by Sammy Hagar
His mother was the greatest woman. She was a single mom, and Benny had a totally normal brother, too. His mom would feed us and let us rehearse in their garage. She would pick Benny up, take him out of the wheelchair when he had to go to the bathroom. She would wipe his ass for him and everything. She was the sweetest woman and she loved us because we didn’t care that he was all fucked up. She put up with us bringing girls over all the time. The drummer was a fourteen-year-old kid who didn’t even have his first drum set yet. His name was David Lauser, but Jesse called him Bro. Forty years later, he is still my drummer. We had a rhythm guitar player and, the first time we played a gig, he freaked out. He was shaking so badly he couldn’t play. He had to play behind his amp. He couldn’t even come out onstage. And we kept him in the band. I was just the singer in the band. I was doing too many drugs. I’d gotten in the habit of going over to Tim Tameko’s house to smoke pot. Every now and then I’d buy a lid and deal joints. I’d go over to Tim’s house and act like I was cool, because I was trying to be a rock star now. It was a scene. There was always music going. I’d play guitar and he’d let me leave my amp there. He would always have joints or acid or speed, and people were constantly coming and going. Guys would be shooting up speed. I came in one night late. Everybody was smoking dope. I had a couple of joints. I lit one and passed it around. This one guy said, “Hey, man, do you mind if I have this to go?” A roach? I didn’t think anything of it. “No, it’s cool.”
This random guy turned out to be a narc. They were trying to get the big dealer, whoever that was. There was no big dealer in our world. We were all dealing joints, not kilos. If I had $85, I would have bought a kilo in a second, but I never had eighty-five bucks. Still I didn’t realize what I’d done until about three months later, when a cop pulled me over and gave me a ticket for an illegal lane change. It was such bullshit that I went to court to fight it. When the judge asked me how I pleaded, I said, “Not guilty.”
“And how do you plead to the charges of possession…no, distribution of marijuana?” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about, and then this narc walks in holding a plastic bag with my joint. It turned out that our pal Jim had been busted and rolled over on everybody else. They threw me in jail.
In the middle of the night, some guy in my cell pulls a baggie with two joints out of his asshole and fires up right there in jail. It freaked me out. “I’m in for this, you motherfucker,” I said.
“They don’t care,” he said, and I knew he was right. We toked up. Nothing made sense.
It was not a good trip. I stopped smoking dope after that, because getting high in jail bummed me out so bad. There was some enormous bastard in the next cell for writing bad checks. “You got a girlfriend?” he says. “She’s fucking Jody right now, man. He’s fucking her in the ass. She’s blowing him.” Some other old jail guys chimed in. They were dogging me heavy and they were getting to me.
It was the worst four days of my life. My mom was bumming hard. My brother and my sister visited me. Everybody’s going, “Oh, Sammy, how could you do this? When you get out, you’re going to cut your hair and go straight,” and all this shit. When I finally went to court, I didn’t have an attorney, so they gave me a public defender. When we eventually did appear in court, it turned out that I’d worked with the bailiff at the ABC Store where he had been working as a security guard. He recognized me, took the judge aside, and told him I was a nice kid, a hard worker, there must be some mistake. The judge let me off. It was a lucky break. I could have done time.
So I got out of jail and I decided no more dope—I’m playing music. I’m getting rid of all those friends, quitting all that shit around Tim Tameko’s house. I stopped making payments on my amp because I didn’t have any money, and there was still $80 left to go. Tim paid it off. I went in, like, a year later and they told me it had been taken care of. I never saw Tim again. He got busted, too, only he went to prison. Me? I never worked another day in my life.
3
GOING TO SAN FRANCISCO
Johnny Fortune saw me with the Mobile Home Blues Band at the Purple Haze. He was famous in the area for his hit single, “Soul Surfer,” that made him something of a grade-B Dick Dale for a minute, but his shelf date had actually expired years before. Still, he was a local name, and in 1968, he approached me about being in his band, agreeing to pay me a hefty $150 a week to let me sing whatever I wanted. I wore a mustache, sideburns, and grew my hair long. It was a funny act—he’d play some twangy, old-fashioned rock-and-roll guitar instrumental and I’d sing something from Cream or Hendrix—but we were working steady at the Club Tyro in downtown San Bernardino.
