Red

by Sammy Hagar

  We were going on tour, so we started interviewing managers. We met with the guys who handled Loggins & Messina. When we met Shep Gordon, who managed Alice Cooper, he was wearing a sarong and sandals and a ratty old T-shirt. At the time, Alice Cooper was a really big star, but, as it turned out, hadn’t made a lot of money. Shep explained all this to us. They spent their money making Alice a big star. All the promotion, all the hype, all the marketing.

  “Do you guys want to be rich or famous?” he said. “You’ve kind of got to sacrifice. If you want to be famous like Alice Cooper, you’ve got to spend a lot of your money on things—big production, big publicists, the big image thing. On the other hand, take a big band like the Doobie Brothers—they’re so much richer than Alice Cooper, it’s ridiculous.”

  I’d been in Ted’s office and seen an $800,000 royalty check for the Doobie Brothers, who had “Listen to the Music” at that time, which put me on the fucking moon. Ronnie didn’t like Shep. He was too loose and weird for Ronnie, plus he had too many of his own ideas.

  Ronnie wanted Dee Anthony, because he handled the J. Geils Band, and Ronnie had toured with them back in the Edgar Winter days. So Dee Anthony became our manager. That was big-time, because he had J. Geils; Humble Pie; Spooky Tooth; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Joe Cocker. He had the roster. So we just went out to tour and basically never came home.

  Every night we were opening for either Humble Pie, J. Geils, or Peter Frampton—all Dee Anthony acts—and then Black Oak Arkansas and Foghat. We’d get in a station wagon and drive ourselves. We didn’t have a tour manager, so Ronnie had put us on $150 a week salary when we started to tour, $10 per diem on the road. He was the one to check us into hotels, and he was a great band leader, at the start.

  A lot of the time, we opened for Humble Pie. We didn’t go over that great, but we were working or traveling seven nights a week. Sometimes we’d even do a club the same night. We’d open for Humble Pie at the arena, then run over and do an eleven o’clock show at the club to make a little extra money. We had two roadies. They drove the truck with the equipment, and when they got to the place, they’d set it up. Then, during the show, one guy was our lighting guy and the other guy was our stage manager.

  We played Detroit, like, every month. We opened for everybody and their dog. About the twelfth time we were playing Detroit, we were opening for Aerosmith at Cobo Hall. They were big there, but nowhere else. It was right after their first album. We got a huge encore. Montrose was really starting to get big in Detroit, and we came back to do “Helter Skelter,” the Beatles song. It was one of two or three encores we used on our first tour. We would go out and play the first Montrose album, come back and play a cover. “Helter Skelter” was one of them. We came offstage, go back to the dressing room, can’t wait for these guys we’ve never heard before go on. Denny and I ran out to the side of the stage. They went out and opened with “Helter Skelter.” They didn’t know we’d done it.

  Opening for all these different bands was a crash course in touring. Humble Pie spent every penny they made on tour. They’d fly Lear jets. Steve Marriott, their lead singer, would come off tour with nothing. They were selling out arenas everywhere. But they lived so high, they were always broke. Steve was such a fuckup. I loved the guy. He and Peter Wolf from J. Geils were guys that I watched every night when I opened for them. They taught me how to be a front man. I remember one time in Chattanooga, Tennessee. We were sitting in the hotel room of tour accountant Jerry Berg, picking up our $10 per diems on Monday morning, first in line for the weekly payout. Jerry was filling out the paper, sign here, when Steve came busting into his room, fucked up in the middle of the day. He’d been up all night doing blow and drinking.

  “How much fucking money we got, mate?” he said.

  Jerry started to close his briefcase and Steve punched him in the mouth, grabbed the briefcase, and dashed out the door. Carmassi and I just sat there, stunned that we didn’t get our per diems. Jerry was bleeding. Steve was gone. He had a limo parked out front.

  Berg got on the phone with Dee Anthony, who wanted to know how much money was taken. When Berg told him forty thousand dollars and change, Anthony went nuts, chewing him out. As far as he was concerned, it was all Berg’s fault. Marriott didn’t show up for the concert that night. We had to cancel and now we were stuck in Tennessee. The next day, pulling into the Holiday Inn parking lot, here comes fucking Dee Anthony, rolling in like the president, practically with little flags on the car. He gets out, grabs Jerry by the neck, throws him against the wall, and gives him another pounding.

