning incense, having sex in the grass. We saw Brian Jones wandering around, as stoned as we were. We saw some of the bands. We caught Otis Redding. I saw Eric Burdon and the New Animals, who blew my mind. Hugh Masekela was cool. I saw weird things like the Association, who had great harmonies, but I missed Hendrix. I didn’t see Janis Joplin, either. I was high on acid for three days.

  All that left a big impression on me, but it was when Bucky introduced me to Fresh Cream that I decided that’s what I was going to do. I hadn’t had a job in a bit, and I’d been spending my time getting high every day. I’d been listening to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s East-West, and of course everybody dug Sergeant Pepper’s, but not really trying to play anything, just tripping. But then Cream came out with their first album, and all of a sudden, I’ve got to get back into music, way back. I wasn’t just tripping anymore. I went and stole a guitar—actually a friend of mine stole it. He knew about the guitar and where it was. We watched and waited for the people to leave their house and we climbed through their back window. My friend did it because he believed I was going to be a rock star. I already looked like one. Another one of my doper friends, Tim Tameko, who had a real job at Kaiser Steel, signed for me to buy an amplifier, a Fender Bassman, because that’s what Eric Clapton used to get a big, fat tone. I set my sights on becoming Eric Clapton. I went to see Cream play that September at the Whisky a Go-Go on the Sunset Strip and I thought I made eye contact with Eric Clapton. I thought he looked right at me. I looked just like him. I wore my hair in a big natural Afro like his. It was before he had his long, wavy hair. I had the exact same look.

  THE NEXT MONTH, I went over to see this band I had heard about. They already had a lead singer who played guitar and he was pretty good, and I only went
to check them out. I walked in wearing a pinstriped double-breasted jacket with a roach clip on my lapel, white T-shirt, jeans, boots, John Lennon shades, and my frizzy Afro hairdo. The band’s guitarist, who was named Jesse Llamas, took one look at me and said, “Can you sing?” Just like that, I was the new singer for the Mobile Home Blues Band.

  Jesse and I were pretty much opposites. He was this fat, greasy-looking Mexican slob who didn’t even tie his shoes but could really play, while I looked the part but had little else. Jesse knew what was happening and turned me on to Jeff Beck. He worked at this cool little record store between Colton and San Bernardino, where he bought an import single of “Rock My Plimsoul” and, on the other side, “Hi-Ho Silver Lining.” Jesse played me “Red House” and “Manic Depression” off the English version of the first Jimi Hendrix album.

  The Mobile Home Blues Band was a weird band. We only did ten gigs or something, but we rehearsed for what seemed like forever. The highlight, if you could call it that, was when we opened for American Breed (remember “Bend Me Shape Me”?) at this crazy, nonalcoholic club called Purple Haze in Riverside. Our bass player, Benny Mosteller, was a little genius in a wheelchair. He was born with this rare disease, all crippled up. His joints were fused together. When he was about fourteen years old, he had an operation and they just cut out the joints, so at least he could straighten out. He played a Hofner bass, like Paul McCartney. He was right-handed, but he had to play left-handed because of the operation, and he was fucking great. He was a brain, too. He would tell everybody what key and what notes to play. He had long hair and he was really fucked-up-looking from spending his life in a wheelchair. But he was a math genius in school. And he played perfect—perfect time, perfect note choices.