by Sammy Hagar
With my $5,000, I bought a Ferrari 330GT 2+2 that belonged to land speed record holder Donald Campbell, my first Ferrari. Right-hand drive, four-seater, four headlights, bluebird blue. I bought it the first week we got there, and that pissed off Scott and those guys, too. It had four seats in it. Every day we drove to the studio in my right-hand-drive Ferrari. I was driving it all over England on days off. Betsy and Aaron had come with me to England, and I took them to Stonehenge one day. I drove to Scotland another. Betsy and I stayed out by Wembley, in a kind of apartment, so I was always driving to and from the studio. For six weeks, we went everywhere in this Ferrari. Then, right before I left, I shipped it home.
It broke down a couple times. One time, the radiator hose vibrated loose, hit the fan belt, and drilled a hole in that son of a bitch in the middle of London. I was underneath the thing in the thick of traffic, Betsy and Aaron sitting on the side of the road. The car got so hot, it vapor-locked. I fixed it with a makeshift hose and a borrowed screwdriver.
Capitol paid for everything, but I was digging a hole with them. They paid for making the records. Then they would put me out on tour opening for anybody and everybody and they had to pay for that, too, since I was only making $500 to $1,000 a night as an opening act, and it took about $1,200 a day to be on the road. So Capitol had to pay the difference, which was why, even though I was doing everything cheaply, I still wasn’t making any money.
AS WE WORKED on the second album, I wrote the song “Red.” Carter tightened up some of the lyrics. He was good with lyrics, so I would listen to him. He was more lyrical than me. “Crimson sin intensity” is one of Carter’s lines. I thought that was clever, kind of deep. I started wearing red, painted my guitars red. I just started going red, red, red.
I realized at some point that I really love the color red. I was still into numerology from that book that I found in that trunk behind my house; between that and the dream I’d had with my father right before I heard about his death, I’d started seeking out the mystical. Somewhere it came to me that the color red was my color. That was the magical color. Red was everything.
Red is fuzzy, if you look at it. You light red with a red light, it doesn’t have hard edges, like most colors. It turns into fuzz. It isn’t like a defined circle. It gets deep. It looks soft. Yet it’s aggressive as hell. It’s blood. And it’s energy. It means so many different things. Red is my color. It means everything for me. I dream in red.
I took it to numerology. R is a 9, E is a 5, D is a 4. Red’s a 9. I became the red/9 guy. That was it. They both mean the same thing. They have a power. Red has a rhythm. I put red as my color, nine as my goal. I want to raise my consciousness to the nine. I changed the name of my publishing company from Big Bang to the Nine Music, wrote the song “Red,” and started dressing in red. I thought this was going to represent what was going on inside of me. If I put on a pair of red pants, red shoes, red shirt, red guitar—that’s Sammy Hagar. I just felt it. I believed it. No one told me to do it. It was what I wanted to do.
Years later, David Geffen told me he thought I should lose that red thing.
I got along really well with Geffen. He was a strange creature, that’s for sure, but he is also as smart as they come. But, by the time I got to those guys, they didn’t quite understand where I was coming from. I was deep into it by then.
Right before the January 1977 release of the Red album (official title: Sammy Hagar), I got offered the Kiss tour, very big deal, at the last minute. I was added to the bill that February at Madison Square Garden in New York so late I wasn’t even advertised on the show. People started booing before I walked out. I had never played New York except with Montrose. They didn’t even know me. I looked out and the whole place was dressed like Kiss. They’ve all got their makeup on. They were booing and flipping me off.
“Hey, what the fuck do you people think you’re doing booing me?” I said. “You haven’t even heard the music yet. You don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
All dressed in red, I played the first song, “Red,” entirely unknown to the crowd. I played “Bad Motor Scooter”—pulled some Montrose out of my ass. I could hear the crowd between songs: “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” Then I went into “Catch the Wind,” the Donovan song that was the single off Red, and in the middle of it, they drowned me out with boos and started throwing shit onstage. I stopped.