  They found Steve in jail. He was arrested with a bunch of drugs, hanging out with some black dudes. He was a soulful little white British boy who wanted to be black and sang like it. They got him out of jail and the tour continued.

  About a month later, Steve came up to me in a hotel lobby and said, “Hey, mate, let me borrow your cassette player.” I had a little bullshit cassette player and headphones and used to walk around with it. Everybody did.

  “Uh, no, not really, man,” I said. He invited me up to his room anyway.

  I went to his room. He’s got a suite. He’s got a framed picture sitting on his table, covered with a road map of cocaine. At least an ounce. Half of it gone, big chunks missing. He’s got a couple of chicks and a couple of other guys hanging out.

  “Put your tape recorder down,” he said. “Let’s fucking play some music.” He pulled out a blues cassette, John Lee Hooker, something like that. I did a couple of bumps. I’d done coke twice in my life. The first time, I didn’t even realize I’d done it. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t realize I was fucking numb, that my whole face was numb. The shit was that good.

  “Hey, man, you got like a hundred-dollar bill or something?” he said.

  I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my pocket. He rolled it up, did his blow. I did mine. I see my five bucks sitting there and I’m thinking, “Before I leave, I got to get that.” That was the first time I’d ever hung with Steve. He was cool. He didn’t give a fuck. He was completely on the moon all the time. He’d stay up until he passed out. He’d do blow until he ran out. He’d spend all of his money, and when he was broke, he’d go earn some more. He’d just live like that, really a reckless guy, but cool. Before long, I had to go. I couldn’t take the crazy coke thing. I had to get my tape recorder and my five bucks and get the fuck out.

  I took the five bucks, unrolled it, and stuck it in my pocket. I went to grab the tape recorder and Steve piped up, “Oh, no, man, you’ve got to leave the tape recorder,” he said. I knew if I left my tape recorder, I’ll never see the thing again. But sure enough, I left it. I actually did get it back, like, a week or two later, from some equipment guy who cleaned out his room, but that was the last time I partied with Steve. It just didn’t feel good in there.

  One night we were off in Atlanta. Montrose used to play this club, Poor Richard’s, but this time they had a blues band with Willie Dixon, the guy that wrote all those Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf songs. Steve had a limo. I waited for him to get offstage. We jumped in his limo and he poured me a Courvoisier and handed me a quaalude. I didn’t drink and I didn’t do drugs, but off we go to the club. Steve wanted to jam. We walked in, sat down at a table. I started getting dizzy. I was fucked up. Steve went up and talked to the band. They said okay and he looked at me. “Come on, man,” he said.

  He jumped up onstage. Richard’s had a stage that was about two feet high, right about knee level. I went walking up. I walked right into the fucking stage and fell flat on my face and passed out. Next thing I know, I woke up in my hotel room, going, “What the fuck happened?”

  THESE WERE DAYS of growth and learning for me. I was searching in life. I was reading the Alan Watts book This Is It. I was reading books by the mystic mathematician Ouspensky—A New Model of the Universe, The Fourth Way, and Tertium Organum. I was reading Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. I was totally uneducated. I was in a rock-and-roll band, one of the lowest things on t
he planet, but I had these great big ideas. I wanted something and I couldn’t help thinking about it.

  One night I freaked out Ronnie. Very seldom did Ronnie and I share a room. This night we found ourselves in the same hotel room in Atlanta, Georgia, and Ronnie was anxious about the band. “This isn’t really working for us,” he said. “We’re not making it. We’re in the hole. We’re losing money. I don’t know what we’re going to do. What’s your idea? What do you want to do?”

  I laid the whole thing on him that I laid on Nicholson and the boys. I was glittered up in Montrose. I was shiny. I was satin, velvet, rhinestones, and platform boots. Betsy was still tightening me up with my clothes, making really nice things.

  “I think we need to really step it up,” I said. I told him we should get really shiny, put on a big show. “Let’s get some backing from Dee Anthony or Warner Bros., and throw this big production together. Like Alice Cooper—let’s put on a show. Then when we go out and open for these bands, we’ll blow them off the stage and we’ll make it.”

  I went on for probably an hour, and then I heard a click, the light went out. He didn’t even respond. I’d laid the whole thing on him, stuff that I’d been thinking about for months. And he turned out the light. The next day, everything had changed. It was over. He wouldn’t even include me in the conversations with the other band members.

