by Sammy Hagar
In Europe, Ronnie wouldn’t talk to me. Montrose headlined some shows. Other nights, we would open for the other bands, like the Doobie Brothers. We opened for Little Feat in Amsterdam and got booed off the stage by the third song. People started whistling in the middle of our songs. That really destroyed Ronnie. He decided it was over. I could see it in his head. He wanted to break up the band. I knew it. I heard him talking to Denny.
“Heavy metal’s done,” he said. “We’re in the wrong kind of band. We need to get out of this.”
Warner Bros. was paying us, like, $250 a week and all expenses. I was making more money than I’d ever made yet in Montrose. I got this great review in Belgium. It had a picture of me in the newspaper the next morning. It was in Dutch, but it was a positive review about me, what a great front man, a new star, and all that bullshit. That was it for Ronnie.
We went to Paris the next day. On the trip, I got food poisoning from some mussels I ate in Belgium and was violently sick, puking and shitting. We had sold out two nights at the Olympia Theater—Montrose was big in France—and it was the last tango in Paris, the final night of the Warner Bros. Music Tour. We pulled up outside the theater. An old pal from the Humble Pie road crew, Mick Brigden, was driving us. Ronnie was in the front seat. I was sitting in back with Denny and Alan Fitzgerald, our second bass player, because Ronnie had fired Church before the second album. Ronnie turned around to talk to me.
“After tonight, I’m quitting the band. What are you going to do?” he said.
I was sick, edgy, and ready to punch the guy in the face. “I’m going to start another fucking band. What the fuck do you think I’m going to do?”
He reached back and shook my hand. “Okay, good luck,” he said. He didn’t even look at me onstage. I was sick. I couldn’t sing. I was weak. It was a horrible ending.
The next day, on the plane on the way home, I talked to Denny about starting another band. A week later, Ronnie called him and the other guys and told them he was going to keep Montrose together and get a new singer. It was totally premeditated. He had it all figured out. Our record deal was up, and he had already told Ted Templeman that he wanted to renew the record contract and that he was getting a new singer. They were going to re-sign for a lot more money.
I got home from that tour with nothing in my pocket, no money in the bank. My wife was freaking out and I had nothing going on, nothing coming up. I didn’t think I could make my next month’s rent. But almost immediately, a publishing royalty check from the first Montrose album, for $5,100, showed up in the mail. I had no record deal. I had no way to make a living, except for playing music. I knew I was going to be okay, but I didn’t have it set in stone. So I went out and I bought a $5,000 Porsche.
5
THE RED ROCKER
As soon as I got home from being fired, I walked into my sister’s house and went straight to the phone. Betsy had come over to Europe again and Bobbi had been taking care of Aaron. I went straight from the airport to her house. I picked up the phone and called Dee Anthony and told him Ronnie fired me. “Hold on,” he said. “Don’t be dropping no bomb on me. I’ve got to look into this. You guys owe me a lot of money.” I never heard from Dee again.
Jerry Berg, who was Dee Anthony’s tour manager, always liked me. When I told him I needed a manager, he quit his job to manage me. He was a first-class guy, smart, always well dressed. He handled the money and I thought he had his business down. He seemed like a good business guy, but he really didn’t know what he was doing managing a band. Dee Anthony had been doing everything and keeping Jerry in the dark.
I was on my last nickel. I went over and stood in line and started collecting unemployment again. I was considering going back on welfare, too, because I had a baby. My house rent in Mill Valley was more than $200 a month, which, in those days, was a lot of money—way more than I was able to make in a month. I was fucking down and out, brother. People in San Francisco thought I was a big star. They figured these guys headlined Winterland. I would have thought we’d made it, too. But I didn’t have any money.