“I’m so happy that they flew in this special audience for me from Los Angeles,” I said, and the place went nuts. They charged out of their seats. They wanted to kill me.
“Fuck you,” I said and dropped my pants, pulled out my dick, and smashed my fucking ’61 Stratocaster to pieces onstage. What an idiot. Demolished this vintage guitar and walked offstage.
Standing in the wings, of all people, was Bill Graham, holding his face, going, “Oh, my God. Sammy.” He followed me into the dressing room. “What is wrong with you? Don’t ever do that! You could have won over those people.”
Bill had been riding in a limo on his way to the airport when he’d heard on the radio that Sammy Hagar was opening that night for Kiss at Madison Square Garden. I often wondered if Graham was the Bill that the psychic Miss Kellerman asked me about. Graham, the promoter behind all those historic sixties concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium and the boss of the San Francisco music scene, had taken a personal interest in my case. He was working me up the bills at Winterland, his home base of operations through the seventies, and was one of the first concert producers to act like I might have a shot.
When Graham heard on the radio about my show with Kiss, he turned around and came straight to the concert—just in time to walk in and see me pulling down my pants.
As I was standing there with Bill, Paul Stanley from Kiss came in. “What happened?” he said. “That was terrible. I can’t believe it.”
I told everybody to shove the Kiss tour up their ass, and never did another date with the band. It was the worst experience I ever had onstage and it ruined me in New York. They didn’t even know who I was. They hated me before they heard me.
I was just beginning to figure out who I was. Shortly after the Red album was released, I did a $1-admission concert called the Rising Star in Seattle, a radio station promotion run by some disc jockeys in the Northwest. It worked well for me. I sold out and the Northwest became one of my first big areas.
The reviewer covering the Rising Star concert in the paper called me “The Red Rocker, Sammy Hagar.” Some kid came up to me with the newspaper, and he asked me to sign it. “Will you sign it ‘The Red Rocker’?” he said. I was happy just to sign an autograph. A few days later, I was walking down the street in Texas and somebody yelled out, “Hey, it’s The Red Rocker.” And it hit me—hey, that’s me.
6
I CAN’T DRIVE FIFTY-FIVE
I found a home in Mill Valley. I had been renting this place, but when the lady who owned the house decided to sell, I knew I had to buy it. My heart and soul were already in it. Leffler arranged for Capitol to give me an early advance on my next album after Red, so that I could put the down payment on this architectural wonder of a house. It was on top of Mount tam in Mill Valley, called tamalpais Pavilion, and I could barely afford the house, but I knew I wanted to live there. A Frank Lloyd Wright protégé named Paffard Keatinge-Clay, a British-born architect, built the place for himself, got divorced, and lost it. He built this house out of cement and glass, and steel-reinforced concrete—the first prestressed concrete house in architectural history. He built another one just like it in Switzerland, and he built a bank in Pasadena that’s exactly double the size. And that was it.
Glass all the way around, eight concrete columns hold everything up. the roof is sitting on top of it. It’s not bolted down whatsoever. I scraped up the $60,000 down payment from Capitol and the owner carried me for the other hundred grand. I didn’t know how I was going to make the payments, but I managed. I still live there today.
When it was being built, a filmmaker na
med John Korty lived down the street and watched the endless parade of cement trucks driving past his door. He wrote a script about a guy whose house burned down. An earthquake destroyed his next house, and then another one the termites ate and he was a termite inspector. He freaked out and built this cement house that was bulletproof. That’s the story of Crazy Quilt, a kind of cult classic among early American independent films. That’s my house in the movie.
The Red album had a little success. It sold about 100,000 albums. After the tour, Carter and I went straight back to England to make Musical Chairs. That album had a sort of Top 40 hit, “You Make Me Crazy,” that was me trying to write like Van Morrison.