  Ronnie wanted to be a rough-and-tough jeans and T-shirt guy, don’t talk to the audience, never smile. He had a lot of anger inside of him. He could have been in Metallica or something like that today. He shut me out. I started feeling real insecure. At sound check, he would play with Denny and not be concerned about what I wanted to do. He was hurting my feelings.

  The first Montrose record never made the charts. It made Bubbling Under one week, but it never graduated to the actual Billboard album charts. By the time the tour was over, we had sold eighty thousand records. I went into Dee Anthony’s office in New York and said, “Hey, Dee, Ted Templeman told me we’ve sold eighty thousand records.” He picked up the phone and calls up the booking agency—I’m sitting there, watching him do this—and he said, “Frank, these guys sold eighty thousand records. Let’s start asking for seven-fifty, maybe a thousand dollars.”

  It just sold slowly, but it sold. We didn’t have a big Top 40 hit when we came out, but FM was picking up “Space Station” and “Rock Candy.” It’s still never been on the charts, but the first Montrose album has sold more than 4 million records over the years. “Rock Candy” is like a standard for bands like Def Leppard or the Cult. Over the years, anybody who wants to jam with me wants to jam “Rock Candy”—Chad Smith, Joe Satriani, Matt Sorum, Slash. Lemmy from Motörhead came up to me at a show in England, and what did Lemmy say? “Fucking ‘Rock Candy,’ mate.”

  It is in the bible—it’s scripture.

  By the time we came off that tour, we had all sorts of money issues. About a month into the tour, all that per diem stuff became sporadic, and when we came out of the first tour, we were owed ten weeks’ back pay. Dee Anthony had helped us out a little bit, but not much. We ran out of money on the road. We got stranded in a Holiday Inn in Little Rock, Arkansas, and we couldn’t get out because Ronnie’s card was maxed. They called the cops and made us sit in the fucking hotel. We called Dee Anthony and he finally gave them a credit card over the phone.

  We were making $500 a night and it was costing about $600 a night to tour. We were dying. Without getting paid, my home phone was shut off. Betsy was back on Montfort Street in Mill Valley with Aaron, sitting there freaking out, not able to talk to me. It had made the latter part of the tour miserable.

  When we came off the road to do a second record, Denny and I went into this little studio I had in the basement and wrote a bunch of songs. I wrote “Call My Name,” “Someone Out There,” and a handful of songs that ended up on my first solo album, Nine on a Ten Scale. I wrote them for Montrose, but Ronnie didn’t want to even hear them. He wanted producer Templeman to find outside material. We cowrote three songs. “Paper Money” was some of my best lyrics yet, a little political commentary on consumer society. Even Templeman wondered what Ronnie was doing. He insisted on being named coproducer with Templeman and he was in the booth, saying he wanted things to sound this way and that way.

  After that conversation in Atlanta, he totally shut me out, held me back, and pushed me down. He did not want me taking over that band. I didn’t want to run his band, but I was looking to make it. I thought I had a great idea for that band. It might not have been the right idea. I can’t say Ronnie was totally wrong. But he got so insecure about it that he broke up a great writing relationship. He could have nurtured me. Those were my first songs.

  Looking back at my life, I can’t call anything a mistake. I’ve had nothing but great success, and really in a nice chronological pacing that brought me to where I am today. If I’d experienced huge success in Montrose, I wouldn’t be here today, doing this. It’s all been little steps that have kept opening my mind. I would have stopped growing a long time ago if it hadn’t been for Ronnie and guys like him. Knowing that makes it hard to be pissed at him now. But, at the time, I was going, “That motherfucker.”

  While all this was going on with Montrose, my marriage was really on the rocks. My wife, Betsy, was losing it. In spite of her breakdown after Aaron’s birth, I didn’t realize just how serious her psychological problems were. She was incredibly needy and I liked the way that made me feel. The first time I’d smoked dope around her, she couldn’t handle it, but I’d held her and felt very compassionate, like I could help this person. That made me feel very manly. But then, when I was on the road, Betsy would not let me get off the phone until she fell asleep. I’d have to sit there for hours after a show. She’d say things like “I took Aaron over to Lori’s house. I had to take Aaron over there because I’m depressed and I’m freaking out and I’m afraid.” I thought she might kill herself.