I took an old mattress that I picked up off the side of the road and put it up against the wall in my basement for soundproofing. I started writing. Went down there with a guitar and an amp and a little cassette recorder, and I just fucking recorded. I wrote and wrote and wrote. Bill Church was immediately on board, because he hated Ronnie for firing him from Montrose. When Denny couldn’t come over anymore, I started getting his little brother, Billy Carmassi. I had this slide player, Glenn Campbell, from a band called Juicy Lucy. He’d played around Riverside before moving to England, and was fresh off the Mad Dogs and Englishmen Tour with Joe Cocker and Leon Russell.
All I knew how to do in those days was what I’d done with Montrose. That was the start of my solo years. I just knew how to be Montrose without Ronnie. I was playing guitar and singing. I was really driven to write my own songs and go out and tour until I made it. I didn’t think about hits.
The first guy I called was Ted Templeman. The Warner Bros. staff producer, who made the two Montrose albums, was the only person I knew in the record business. He declined to sign me as a solo artist, but Ted did give me a couple of thousand dollars to demo out some songs. I went into Wally Heider’s Studio and cut “Silver Lights,” a couple of other songs that I’d written for Montrose, and a couple of the new songs. Jerry and I went down to KSAN, the San Francisco FM rock radio station, and thank God for radio stations like that in those days. They played my five-song demo—put it right on the air. I didn’t even have the songs copyrighted, but it didn’t matter anyway. John Carter was out there somewhere and heard it.
Carter, known universally by his last name only, was a San Francisco–based A&R man for Capitol Records, who had written “Incense and Peppermints” and “That Acapulco Gold” and a couple of other goofy songs, but I don’t think he had produced anything at that point. He called and said he wanted to sign me to Capitol Records. About the same time, he signed Bob Seger. That’s when Carter went through the roof at Capitol. He went on to do the Tina Turner comeback, Private Dancer, and then signed the Motels. Carter had some really interesting ideas. The fact that he signed me, and that I’ve had such a long career, shows his insight, because I never actually had any success on Capitol.
We cut the first album at the Record Plant in Sausalito. One day I saw Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones recording stuff for his Monkey Grip solo album. I’m fucking starstruck. I went up and introduced myself.
“I’m from Montrose,” I told him. “We did one of your songs, ‘Connection.’”
“Brilliant, mate,” he said and walked off.
The Plant was a crazy scene. I was coming in at ten o’clock at night and working until six or seven in the morning—the cheapest time I could get. There were so many drugs around there, it was unbelievable. One night I walked in and the guy at the front desk was doing nitrous oxide. The engineer that Carter hired was also doing nitrous while he mixed the album. He took one song called “All American” and, while I was gone, had everybody overdub. He doubled everything. He doubled the bass, doubled the drums. He put two twenty-four-tracks together. He played it for me the next day. It was out of sync and wobbled. As if the nitrous weren’t enough, these guys had been on a two-day coke/weed run. I threw it out.
One day I was heading out of the studio when I heard someone buzzing at the door. The receptionist on nitrous was nowhere to be found, so I buzzed the guy at the door in. It was Van Morrison.
“Fucking drug addicts,” he muttered as he walked past the reception area. I chased after him.
“Van, I’m Sammy Hagar,” I said. “I’m doing a record with John Carter”—he knew Carter—“do you have any songs?”
“Like what?” he said.
“Like ‘Into the Mystic,’” I said. It was my favorite Van song.
“Follow me,” he said.
He picked an acoustic guitar and we went into a little tiny room. He played me “Flamingoes Fly.
” Giving it up—not like going through the motions. Eyes closed, singing the fuck out of it. I’m goose-bumped. This guy’s my hero, my favorite songwriter at the time—him and John Lennon, they were the guys I wanted to write like.
He told me he would come back the next day and make a recording of the song for me. I was jacked out of my brain. When I told Carter, he went nuts.
When Van Morrison came back the next day, he was in a different mood. He went in, without a click track, sat down at a microphone, played acoustic guitar, and sang the song for a demo. This time, he couldn’t have cared less. He knocked it off and split. But Carter gets a bright idea. We have Jimmy Hodder from Steely Dan overdub drums, Bill Church overdub the bass (he’d played with Van before), and me singing, and put together this track like it’s a duet with me and Van Morrison.