When it was time to hit the road in support of Musical Chairs, I landed the Boston tour. The group was the big new rock band of 1977. First, they went out opening for Black Sabbath, but quickly graduated to headliner. Boston hired me as the opening act for the whole tour. The first leg lasted nine months, with a break for Boston to go in and record their second album. While Tom Scholz and the rest of Boston did that, I went out and did a miniature headline tour and did pretty damn good. Small arenas, three- and four-thousand seaters in Texas and Southern California. Then I went back and did the second Boston tour for eleven months starting in fall 1978, opening every night, two and three nights in every venue in America.
There were only a few places where I could pull that off: San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Santa Monica, San Bernardino, and San Antonio, Texas. Those were the six markets where I could go make five grand. Leffler would put me in those markets while I was out touring, opening for other people, and do quick little headline shows to keep me alive.
On that first little headline tour, I did the craziest thing. I made a live album, All Night Long, and that became my next release in 1978. Oddly enough, the live album sold about 250,000 records.
I was starting to break. You could see it. My record was selling with no singles, no radio airplay, no nothing. Just twenty-one months of nonstop touring.
On my next album, Street Machine, I parted company with Carter and decided to produce it myself. For years, Carter had been giving me these dumb songs, always trying to get me a Top 40 hit, trying to get me to do covers like “Dock of the Bay.” When I’d finally bent over backward and done “Dock of the Bay,” covering Otis Redding, for God’s sakes, with guitarist Steve Cropper, who wrote the damn song, it didn’t even work. I’d brought the guys from Boston over to Wally Heider’s Studio in San Francisco after a May 1979 Day on the Green concert we played across the bridge in Oakland before fifty-five thousand fans, and they sang background vocals. That was supposed to be a shot at a Top 40 thing, but even KFRC in my hometown would not touch it. I was already headlining concerts in the Bay Area for promoter Bill Graham, but they wouldn’t play my records on the radio. I’d given Capitol “I’ve Done Everything for You” on my live album, a song that two years later was a Top 10 hit for Rick Springfield, but they hadn’t been able to get one radio station for me. To Top 40 radio, I was a heavy-metal guy.
By the time I went into the studio to record Street Machine, I was over trying to get a Top 40 hit. That record sold about 350,000 when it was released in September 1979. After years of opening concerts for everybody and their uncle, people started to think I could be a headliner. Louis Messina of Pace Concerts in Texas packaged me with Pat Travers, who was on the charts with the hit “Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights),” and the Scorpions, the German hard-rock band who were just starting out in this country. We sold out everywhere. It was unbelievable. We were doing ten, twelve thousand seats. It was a low ticket price and it was a package deal, but it was the first time I did a headline tour.
But Capitol Records still didn’t get me. I had just done a headline tour, selling out arenas, and they couldn’t get me past 350,000 records. My business had quadrupled, not just the box office but T-shirts, everything. I was becoming a genuine rock star onstage. In England, I was on the cover of Melody Maker and New Musical Express. They took a picture of me in shorts, high socks, tennis shoes, and a tank top with my Trans Am and my Explorer. I looked fucking mean. One headline said, “Van Halen, Look in Your Rearview Mirror.” We sold out fourteen theater shows in England before we even left this country.
My last album for Capitol, Danger Zone, released in June 1980, simply reinforced that Capitol did not know what to do with me. It sold another 350,000 copies, even though I was packing venues all over America. I sold out the Oakland Coliseum Stadium that Fourth of July. Originally, Tom Scholz, the genius guitarist behind Boston, was going to produce. He came out and did preproduction, but his record company decided he should be working on another Boston album, not somebody else’s record. They were going to sue him, so he left. The next day, I hired somebody I knew, named Geoff Workman, at the last minute, because we were already kind of in the studio, ready to go. Workman, an engineer who worked with Queen’s producer, had just finished recording an album with Journey and their new lead vocalist, Steve Perry, and I liked what I heard. Scholz was upset that I replaced him so quickly, but I told him I didn’t have money to burn. I needed to get going and get back on the road. That’s when I really broke wide-open. Touring in support of Danger Zone, I saw it was really starting to happen for me. I saw it with my own eyes. At every concert, people were singing my songs. They knew who I was. I could see it coming every night. From the time I began playing music, I’d put my nose to the grindstone, head down, rolled up my sleeves, and went forward. I’d never made it and I’d never had any money. When I came back, my accountant told me I had $300,000 in the bank. “What do you want to do?” she said.