  Lori was Denny Carmassi’s wife. They didn’t have kids, but Lori was a real solid lady, very strong. I dealt with this every night. I would be on the phone. I would spend every penny I had on hotel phone bills. I cared about her. I was concerned about my kid. But I was focused elsewhere. I was determined that I was going to stay in that band. I was going to make it happen. That was very tough for me. She made life hard for me.

  I sent Betsy down to stay with my sister Bobbi, who’d helped her after Aaron was born. My sister practically raised Aaron, because Betsy was always depressed and crying. She would get to the point where she couldn’t get out of bed. When I came home, she’d be happy, but soon she would be accusing me of fucking around, and start her “When are you going to get out of this business?” line of questioning. I told her when I have a hundred thousand dollars in the bank, I’ll quit, enough money to start another business.

  When the band started doing a little better, I told her she could come out on the road with me. Ronnie had a firm rule against wives on tour, but I told him I didn’t have a choice. The first time we went to England, she borrowed money from her parents and flew to England on her own. Aaron stayed with my sister Bobbi. Betsy traveled by train and met up with me in hotels and didn’t even go to the gigs. She busted her ass to be with me. She was insanely jealous. A girl would look at me and she’d turn beet-red and attack her. For such a humble, meek little mouse, she could be very aggressive. If a good-looking woman walked in front of me with Betsy, I’d have to look down. She’d watch my eyes, everything I did. My childhood sweetheart, my virgin bride, who I never gave reason to worry. Not at first, anyway.

  It was rough, because Montrose basically went out for two and a half years and never came back. We would come home for a couple of days or a week, then head down to L.A. into the recording studio, and then back out on the road.

  That’s when that whole promiscuity thing with me started, and it just got worse and worse through my time with Montrose. I was trying to be good to Betsy. I’d feel guilty if I was with a chick. I wouldn’t sleep with th
em overnight. Mostly I would just let them give me a blow job. I didn’t think that was cheating. I thought that as long as I didn’t fuck them, that’s not having an affair. Then I decided as long as I don’t fuck them twice, it’s not an affair.

  I had all these little rules and I was trying to be a good guy. I was probably the best guy in the world for about two years. In those days, at every gig, outside of the hotel, hanging around backstage, in the dressing room, on the side of the stage, everywhere you went in our little world, there were groupies. They were dolled up and they were there for the band. Whatever you want. You want to get your dick sucked? You want to see them eat each other’s pussy? You want to fuck them? You want to take them on tour? That’s what they were there for. Some of them good-looking, some of them not, but always dressed up to the tits with a lot of makeup. They shined themselves up good.

  It was so available. I’m a sexual person, so coming off a stage, being up there, playing the rock star for thirty-five minutes, if I saw a woman that really tweaked me, I couldn’t resist. It was not an easy thing for me to deal with. I think it destroyed my marriage more than anything. I had to lie so much and I’m not a liar. I’d rather tell you the truth and deal with it. Otherwise you wind up with so many things to deal with that when you see that person coming, your stomach starts churning.

  The Warner Bros. Music Tour was the beginning of the end. Montrose, Bonnaroo, Little Feat, Graham Central Station, the Doobie Brothers, and Tower of Power—three bands each night, two nights in every city, all across Europe in February 1975. We went by train and we played everywhere. Denny Carmassi and I had never been out of the country.

  One of Don Pruitt’s buddies used to tell me, “Motherfuckers don’t wear clothes on the beach in Europe,” and I would always tell Denny this story. So when we finally arrived, we get off the plane and check into our Holiday Inn in Munich, and we go, “Let’s go down to the pool.” We wanted to see the naked chicks. The hotel had a spa, with an indoor/outdoor pool and a restaurant above. We went in the men’s locker room, dropped our drawers, grabbed our towels, wrapped them around us, and headed out for the pool. We went through the turnstile, unwrapped the towels, and went to jump in. We’re naked. Both of us. Some German guy started yelling, “Nein! Nein! Nein!” We were walking, buck naked, turned around and looked up. People having lunch in the restaurant were looking down at us. They ran us out of there hard. The guy chewed us out in German. We didn’t know what the fuck he was saying, but he was definitely going off on us. I felt like the dumbest asshole that ever lived. I went back to my room and wouldn’t leave.