Red

by Sammy Hagar

  Then I started getting deep into it. I’d add the numbers in my home address to see what it was as a one-digit number. I discovered that if you add 9 to anything, it disappears. 9 + 1 is 10. Back to 1. 9 + 7 is 16 or 7 again. Any numbers divisible by 9 always comes back to 9. Three 9s are 27 and 7 + 2 is 9. It will always come back to nine. Four times 9? 36. 3 + 6 = 9. Whenever you add a nine to anything else, it disappears. That intrigued the hell out of me. It drove me crazy. I went, okay, if you added 999 to 9,999, it’s 9 again. You can go on around the block with nines. It always adds up to 9. But if you add 9 to anything else, it disappears. I not only read the entire book, but many others on the subject. I became a numerological nut.

  In my family, you didn’t talk about psychics or astrology or stuff like that, but there was a lady named Miss Kellerman, who lived in a tract home in Yucaipa. She didn’t take reservations. You just pulled up in front of her house, from eight o’clock in the morning to whenever she felt like shutting the door. She had a screen door in front of the regular door, and if the regular door was shut, it meant she wasn’t seeing people. If that door was open, it meant she was doing business. You’d knock on the door and give her fifty cents. She’d take a look at you, and if she didn’t want to see you, she’d just shut the door.

  I tried to go see her probably ten times in my life, and there was always a line of cars down the block. But one afternoon after I’d discovered the numerology book, I pulled up there with my fifty cents, which was about all I had total. The door was shut. There were no cars. I drove all the way out there—I was going to go knock on the door. I knocked. I had a little bit of a beard, really long hair, stone hippie to the bone. She opened up. She barely cracked the door, put her head out. She was an Italian lady who spoke in broken English. “I’m not seeing anybody,” she said.

  “I drove all the way out here,” I told her.

  She took a real hard look and stared right through me. Then she opened the door. I started following her back to this little room, she started talking. “You need to shave your beard, but don’t cut your hair,” she said.

  For an old-time Italian woman like her to say don’t cut your hair in those days was amazing. All my mother wanted me to do was get my hair cut. “Don’t cut your hair,” Miss Kellerman said. “It looks very good under lights.”

  We went into her back room. She sat down in a rocking chair and put her hand under a velvet cloth that was on the table. She began fidgeting back and forth in the rocking chair with her eyes closed and just started laying it on me.

  “Don’t take drugs,” she said. “Who’s Bill?” she asked. “Who’s Bill?” I didn’t know.

  “Don’t be mean to your stepfather,” she said. “He loves you very much and he’s going to die soon.” She had it right, only backward—it was my father who died soon.

  “You have a brand-new little baby girl,” she said. “No, it’s a boy but everyone thinks he’s a girl.”

  That was Aaron. He was born with long, thick, and curly black hair. People always thought he was a girl.

  “He’s a beautiful little boy,” she continued. “And your wife, she has a real problem with her breathing. She needs to drink raw egg whites with honey and lemon. That will help her breathing.”

  Even though Betsy had left the psych ward, she continued to have panic attacks where she couldn’t breathe. We had to rush her to the hospital in the middle of the night, like an asthma kind of thing.

  “You used to smoke cigarettes,” she said. “Don’t start smoking cigarettes again. It’s bad for your voice.”

  Don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t take drugs. Don’t cut your hair. That was the one that got me, since my hair kept me from getting jobs, kept me from getting in places.

  “You’re going to move to Northern California,” she said. I’m what? I’m playing with the Justice Brothers in The Nightclub. I’ve got no money. I’m on welfare. I just got married and have a brand-new kid.

  “You’re going to move to San Francisco,” she said, “but you need to go to Santa Barbara first. There’s something there for you. But then you’re going to move to San Francisco and you’re going to make it. I see your name in lights all over the world. And you’re going to go to seven countries. You’re going to go to Italy, France, Germany…” She named off all these countries and I’d barely been outside Fontana.

  “Go to San Francisco,” she said. “That’s for you.”

  And I believed her.

