by Sammy Hagar
SUCCESS REALLY MOTIVATED me. Ed Leffler was amazed. “You’re different than anyone I’ve ever met in this business,” he told me. “Fame and fortune inspire you. You get better. I’ve never known anyone in my entire life like that in the music industry. The more success you have, the better you get. You jump on that stage now. You’re so much better than you were when you were hungry.”
When I was hungry, I lacked confidence. I was afraid to let my heart and soul out. I was hiding. I was faking it. It seeped through. You could hear it in my voice. My actions were not true and honest, so they didn’t connect. I was bluffing, acting the part. It took fame and fortune for me to become myself. That gave me the confidence I needed to bring out what I really have to offer, whatever it is. I started to get more real.
I took what was left of that big money advance from Geffen and started buying property in Fontana. I didn’t think I would have that much longevity as a rock star, and I never wanted to be poor again. My mom instilled that in me—you’ve got to have something to fall back on. I started building apartment buildings in Fontana. I went to my brother-in-law, James, who was an electrical contractor, and had gotten a contractor’s license. My nephew also became an electrician, and one of their friends became the plumber. I made them all partners. We built nine apartment buildings. I bought the old houses we rented when I was growing up. That was my first entrepreneurial effort and we did really well.
Shortly after we’d started building the apartments, the fire department came to my brother-in-law and said he needed to put a fire hydrant in front of every apartment building. He told the fire department that his plumber could put fire sprinklers in the building that would be more effective for about the same price. The insurance companies went along, because sprinklers put out fires before fire departments could even get there, but the fire department needed some convincing. We staged a demonstration for them. We bought one of my old houses, sprinkled it, and then lit a fire in a trash can. We waited for the neighbors to call the fire department, which was parked, waiting, right down the street, and, by the time they got there, the sprinklers put everything out. The house was still totally cool. Fire sprinkling is amazing. It really saves lives. The city passed an ordinance and gave us some money. Before long, we had 180 employees and ran the second-largest fire sprinkler company in America, Fire Chief Inc.
The next thing I did was the travel agency. I started a travel agency because I was traveling so much for tours that I was paying my travel agent a small fortune. I decided to start my own, Steady State Travel in Mill Valley, hired the two ladies that used to work for the old travel agency, and gave them a piece of the action. It didn’t make a lot of money, but it also didn’t cost me anything when I went on tour.
Photographic Insert I
My dad, Bobby Hagar.
The Hagars before I was born, 1945.
Bob Hope and Bobby Hagar (holding me as a baby) in Palm Springs, 1948.
Baby Sam.
The Hagar kids (from left to right): Bobby Jr., my sister Bobbi with me as a baby, and Velma (with cat), 1947.
My fourth grade photo.
With my stepdad, Mike, at my mom’s place in Cucamonga.
My high school graduation photo.
The Fabulous Castilles in my Anastasia Street backyard in Fontana.
At the reception for my wedding to Betsy with my two nieces looking on. The reception was at my mother’s house.
Betsy and me with our first son, Aaron, in 1970.
The Justice Brothers in 1970.
The Hagar family (from left to right): me; my brother, Bobby Jr.; my mom; my sister Velma; and my sister Bobbi.
Montrose’s first publicity photo. (Photograph courtesy of Getty Images)
Montrose at Wembley Stadium, London, opening for the Who in 1974.
At the Record Plant in Sausalito where I recorded my first album.
Behind the wheel of my first Ferrari 330GT 2+2 outside Abbey Road Studios in London. Aaron is with his stuffed bear, Theodore.
The Red Rocker opening for Boston, 1977.
With my Trans Am in Mill Valley, 1979.
Onstage and working hard.
No singles, no radio airplay. All it took was twenty-one months of nonstop touring.
At the top of the Marin Headlands with my mountain bike.
Day on the Green concert, Oakland Coliseum, July 4, 1980.