I’d made an album a year for the five years at Capitol, while I was touring constantly. I would come off the road and go in the studio. If I wasn’t touring, I was making a record. The label paid tour support, but because my records weren’t selling that well and I was constantly on the road, I wasn’t earning out the expenses. I had done well in England and other European countries, but Capitol never paid me a single royalty. In fact, they told me I owed them $175,000. I had a really bad record deal. I was getting about twenty cents a record. I was spending more money on tour than I was earning. I decided to sue Capitol.
John Kalodner, the big-cheese A&R man at Geffen Records, wanted to sign me to the label David Geffen had just started. At that point, he had only signed John Lennon and Donna Summer. They offered me a million-dollar deal. I was getting fifty grand a record from Capitol and owed them money, but the money Geffen gave me paid for the lawsuit. One day, we walked into court at Marin Civic Center and the judge told Capitol, “I think you folks have made enough money off this young fella.” He let me out of the deal. I walked away a free man.
Geffen broke me on the charts. I finally had hit records that matched my box office on the road. Capitol never managed that. Capitol didn’t market me. They didn’t give a crap. It was especially sweet when I signed with Geffen and shoved it up Capitol’s ass with my first gold and my first platinum album. That was the beginning of a sixteen-year streak of million-seller albums.
Kalodner was the greatest A&R guy. He got Jimmy Peterik of Survivor to cowrite a song with me, “Heavy Metal,” and sold it to the movie even before my album came out. Jonathan Cain of Journey and I cowrote a song, too. Kalodner tried to put me together with different writers, but I didn’t like writing with other people. I was not that confident to be sitting around a guy I didn’t really know and show him my ideas. I would start tightening up. I didn’t feel like I could express myself well enough. Besides, I take everything personally. But I wrote twenty-eight songs for the album. Kalodner suggested Keith Olsen as producer and I liked that idea. Olsen produced Fleetwood Mac and Pat Benatar. We made a great record, Standing Hampton, no question about it, with an instant Top 40 hit, “I’ll Fall in Love Again,” when it was released in January 1982. Went out on tour, headlining arenas, double nights in a lot of places, and I became rich and famous right then and there.
After Geffen signed me, e
verything changed. The turn of fate that happened in my life was unbelievable. I had plenty of money from my record deal with Geffen, and Kalodner didn’t want me to even think about going on the road. For the first time in my adult life, I was home for almost a year. Since I started in the business, I’d never been home. Betsy was as happy as a lark. I built a swimming pool for my house. I grabbed my old pal David Lauser, who was with me in the Justice Brothers, and put a band together. I had money. I had a band. I had a crew.
For years, I’d been working my ass off. Family life was something that just sort of happened to me. I’d barely noticed. I got married and had a baby while I was struggling with the band. When my son was a child, I went out on the road. I couldn’t always afford it, but even after I could afford it, taking Betsy and a small child was never easy. When Aaron was older, we put him in a boarding school, North Country School in Lake Placid, New York, and Betsy started going on tour with me. But she couldn’t stand touring. She hated flying. She didn’t like hotel rooms and living out of suitcases. My marriage was always a struggle. If she wasn’t on the road, every night calling home meant arguments. I was messing around a lot, as much as I could. I still wasn’t doing drugs or falling down drunk, but I started living the life a little bit. I tried not to get involved in anything serious. That way I could at least convince myself that I wasn’t really doing any damage.
Almost across the street from Aaron’s school, on the highway, there was this log cabin that was for sale and wasn’t expensive. It was a log-cabin kit with a big loft, five acres in the back. I bought it and we tried to spend as much time as possible there, but I was always on tour. We’d go back there for Thanksgiving. That was the law. They didn’t allow students to go home for Thanksgiving, because they had this big-deal Thanksgiving feast that the kids prepared. We went back there for Thanksgiving. That was about it.