  I had wanted to go back to San Francisco ever since Cotton broke up. I had seen the scene and it blew my mind. I went back to Fontana to put together a new band so I could move to San Francisco. That’s what I was trying to do in New York. I went all the way to New York, where I knew I had a job, just so I could make some money to get back to San Francisco. That was my goal the whole time. “Start a band,” I thought, “and if we can make it in San Francisco, we can make it anywhere.” Because it’s a hard-core community, I felt the pressure. It was all about music and wasn’t bullshit. It wasn’t L.A. I hated the L.A. scene. I wasn’t about to jump through that hoop. I was going to San Francisco, where people could be themselves. I wanted to have my own band that would be exactly who we were—like Moby Grape and all those bands we loved that came out of San Francisco.

  I went back to Fontana and told my band to pack. On the way, we drove through Santa Barbara. We stopped at a little college place outside town. They had food, but it was a hippie kind of place. “My band and I are on our way to San Francisco,” I told the guy running the place. “Can we play?”

  “I can’t pay you,” he said. We told him we would just pass the hat and he said okay. We set up and played around five o’clock in the afternoon, right when dinner started. A few people came in. They didn’t give us much.

  After that stopover in Santa Barbara, we continued on our way. We didn’t move to San Francisco full-time on that trip, but it was the first of many. We would drive up on our nights off and audition at clubs. We landed a job playing Monday and Tuesday at the Peppermint Tree on Broadway in San Francisco. We won the gig by playing “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Behind Blue Eyes” by the Who. The manager had never heard a club band do that before. We would load up our gear on Sunday nights after playing all weekend in San Bernardino and drive up. The eight-hour drive was never fun. The only way all of us could fit in the van with the equipment was if somebody lay across the top of the Hammond B-3 organ in the back. The Peppermint Tree was a slick place. The bands that played there had to be good. They wore uniforms. They were show bands. But Monday and Tuesday were the off nights. We would play for nobody. We played covers, but the Who and the Stones, not the commercial rock hits. But we also played our originals.

  Eventually, the San Bernardino scene at The Nightclub got out of hand. The Hell’s Angels started coming around and they tore the place apart. They would start kicking ass and the fucking National Guard would have to be called in. We’d go out and sit in the back. Finally the city just shut it all down. We were devastated. But when The Nightclub got knocked out, I said fuck it. We’re going to live on those two nights in San Francisco.

  When we got to San Francisco in fall 1970, at first, we all slept on the floor at the apartment of Don Pruitt, who I knew from my previous time in San Francisco when he was the manager of Basin Street West. We finally landed a job at a club called the Wharf Rat, not a hip joint, but the Justice Brothers was a pretty good band and it was a steady gig. That gig, along with welfare and food stamps, helped me make enough money to get Betsy and Aaron off Pruitt’s floor. The band continued to live with Pruitt at 1565 Oak Street, and Betsy and I rented our own little, one-room flat in the same building. Aaron slept on a mattress under the kitchen table, and Betsy and I stayed in the living room with a mattress on the floor.

  One night, I dreamed somebody was knocking at the door. I got up to answer it, wondering who could be knocking on my door in the middle of the night. I open the door and it’s my dad. Only he’s, like, twenty-two yea
rs old, young and vibrant. “Hey, son, great day for the Irish!” he says. He’s acting crazed, really happy, but drunk on his ass.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” I tell him. “My kid’s sleeping right here on the floor, right in this room. Don’t ever come here drunk in front of my family. You’re going to scare this guy. Now get the fuck out of here.” I slammed the door shut, went back to bed, and that was how the dream ended.

  Two minutes later, somebody’s knocking on my door again. I head to the door, thinking, “God damn it—I’m really going to chew his ass out this time,” and I opened the door. It’s Don Pruitt from next door. “Your sister is on the phone,” he said. I didn’t have a phone of my own. I went over and picked up the receiver. “Dad died,” my sister said.

  Dad died in the backseat of a police car. They picked him up in a park in San Bernardino across the street from The Nightclub. He had been living on the streets since we left him in that burned-out house. After the cops had picked him up, they’d arrested three more drunks on the way downtown and all the drunks started fighting in the backseat. One of the cops sprayed Mace over the idiots and when they arrived at the police station and got out of the back of the car, Dad just fell over and, for once, didn’t get back up. I often wonder what would have happened if, in my dream, I’d have invited him in instead of yelling at him.