Governors’ Camp, Kenya, 1983.
Egypt with Betsy and Aaron, 1983.
Hagar, Schon, Aaronson, and Shrieve (HSAS) at the Warfield Theater, 1983.
Full ’80s—VOA time, 1984.
Bringing Andrew out for the encore at the Cow Palace, San Francisco, which was toward the end of Van Halen’s 5150 Tour.
Aaron and Andrew in the back of the limo on the way to a Van Halen concert in Los Angeles, during a leg of the 5150 Tour.
A portrait by Annie Leibovitz, 1986.
With director Gil Bettman (left), at a video shoot for “Give to Live” on Mt. Baldy, 1987.
With Eddie on the OU812 Tour, 1988.
My first acoustic performance at the Bridge School Benefit, Mountain View, 1989.
I started Red Rocker Clothing, which was a disaster, because the rag trade is the craziest business in the world. I had this great idea to make these upscale flannel shorts. I bought the flannel from Ralph Lauren. He had this line of flannel shirts and stuff, and it was the baddest flannel. I lost probably $300,000, because I got a huge order I couldn’t fill from JC Penney’s. I was late. I ended up with $65,000 worth of these flannel shorts in my warehouse, because they wouldn’t take them. Some of them didn’t have buttons, I was trying to rush them out so fast. The next year, everybody had flannel shorts. Very tough business. You come up with an idea and the next year everybody flat rips you off and you have to come up with something fresh. I bowed out.
While I lost some money on the clothes, I ended up starting something else that made money: bike stores. It was Bucky who got me into the bikes. Bucky, my old pal who I used to help steal albums from the ABC Store and who turned me on to Fresh Cream, was living in an apartment on B Street in San Rafael with his wife, Joelle, and their son, Benny. He’d married her in Rochester, but she ran away with some other guy and they split up for a while. Bucky took her back after he moved to California, which is when they had their kid. Bucky was always around. I took him to England with me as my roadie and truck driver when we did Red. Ed Leffler loved him, but he was tough on the other guys. He was hard-core and always looking out for me. Plus he was into drugs and drinking and could be an asshole. We had to cool him out from time to time.
Eventually, Bucky took a job at this bike shop, the Corte Madera Cyclery, an old-time Schwinn dealership. This was right around the time that two guys named Steve Potts and Gary Fisher were inventing the mountain bike in Marin County. They took a fat-tire, cruiser bike and put gears on it from a ten-speed. They rode these bikes up and down Mount Tam. One day, Bucky took me in the back of Corte Madera Cyclery and made me a mountain bike. Right away, Bucky and I were riding our bikes everywhere. He biked to work every day, rain or shine. Between his biking and mine, I saw the mountain bike business coming and it really appealed to me. He told me I could buy the store for around $75,000, pretty cheap. All I had to do was buy the inventory, and it was a small store. I bought the store and he started making mountain bikes. We were the mountain bike kings. All these guys were bringing their cruisers to Bucky and he converted them to mountain bikes. At the store, Bucky couldn’t put mountain bikes together fast enough. We had to hire mechanics.
Seeing the success of that store, I had an idea to open an even bigger bike store, a superstore that would carry bike clothing and accessories. I built the Sausalito Cyclery. We were the number-one independent bike store in California, one of the top ten in the country. We were doing $4 million a year in sales out of that place, with a million dollars in inventory on the floor. I bought the top shit. You couldn’t even get into the store half the time. We were
blasting twenty to thirty high-end bikes a day out of there. When the first commercial models from Specialized came out, mountain bikes started taking off. We bought them. We started seeing the trend. People started buying these things. They were trading in their road bikes. Pretty soon we couldn’t even take trade-ins, because nobody wanted road bikes anymore.