One night, Bucky’s girlfriend took a couple of fake IDs and came in with his sister, Betsy. I brought them sloe gin fizzes on the break because it seemed like the sort of drink for a girl. She might have had two. Betsy got dizzy and I took her outside and held her in my arms. She’d never had a cocktail before in her life. She’d never used drugs. Standing there, holding her, I kind of fell in love with her. I was still living with Christie at her grandmother’s house, but I started hanging out with Betsy and ended it with Christie soon after. It wasn’t long before Betsy and I took a camping trip to Big Sur and decided to get married. I was twenty-one years old when we were married on November 3, 1968.
I got sick of the Top 40 scene with Johnny Fortune pretty quickly. I just sang the same stuff, and it got old fast. I started hanging out at this dump of a nightclub in nearby Riverside called the Gasser, where the few original rock bands there were in the area played, and I ended up meeting this guy named Dave Arney, who was a bit older. He was a bass player, and he wanted to start a real band—an original band. He already had a drummer, Larry Taylor, who also wanted to work on original material.
This fit with where I was. I didn’t want to play covers and neither did they. We started a band called Cotton. Betsy sometimes sang background vocals and played flute. Arney had a van and he had connections. He knew an agent who got us a gig in San Francisco, backing up oldie-but-goodie acts like the Coasters, the Drifters, the Shirelles, even Bo Diddley, who was very cool.
When Betsy and I got married, this was our honeymoon. We found hotel rooms above the Basin Street West on Broadway. Betsy and I had our own little room and the other guys shared a room. The bathroom was down the hall. I wasn’t a junkie, but I decided I was done with my drug days and tried to clean up. I didn’t even want to smoke dope anymore because Betsy didn’t dig it. I’d get stoned and get bummed out, so I did my best to cut it out altogether.
This wasn’t easy, considering there was always a lot of weed around. Pounds of it. Larry Taylor, the drummer, had never taken acid before we got to San Francisco, but sure enough not long after we got there he took acid and went wandering out in the street. He finds two cops walking the beat on Broadway and says, “You guys want to get high?” They say, “Sure, we’d like to get stoned.” He brings the two cops, four o’clock in the morning, back to our house—thank God Betsy and I had our own room. They fucking arrested the fuck out of Larry and Dave.
So that band, obviously, was over. I had nowhere to go. I had no money. I was married. I went back and stayed with Mom for about five days. My stepdad, Mike, crucified me. Every morning he dragged me out of bed and told me to find a job. The last straw was when Mike butchered a hog in the front yard and brought the head in to show everybody. Betsy freaked out. She ran off and wouldn’t come home for hours. I couldn’t take it anymore. Betsy’s dad had a trucking company with three dump trucks in Rochester, New York. He didn’t collect garbage, but he hired his trucks out to the city. Betsy’s brother, my pal and new brother-in-law, Bucky, was driving one.
“Betsy, call your dad,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here—I’ll do anything.”
Bucky’s truck-driving was a pretty new job for him. A while back, Betsy and Bucky’s dad had moved back east, leaving her and Bucky to take care of the
ir house in Fontana. Unfortunately, Bucky became a heroin addict, and after Betsy and I got married and split for San Francisco, Bucky sold everything. They had a ’59 Corvette. He sold it. He stayed in that house with no water or electricity. He started breaking into houses, robbing people. He was really desperate. His dad got wind of everything, came out from New York, beat the shit out of Bucky, threw him in the back of a car, and drove back to Rochester. Bucky kicked in the backseat of the car on the way to New York but that didn’t stop his father, and by the time Betsy and I were ready to leave California, Bucky was already back there driving one of his old man’s trucks.
I didn’t have any money, and around then, my Volkswagen blew up. Betsy’s dad really didn’t like me, but he loved his daughter, and he gave us a pair of tickets for a Greyhound bus that stopped in every fucking town between California and New York. It took us three and a half days to get to Rochester. I had an amplifier and a guitar, and we had a trunk with all of our stuff. We’d change buses a lot of places. You’d get to Chicago and have to get on a different bus and I’d lug everything. Betsy couldn’t carry anything. She was pregnant and wasn’t feeling well the whole time. We didn’t have any money. We didn’t eat on the bus. Betsy’s dad picked us up at the station. He didn’t even look at me.