We were getting ready to come out with that record and Van got wind of it. His attorneys took him off that record so fast. We had to go back in at the last minute and start from scratch on that song.
About two years later—Van’s still my hero, but I never talked to him again—I went to the Mill Valley movie theater. Betsy and I buy our tickets and go stand in line. Guess who’s in front of me? Van Morrison and his girlfriend. I didn’t want to say anything to him, because he was shining me on. He had his back to me so hard. Within thirty seconds, he grabbed this woman. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, and they were gone.
The Plant always had people like that coming and going. Sly Stone had a room at the Plant they called the Pit. We worked in the room for a while—that’s where the engineer did that coke and nitrous mix of “All American”—and we were told we had to move to another room because Sly was coming. One night, it was raining like a motherfucker, and I needed to get two guitars out of my car. Sly Stone pulled up in a Rolls-Royce while I’m getting my gear out of the car. He was wearing a big fur coat, floppy hat, and had an entourage around him. One of his guys goes up, hits the buzzer. As soon as the door opens, they hold it open. Sly goes in last. I run for the door. It’s pouring rain and I’m carrying two guitars. “Hey, hold the door,” I said.
Sly looked right at me and let the door slam shut. I was pissed. I was in a bad mood about something anyway. I went off. I started kicking the door, yelling and screaming, hitting the buzzer. Mr. Nitroushead at the front desk opened the door and I steamed past him. Sly was standing with his guys in the lobby. “You motherfucker,” I said. “You could have held that door open. It’s raining outside.”
“People hold doors open for me, motherfucker,” Sly said.
His big bodyguards swung around and pushed me against the wall and Sly walked off. I was all by myself. What a prick.
There was a girl who also worked behind the reception desk sometimes, who was always doing coke. “You want some?” she would say. She was there one night when I came staggering out of the studio after singing seven hours straight. My head was killing me. “I’ve got a singing headache,” I told her.
She came around from behind her desk, undid my pants, and started blowing me, right there, in the lobby, about two in the morning. She wanted to take me in the Jacuzzi, but I didn’t go for that. I wasn’t that promiscuous then, but when a chick unzips your pants and starts going down on you, it’s really hard to say no. That’s the kind of place this was.
When I got my record deal from Capitol, they gave me $50,000. Before then I’d been broke—flat down to nothing and getting unemployment. The next week, I got the check for fifty grand. When I told the unemployment people about it, they said, “What about the next week? Are you getting paid?” They gave me my checks. And I’ve got a Porsche parked out front.
Because I was using a Capitol Records in-house producer, all the recording costs went on their budget and I got to keep the whole fifty grand. I was living good. This was the most money I’d ever had. Of course, I had to pay band members. I had to pay roadies, if I wanted to use roadies. I had to rent trucks. But the studio time and the musicians’ studio pay was all covered by Capitol. They were running a tab, though I didn’t realize that.
Anyway, my first album, Nine on a Scale of Ten, got done and came out in May 1976. I went out on tour almost immediately with Joe Cocker, Ted Nugent, lots of others. I opened for everybody. They pulled the plug on that record at 27,000 copies. It went out of print. Not because it was dying. It didn’t do that great, but there was some kind of behind-the-scenes politics with Dee Anthony, who still thought I owed him money from Montrose and managed to wield considerable power in the industry, that killed it at the label.
As a result of this, I parted ways with Jerry Berg and signed for management with Ed Leffler, the man who would handle my career for the rest of his life.
I’d first met Leffler when I was auditioning for Capitol in Hollywood at the Starwood with my new band, which I was calling Sammy Wild and the Dust Cloud. A dust cloud is the beginning of a star. I was still on the Bowie kick, and I was going to be from another planet. I was going to be from Mars. I was appearing on a showcase gig that Jerry had helped put together with Back Street Crawler, a new band led by Paul Kossoff of British rockers Free, whose “All Right Now” was a favorite of mine. Leffler ended up at the showcase because he managed the red-hot British teen pop band the Sweet, and he’d come looking for a good opening act for his band when the Sweet hit the Santa Monica Civic the following week. He caught my show.