We put mannequins in the store with the bike clothing and we got a review in a bike magazine saying we were the only bike store in America that displays clothing on mannequins. I made my own mountain bike—the Red Rocker. I landed the cover of Mountain Bike Magazine with this thing. I had two lights on it and I was the first bike builder to use black components. Before the Red Rocker, everything was chrome. You had the bike, whatever color. You had black tires, sometimes white walls. Everything else was chrome. I wanted everything red and black, no chrome. It took me a year and a half. Gary Fisher made my frames. There were different gear people in Japan. They made me enough parts for one hundred Red Rockers, two water bottles, two Maglites, and all-black components—rims, spokes, bolts. It was a really bad-ass machine. We sold out instantly, bang, gone. We had ten thousand back orders from around the country.
We went back to Japan, where our suppliers told us the most they would make was three hundred this year. Meanwhile, here comes Specialized with their red-and-black Rockhopper—Rockhopper? Red Rocker? Pure coincidence, I’m sure—and they stepped on me. They had components for fifty thousand bikes. I got out of the business, but I was pissed. I had been totally ready to take over the mountain bike world.
The Sausalito store was a gold mine, but Bucky wasn’t running the place. He couldn’t. He’d show up late and yell “fuck you” at someone and walk out. Everybody loved him, but you couldn’t put him in charge. Instead he worked the floor. After months of this, I finally had to sell Corte Madera, because Sausalito killed it. Everyone came to Sausalito, because it was built right on the bike path.
With all these different businesses going on outside of my music, I was making some money, and I began buying things. I bought a couple of other houses beyond the one in Marin County. I started getting into Ferraris. I started developing a taste for fine wines. One night, when I was in Montrose, I’d tasted a 1945 Latour and a 1927 Martinez port on the same night and I started to build a collection of fine wines. I made concert promoters provide me with certain vintage bottles backstage as part of my contractual requirements and take them home unopened. Bill Graham was hip to my chisel. He had all five bottles in my dressing room opened, so I couldn’t take them home, and, later, gave me a recorking machine as a gift. I just started living the life. Betsy was able to spend a lot of money, too. She was spending money to keep herself happy. She’d go shopping and refurnish the house. I’d come home and go, “What?” but, since I was doing okay financially, I didn’t really care.
Things still weren’t great between us though, and around then, I finally had an affair. I’d been screwing around on the road here and there for years, but this was different. This was a real affair, where I fell in love with another person. She was in the record business. I’d met her when I was recording my first album with Geffen in 1981. She represented a music publisher and maybe had a song for me. She was so independent. She lived by herself, owned her own house, drove a new car, worked hard at a good job—the opposite of Betsy. I fell in love with her and I began a long-running affair. I’d fly her out on tour. Betsy would leave, and she would come in. I used to fake trips to Los Angeles to see her. I’d fly down for the day. She’d pick me up at the airport. We’d go to her house and have insane sex. She was so liberated—I loved that about her. It was like, my God, this woman can take care of me.
After the affair had been going on for two years, I was ready to leave Betsy, but then I decided that, first, we needed to take a family vacation, this big trip to Africa. Betsy, Aaron, and I went to Italy, Sardinia, Egypt, and Kenya, where we spent six weeks on safari. We were gone the whole summer of 1983. I was looking to figure out what I was going to do with my girlfriend. I needed to figure myself out. I was planning on leaving Betsy. I was in love.
We were in Sardinia. Aaron was out at the pool and Betsy and I had a quick daytime throw-down. It was a beautiful day and everything was right. I knew immediately she was pregnant. That had happened the first time with Aaron, too. That time, we did it while we were listening to Procol Harum’s Salty Dog album on a tiny record player in a hotel room, and afterward I just knew. In Sardinia, it wasn’t like it was amazing sex or something—it was actually a kind of a quickie deal—but you could tell something happened.