I started driving trucks for him. Every day of the week, four o’clock in the morning, we picked up junk and hauled it to the dump. Each truck needed three guys. We’d pick up casual laborers, black guys waiting on a street corner, to hang on the truck, jump off, and pick up the stuff. I was one of those, only I came automatically with Bucky’s truck. I made $10 a day.
I was looking to make money any way I could. I was in a band called Salt and Pepper with this guy named Herb Gross. When Herb originally asked me to be in his band, I told him I needed money, so he got me another job, at H. H. Sullivan Printing Company. I got off work with the dump truck at eight o’clock in the morning, ate breakfast, and then went to work at H. H. Sullivan until five o’clock in the afternoon. If there was any overtime to work, I’d do that, too. At the same time, I rehearsed with Salt and Pepper every night. We never played a gig, but we rehearsed the whole time I was there. In the middle of all this, I got drafted, and because Betsy was pregnant, I sent in her medical report. They didn’t draft guys who had children. That was the summer of Woodstock. It was happening just across the state and I wanted to go, but Betsy was too pregnant.
I worked all that summer. I saved every penny and didn’t spend one nickel. We ate for free at the house. I didn’t buy a record. I didn’t buy a guitar string. I didn’t buy a candy bar. I always told Betsy’s family I wanted to go back to California and I wasn’t messing around. Betsy’s dad built this van for us to drive back to California in. He put a brand-new engine and transmission in this old, beat-up van, and some nice, new tires. We worked on it together—him, Bucky, and me. I had two jobs, was in a band, and I was working on the car on weekends. The first time I started that car up, I was ready to go. Bucky threw our shit in the back and, at the last minute, jumped in with Betsy and me. He didn’t even say good-bye to his parents. His dad wanted to kill him. It was four o’clock in the October afternoon, the first day of snow that year in Rochester. I had my money. The second that engine turned over, we fucking split.
Because the van only had two seats in the front, we put a little cot in the back for Betsy, so she could lie down, nothing more than a patio lounge chair that we wired to the side so it wouldn’t slide around. Bucky and I took turns driving, and we went straight through in fifty-six hours. Ran out of gas once and broke down once, but Bucky was a good mechanic and he fixed some wire on the engine. We got it going again. We ran out of gas somewhere in the middle of nowhere. He hitchhiked, got some gas, came back, and we kept going. We did not stop.
When I came back to Fontana, I had saved about sixteen hundred bucks. My sister Bobbi’s husband, James, had rebuilt my Volkswagen for me, and Betsy and I rented a nice little house on Anastasia Street. I had enough money to last a few months, but I still didn’t have a job, so I went on welfare. I couldn’t afford to have the baby; food stamps and welfare saved my ass. Now I didn’t need to have a second job. I could live and play music. That was when I started a new band called Big Bang. It was with Bro, the drummer from Mobile Home Blues Band, David Lauser. The year before, I’d seen the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart at the Fillmore West in San Francisco and more than ever I knew what I wanted to do: play guitar like Beck and sing like Rod. There was an old garage in the back of the house on Anastasia Street where we rehearsed. We ran through a bunch of bass players and other musicians and went through a number of names—Manhole, Skinny, even, for a brief minute, Chickenfoot.
Aaron was born February 24, 1970. When she finally had the baby, Betsy went crazy almost immediately. She had a nervous breakdown and experienced panic attacks that made her unable to breathe. She was really in trouble, and she ended up in Ward B in San Bernardino County Hospital. She had to see a psychiatrist.
