Red

by Sammy Hagar

  Good thinking, it turned out. The HSAS thing didn’t really work. Neal and I had wanted to do something together, but I don’t know why we got bassist Kenny Aronson and drummer Michael Shrieve. They were good and everything, but it was more a matter of who was available. Aaronson had played with Billy Squier and Neal knew Shrieve from when they played in Santana together. Shrieve, who’s a great rhythmical guy, wasn’t a rock drummer at all, and we were a rock band. But he made the band kind of cool and fusion-y.

  We did twelve shows in November 1983 around the Bay Area, all sold out for a band nobody ever heard before, and gave all the money to arts and music programs in public schools. We cut the album live, which I thought was sort of adventurous, but it never sold more than 150,000, even though I was selling more than a million as a solo artist and Journey was selling more than a million with Neal. It never caught on. “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which was the single, didn’t really work, never hit. We played an MTV show called The Concert. Neal and I went to New York and did press for days. But it just never took off. It might have been better if we’d gone in the recording studio, made the record, and then done the shows, but the way we did it was unique. We never toured again.

  I went right back to record “I Can’t Drive 55,” which ended up on my album VOA. That album was produced by Ted Templeman, Montrose’s old record producer who’d fronted me the budget for my first solo demos, and I recorded it at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, this large orchestral room where Journey just finished recording their album Escape. I did all the demos at my little studio in my house in Mill Valley. David Lauser came over and laid down drumbeats, and the two of us would spend ten or twelve hours every day in my basement, working up a bunch of ideas.

  VOA with “I Can’t Drive 55” really took off when it was released in August 1984 and made my business ridiculously big. “I Can’t Drive 55” was not my biggest hit, by any measure, but it means more than any song I’ve ever written. At the time, “55” only went to number twenty-six on the charts. It wasn’t even a Top 10 hit, but it was the one that really sold the records and kicked my concert business into the stratosphere.

  The tour for VOA was my most successful. I sold out arenas everywhere, two, three, or four nights some places, one of the top-five grossing tours in 1984—right up there with Van Halen, who broke at the same time with “Jump” and all that. I remember getting an award in Portland, Oregon. I sold out two nights and got the Show of the Year. Van Halen was runner-up. We were neck-and-neck on the road. They had a much bigger record. My album was 1.6 million, but they ended up selling 10 million records.

  My records were never up to my box office. There would be a guy like Greg Kihn or Tommy Tutone, who had his moment where he sold as many records as I ever did, maybe even more. But they could never sell out arenas, and I could go out and do multiple arenas. I was a live performer who came up as an opening act. My albums were just ways to get me back out on tour, until I met John Kalodner and Geffen, who got my records going.

  Kalodner and Geffen also got me doing music videos, which pushed my VOA Tour even more. The video to “I Can’t Drive 55” was huge on MTV, doubled or tripled my box-office business, and did for me instantly what radio never did. It made me a star. The all-music cable channel started in 1981, but it took a few years for the idea to catch on with local cable companies and the public. Once MTV did catch on, it had incredible power, and making videos was almost as important as making records. “Three Lock Box” had been my first video in 1982, and I’d noticed it changed me from being relatively anonymous to anyone but my fans to someone that old ladies recognized walking through airports. But the “I Can’t Drive 55” video took everything to a new level.

  Kalodner put me together with director Gil Bettman, who had done great car scenes as director of the TV series Knight Rider. It was like shooting a movie—quarter-million-dollar budget, four-day shoot, twelve-hour days, at different locations all over Southern California. We rented a wing of an old hospital in Los Angeles and built a jail, put up bars, and a courthouse, where the judge sat and the old lady hit me with the umbrella. We used real California Highway Patrol officers in one shot, where they wrestled me down on the hood of the car. I got to drive my Boxer 512 flat-out. We went out in the desert by Palmdale, where I could go 170 miles an hour. Gil dug holes in the ground and put cameras in them to drive over.

  That song changed my relationship with the California Highway Patrol. At that point in my life, I’d had thirty-six tickets. My license taken away three times. I was paying $125,000 a year for car insurance, because I had all these hot cars. I’d been to traffic school. I had hired attorneys. I erased as much as I possibly could, legally and financially, and I was still in bad shape. “I Can’t Drive 55” changed everything. Since I wrote that song, I’ve maybe had two citations. I’ve been pulled over at least forty times, stopped and let go.