Sure enough, we get to Africa and Betsy’s kind of sick all the time in the morning. We arrived at the Mount Kenya Safari Club just in time to see Robert De Niro leaving. He was with this little kid and a white-haired guide in a Land Rover, pulling out as we pulled up. It was British-style Old Colonial. I hated the place. After five o’clock, men were required to wear a coat and tie. Women had to be in evening gowns. Children weren’t even allowed out of their rooms after five o’clock. Betsy was sick. She couldn’t leave the room anyway. They treated you real well and the place was gorgeous, but it was stupid fancy. It was a bird sanctuary. They had these black guys with white gloves in tuxedoes going around with little brooms and buckets, sweeping up bird poop. But best coffee I ever had in my life? Mount Kenya Safari Club, no question.
Anyway, we went all over Kenya and Tanzania on these safaris, like the Governors’ Camp, which is camping, but very elegant. De Niro was there. He was on the same safari I was, either coming or going. A couple times we’d see each other in the bar, had a couple of words. “Hi, I’m a big fan, yeah.” He didn’t know who I was, but he knew I was somebody. Long-hair fucking hippie-looking dude in this place.
Going home, we flew from Kenya to London, fourteen hours, and changed to the Concorde. I was really splurging. First class all the way. Flew the Concorde to New York, changed planes for Albany, where I picked up a rent-a-car and started driving to our log cabin in Lake Placid, where Aaron went to school. We were taking him back to North Country School to start in September.
It was two o’clock in the morning when the cop pulled me over. We’d been traveling for twenty-four hours. I was burnt. While I was out of the country, they had changed the speed limits. The cop starts writing me the ticket. “Officer,” I said, “I was only going sixty-two.”
“Around here,” he said, “we give tickets for sixty-two.”
He was parked behind some trees on a four-lane highway, nobody on the road, the middle of the night. I looked at Betsy. “I can’t drive fifty-five,” I said.
As soon as I heard myself say it, I went, “Whoa!” Grabbed some paper and a pen. I started writing the lyrics. As he’s writing the ticket, I’m writing the lyrics. The cop came back. He handed me the ticket, and I said, “Thank you, sir.”
I went straight to my house in Lake Placid, a three-hour drive from Albany. By the time we got there, it was about five o’clock in the morning. I had a guitar and an amp in my basement. I went downstairs, picked up my guitar, turned on the little tape recorder, and wrote the damn song, right there on the spot.
The whole time we were in Africa, I’d been writing songs, because I knew I was coming back to do this thing with Neal Schon of Journey, my first idea for a super-group, HSAS—Hagar, Schon, Aaronson, Shrieve. Neal and I had it all planned. When I got back and found out Betsy was pregnant, I kind of decided to end my affair or, at least, started slowing down. I had a pregnant wife on my hands and I thought this wasn’t the time to leave anybody. It ripped me up, because I really was in love with this woman, too. But the day Betsy went into the hospital to have Andrew, on June 4, 1984, I called the girl from the music publisher from the hospital and cut it off.
“I’ve got a new baby boy,” I told her. “I’ll never see you again.” I never did.
When a baby’s born, it is a miracle. You can read the Bible or other books, and you hear about miracles. You want something to affect you and change
your life like that. You want to see Jesus walk on water. You want to see someone heal, take a cripple and make him walk. You want to see those things. We all want that. When you see a baby born, you see that.
It shipped me right into shape. I had the whole world in my hands and I watched this baby being born. I was ready to give up anything for that, for my kids and my wife, so that we could continue to be that family together. There’s just something about seeing a child being born. Creation. Isn’t that as close to God as you’re ever going to get?
When I turned my focus back to HSAS, I had all these songs like “Giza” and “Valley of the Kings” that I had written in Africa and Egypt, these vibey kind of lyrics, and I had “I Can’t Drive 55,” because I’d written it on the way home. But I didn’t give it to the band. I didn’t even tell Neal. I just kept it in my pocket. I wrote the whole song anyway, and Neal and I were supposed to be cowriting everything on the new project. I don’t think I was being cheesy or cagey, just that was my song and I saved it for myself.