While Betsy was struggling, my sister Bobbi took care of little Aaron, and somehow I barely noticed what was going on around me. My wife’s having a nervous breakdown. She’s twenty-one years old, just had a baby, and somehow I still had a one-track mind. Nothing else—not my wife and not my new son—mattered to me as much as playing music. I was playing music with Big Bang every day and trying to gig at night. We had a gig here, a gig there. We played an all-black club in Riverside called the Hat Factory, six sets a night starting a ten o’clock, ending around six in the morning. We won a Battle of the Bands playing “Manic Depression.” Got a trophy and a teardrop Vox electric guitar that we traded in for some public-address gear. We finally settled on a bass player, a boyish-looking college student named Jeff Nicholson.
Finally, Betsy’s psychiatrist wanted to see me or we faced getting thrown off welfare. He needed to find out what was going on. I told the guy I was going to be a big rock star. He called me Peter Pan. “You need to wake up, son, and go out and get a job,” he told me. “You’ve got a wife and a child.” He really laid into me. That just pissed me off. I was ready to take him outside. I was a firm believer in myself. I was going to make it. But I might have looked like a total asshole, with my long hair, bad attitude, no job, on welfare, a baby, my wife in a hospital. When Betsy came out, my sister Bobbi nursed her back to health and helped her out a lot. I didn’t change one bit.
Luckily, though, a steady job was not that far off. I was driving in my van with my equipment in the back, going to rehearsal in San Bernardino in somebody’s garage, when I saw a guy boarding up the windows on a club out by Highland Park called the King of Hearts. It used to be a real nightclub, for the martini crowd. I said, “Hey, are you open?”
“Nah, we’re shutting down,” he said.
“I’ve got a band,” I said. He was kind of listening to me. “Can we play here? We’ll play for free.”
The couple who owned the place had no money. They were only barely keeping it open. We started playing and the first night two people came in. Next weekend, we had twenty people. Pretty soon, we were drawing a crowd, a hundred people in there, jam-packed. They changed the name of the place to The Nightclub. We started charging twenty-five cents at the door. We kept the money and then he started paying us. We added an incredible guitarist named Bob Anglin and a keyboard player, Al Shane, and we changed our name, one last time, to the Justice Brothers. We worked four or five nights a week, pulling down a mighty $25 per man every night. That was all cash, so I was still getting welfare. I was living on Easy Street.
I WAS LYING in bed one night at the Anastasia Street place in Fontana, asleep, dreaming. I saw a ship and two creatures inside of this ship. I couldn’t see their faces. I just knew that there were two intelligent creatures, sitting up in a craft in the Lytle Creek forest area about twelve miles away in the foothills above Fontana. And they were connected to me, tapped into my mind through some kind of mysterious wireless connection. I was kind of waking up. They said, in
their communication to each other, no words spoken, “Oh. He’s waking up. We’ve got to go.” They fired off a numerical code, but it was not of our numerical system. There was a split second where I was still seeing everything, and then it was over, like someone pulled the cord or whatever.
I opened my eyes real quick. My whole room was white. I couldn’t see anything. No fixtures, no nothing. It was a timeless white. Infinity. I couldn’t move. My eyes were open, but I was paralyzed in my bed. Betsy was lying next to me. All of a sudden, pow, the connection instantly broke.
I jolted. The room went back to black. Everything returned to normal. It was four o’clock in the morning. I was shaking. My heart was pounding. I was scared out of my brain, beyond anything I ever experienced before. What was that? I didn’t even tell Betsy. That set me off on the weirdest quest. I didn’t even know the word “UFO.” I didn’t know my astrological sign. I didn’t know anything about astronomy or numerology or anything. But I dug into it.
I started looking up in the night sky, sifting through my dreams more often, looking for patterns, breaking things down, and reading books. In the back of the yard was an old, abandoned chicken coop. It wasn’t even on the property, but next to the driveway, a dilapidated shed with a roof ready to collapse. One day I decided to check it out and see what was inside. The door came off in my hands. Inside there was nothing, except for a dirty, fucked-up trunk. I opened it and the only thing in the trunk was a book on numerology. I’ve always been a bit of a mathematician. I started reading and it tripped me out that if you add numbers up, you always come down to one number. You can take, say, 137. 7 + 3 is 10, plus 1, that’s 11 and that’s 2. Or you can stop on the master numbers: 11, 22, 33, 44. Numerology is like astrology. It’s just mathematical equations. I got that by thumbing through the book.