  Once we all had enough money to afford apartments, we left Oak Street and moved into two flats in the same building in Noe Valley. The band had the upstairs and Betsy and I were downstairs. Those guys would be upstairs with Nicholson’s stereo set, staying up all night, while I was downstairs with Betsy and Aaron. Betsy had a broomstick she would bang on the ceiling. Bob Anglin, the genius guitarist, would fall asleep smoking cigarettes and leave his record player on repeat.

  Even before I ever heard his music, I saw a picture of David Bowie and I immediately knew. This was one cool-looking dude. This cat’s got it going on. When I heard the music, I also instantly became a big Mick Ronson fan. He had that killer guitar sound. I wanted to be Bowie and Ronson just like I wanted to be both Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart or Mick and Keith. I was up there singing James Brown songs dressed like Bowie. I used to put glitter on my chest, wear makeup, lipstick, eyeliner—the works. Betsy started making my clothes, and I wore satin pants with these big gay-ass boots. She was really good. I would spend all my extra money on material. We’d go to the fabric store and find the most far-out satins and silks. She made me velvet pants. I was getting really out there, and it all looked pretty gay. I’m the last guy on the planet who’d seem gay, but for some reason I really dug that. We played a couple of gay parties, but I was wondering what was up with that. I’m dressed like a woman. I’m wearing high heels and makeup and I’m wondering why gay guys are digging it?

  We were packing the Wharf Rat, every night, and making good money, $175 a week, real money, especially for a rock band doing cover tunes. I was writing originals. I started getting more outgoing onstage, becoming the Bowie. Jeff Nicholson hated me being the leader. They all wanted to be funk musicians, but I wanted to be more like the Stones. I was always into soul and blues, that’s how I came up. The only middle ground for the Justice Brothers was doing Tower of Power. But I got tired of learning other people’s songs. The last song we learned was “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” by the Stones. Nicholson sang it because I wouldn’t do it. I walked out of rehearsal and they started rehearsing without me.

  4

  MONTROSE

  Twelve o’clock in the afternoon, in a full-blown David Bowie outfit—high heels, makeup, glitter, nine yards—I drove over to Sausalito in my beat-up Chevy van with my Les Paul to meet Ronnie Montrose.

  I’d first seen the flashy guitarist only a week or so before, when I went to catch the Edgar Winter Band at Winterland in San Francisco in spring 1973 with the rest of the guys from the Justice Brothers, who were there to see Tower of Power, also on the bill. It was a rare night off from the Wharf Rat, and I was all glittered up. I wanted to see Edgar Winter, because he was glitter rock. That was all I needed to know. I didn’t know who Ronnie Montrose was, even though he’d already been recording with Van Morrison, but I’d seen him on TV and I dug his moves. He had this little thing where he crouched down with his Les Paul and he spun in a circle, leaning on one foot. He went around and around. He didn’t get tangled up in his cord. It was a pretty good move. I was impressed.

  The next day I’d started hammering the guys in the band, telling them that’s the kind of guitar player we should have. We already weren’t getting along that good, but everybody wanted to keep the steady job. I’d talked about it with John Blakeley, one of the few guys around town I knew from Riverside, who was in a band called Stoneground, but I didn’t even know Winter’s guitarist’s name.

  “That’s Ronnie Montrose,” Blakeley said. “He lives in Sausalito. That was his last show with Edgar Winter. He’s looking for a singer.”

  And so that was how I ended up knocking on Montrose’s door wearing a silver suit and boots. I brought four songs I had written that the Justice Brothers wouldn’t do. He plugged me into this little amp he had and I played him “Bad Motor Scooter,” “Make It Last,” “I Don’t Want It,” and “One Thing on My Mind.” He played me the riff to “Rock the Nation”—that’s all he really had. I showed him the lyrics to “Space Station Number 5” and he started playing that riff. We wrote the song together that day.

  I thought he was rich. From where I stood, he seemed like he was in the biggest band in the world. They’d sold out arenas and had got a number-one album. What did I know? I didn’t know the house was a rental. I saw his car outside, a ’63 Ford four-door. I thought he was driving a pretty beat-up car, but that didn’t faze me. All I knew was that he had just banked an $8,000 royalty check—a fortune, in my eyes.