“There is no way I’m going to let that blond-haired energetic motherfucker open for my guys,” he said. He hired Back Street Crawler instead, only Kossoff died the next day of a drug-induced heart attack on a plane to New York and I got the gig anyway.
At the show, I’d done everything I could. I’d run out into the audience. I’d pulled every trick I knew. I really worked that show hard and we drew a huge encore—a band without even a record deal. Backstage I overheard Leffler reaming out the vocalist for the Sweet. He was bombed, probably on drugs, and Leffler laid into him. He was worried that the band, which was huge in England and had “Fox on the Run” on the charts in this country, was too poppy for America. When we talked later, I told him I already had a manager, but I wanted to go with Leffler. I still owed Jerry Berg the $10,000 he’d paid for the showcase date in Hollywood. He maxed out his credit card to pay for it. Leffler covered the $10,000 and took over my management from then on.
Instead of fucking around, we went straight to England, to Abbey Road, and recorded my next album, Red. When we were getting ready to head over, Carter found a guitar player called Scotty Quick, who had a bad cocaine habit, although I had no idea. I didn’t know anything about cocaine in those days, other than I’d done it a couple of times to little effect. At this time of my life, I was not into drugs at all. I didn’t drink. I didn’t do drugs. I didn’t even drink wine. Nothing. Scotty Quick was a good guitar player, but he couldn’t remember the songs. We’d rehearse them one day, everything was great. The next day, it was like a brand-new song. We were getting ready to go to England to record and he kept fucking up.
One night he came to me in my dream and I told him off, but he was vague, hard to reach, and I couldn’t communicate. Next day I found out that he’d OD’d shooting coke in a Union 76 gas-station bathroom. Real quickly, we lined up a new guitarist. My drummer Scott Mathews recommended some guy he knew, named John Lewark. I took Lewark, Mathews, bassist Bill Church, and Alan Fitzgerald from Montrose on keyboards and went for six weeks to make a record in England.
We were all on a shoestring. It wasn’t like I was some big star. I had the record deal, but there were all these guys that looked at me like, “I’m better than him, how come he has a record deal?” I was working my ass off. I got a record deal because I went to bed at night writing songs. I woke up in the morning writing songs. I spent every second of my waking hours trying to write songs. I really wanted to be a songwriter. Mathews and Lewark looked down at me; “I can play guitar better than him,” or “I can write songs better than that.” There were guys around me every now and then that
would come into my world, trying to make a little money, have a job, but at the same time didn’t respect me. Those guys never played with me again.
Carter had just signed Bob Seger. He sent me a demo of some song Seger wrote but didn’t like, called “Night Moves.” I listened to it, worked on it for a day or so, but didn’t feel it. I wanted to rock. Carter thought Seger’s song was a hit, but I gave it back to Carter and he made Seger do it. Carter was always trying to get me to do hits, and every time anything seemed like a hit to me, I hated it. He wanted me to do “Catch the Wind,” and I loved Donovan, so I did that, but I always wanted to be heavy metal. I wanted to rock hard. Carter was trying to get me a pop hit.
Before I went to England, I’d sold my Porsche for $5,000. I’d bought it for $5,000 and I’d sold it for $5,000. I’d heard that you could buy a Ferrari in England for about half what they would cost over here. In those days, you could go to Europe and buy European cars—Aston Martin, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, Jaguar—pay to ship them back and still double your money. I’d never even really seen a Ferrari up close. J. Geils took Ronnie and me for a ride around Boston one time in his, a 250 Lusso. That blew my mind—the way it sounded, the way it smelled, the whole thing about it. I had an infatuation. I was always a car guy.