  When Ronnie came to see me at the Wharf Rat, the Justice Brothers were pissed off, but they kissed his ass. He walked in all rock-starred-out in a crushed-velvet jacket, big rings on his fingers. After the set, we went outside and he said, “Let’s start a band.” I quit the Justice Brothers that night. One week later, Nicholson was wearing my exact outfit. He got Betsy to make him the clothes. He’s wearing the glitter, the makeup, my whole getup. He’s doing my act.

  Ronnie asked if I knew any drummers. A while back, I’d sung on a demo tape by this band, Thunderstick. They were very much like Free, totally Paul Rodgers, not very Northern California–sounding at all. They were very English glitter-rock, but they didn’t look it. They were all in jeans and T-shirts. I had the look. They wanted me bad. They didn’t have a record deal but they had a record-company guy who was interested but didn’t like their singer. I did some demos with them and I was thinking I might go with them, but nobody in the Justice Brothers wanted to lose that Wharf Rat gig, not even me. Then I saw Edgar Winter at Winterland. Denny Carmassi was the Thunderstick drummer. Denny got the gig, even though we tried out the great British rock drummer Aynsley Dunbar. Ronnie didn’t want any competition. Ronnie wanted control, so he wanted guys like me, who didn’t know anything. We sat down at Studio Instrument Rentals and auditioned a number of bassists, including Andy Fraser of Free, who turned out to be a complete junkie and never even showed up. We tried Ross Valory, before he joined Journey, and Pete Sears of Jefferson Starship. Ronnie knew Bill Church from the Van Morrison band and, before that, a little blip of a band, called Sawbuck, that played on some Fillmore bills. Edgar Winter’s drummer, Chuck Ruff, also belonged to Sawbuck. Church sat there the whole time, watching us try out all these guys. I kept telling Ronnie I liked Church.

  “Yeah, but the guy’s kind of an asshole,” he said.

  I thought he was great. Every time we’d take a break, Church and I would go outside. “Ronnie’s such an asshole,” he said. “He knows I can play. He knows I should be in this band.” Ronnie didn’t want to use Church, because they had fucked around on each other’s old ladies or something like that. Of course, we ended up with him. But Ronnie torture
d him for about a week, auditioning other guys.

  Ronnie knew Ted Templeman of Warner Bros. Records through Van Morrison. Ted came up and saw us. We rehearsed at Studio Instrument Rental maybe three or four times and we had the whole first album written. We wanted to be Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin.

  “Rock Candy” was the last song we wrote. We had nine songs, one called “Drugs” and another one called “We’re Flying,” which weren’t very good, and we threw those out. Templeman told us we needed one more good song. Denny just started playing that drum beat when Ted was in the room. Ronnie came up with the riff and I just started singing, “You’re rock candy, baby.” The song just came together. That was the only song that was a band song. All the rest of the songs, either Ronnie or I wrote.

  Ted signed us. We went straight into the studio with him and engineer Donn Landee. Everything happened so fast. We moved into the Sheraton Burbank, near the Warner Bros. lot, where all the acts stayed. We had no money. They gave us a $50,000 advance, but we spent $25,000 on equipment. We each took five grand. We kept five grand in the bank. We didn’t have a manager. Ronnie was totally in charge.

  I got my $5,000. I rented a house for $80 a month in Mill Valley, 37 Montford Street, and I bought a car. Not just any car, of course, but a Citroën Deux Chaveux, the most uncool car on the planet—a French car that looks like a sardine can. I thought it had class. I sold my VW to a guy for fifty bucks. The van was so bad that, when I sold it to somebody, it couldn’t make it out of the driveway. It was too steep. The guy had to back up in the dirt and get a running start, because it couldn’t make it. It was that powerless. The Citroën cost almost three grand. I rented the house and had, like, $1,200 in the bank. I was rich. We made a little session pay making the album. I now had a phone. I got my first credit card. I knew the album was going to come out and I had written those songs. One cool thing Ronnie did for me was that he had our lawyer set up my own publishing company, Big Bang Music, so that I could control my publishing rights.