  Some of the stories are classic. I was driving my Ferrari one night from San Francisco to Malibu with Betsy—this was later, during my first year with Van Halen—and was rolling between 150 and 160 all the way down Highway 101. As I approached Santa Barbara in the Ojai area, where there are all these speed traps, I decided to cut my speed. I had been checking my rearview mirror the whole way and couldn’t see anything behind me.

  Up ahead is a roadblock, two California Highway Patrol cars. I didn’t think there was any way this was for me when I pulled over. About the same time, a helicopter lands, and three other Highway Patrol cars pull up. They had been chasing me for a while. I just didn’t know it. Those little five-liter Mustangs are good for 140 miles an hour, max. I was blowing them off so bad I couldn’t see them in the rearview mirror.

  The cop got out of his car, shaking, with his gun in his hand. “Get out of the car,” he said.

  I got out. “You better have a good excuse,” he said.

  “Sir, I do not have a good excuse,” I said. “I was just having a good time. I have a fast car. I’ve been to driving schools and taken racing car courses. I didn’t think I was in danger. I was not reckless-driving.”

  He backed off and holstered his gun. He walked off, took off his hat and wiped his brow, replaced his hat and came back. “Okay, how fast were you going?” he asked.

  “I was really going fast,” I said. “Probably around 150.”

  He threw his hands in the air, and marched back to his car to the other guys to confer. Everybody was worked up. “My life was in danger,” one of the other cops kept yelling at Betsy. Finally the cop with the gun sent everybody else away. They took off.

  The guy took his hat off again and pulled me over to the hood of my car and leaned against it. He started telling me his troubles. He had looked at the license and knew who I was.

  “You know, I’ve got kids and this is a really stressful job,” he said. “And here you are, a rock star, your life’s in your hands. You’ve got anything you want. I was chasing you down the road thinking, ‘I want to kill this guy when I pull him over.’ And then you sit there so calm. You tell me how fast you were going. You didn’t lie to me.”

  He sat there forever, singing the blues to me about his life. At the end, he stood up, put out his hand, and said, “Nice to meet you.” The wackiest pull-over ever.

  Just recently, I was blasting down 101 in Marin County, going to rehearse with my new band, Chickenfoot, driving my Boxer 512 from the “I Can’t Drive 55” video, doing about ninety, when I flew past a cop under the freeway. Sure enough, he pulls me over. I came to a stop on the side of the freeway and rolled down my window. He came up and squatted down, his dark visor down on his helmet. He held up his radar gun, pointed it at my face, and it was flashing “55-55-55-55.” He pulled off his helmet and he has the biggest shit-eating grin on his face.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, man,” he said. “All the fellows told me you’re around here and they see you all the time. I’m the biggest fan you ever had. I just got out here from the South. I’ve been on the force for two months now, and
I’m telling you, man, I’ve been looking for you. And I got you!” You write a song like that, and no telling what happens. I wish I was smart enough to say I’d done it on purpose.

  Even though I made a lot of money on that tour, I came home from it ready to take a year off and figure things out. Betsy was on my ass all the time; she wanted me off the road and we’d just had Andrew. I told her we would buy a house out in the country. I went and looked at this place in Nicasio as well as a property in Big Sur. We were really going to go remote, try to get off the grid. I had been reading this book The Coming Hard Times by this guy who said the banks were going to collapse, everything was going to fall apart, the bottom’s going to come out of society, and gold was the only thing that would be valued. Paper money would be worth nothing. I really believed this shit.

  I was looking for a cabin in the woods with a hundred acres. I was stocking up food. I got guns. I had all my ammunition, not to kill people, but to eat. I learned how to kill animals. I went hunting all the time. I learned how to kill a deer and skin it, how to cure it and eat it. I was going to go Ted Nugent on everybody. I was going to hunt and fish. I was going to put a racetrack on the spread and have all my cars.

  The more I thought about things, the more I decided to stop the grind—album/tour, album/tour, album/tour—for my wife and family. I was burned out. I’d been on the road for more than ten years and, before that, I’d had a hard life—work, work, work. Now I had everything going. I had my bike stores, my travel agency, my fire sprinkler business. I had my apartment buildings. My business manager had done a great job for me. I was set. I didn’t even need any royalties. I was at a peak, and I felt like the fucking king. I could do whatever I wanted. I had $3 million in the bank, and I could see daylight. I would do one more record and one more tour, put away another $2 million, and retire altogether. Between all the other businesses and the money I already had, it was not necessarily a lot of income, but certainly more than enough to live on.

  I was ready to give up everything. Betsy was pressuring me. I was seeing things her way, and then Eddie Van Halen called.

  7

  5150

  I came off the tour, I was fried crisp. I cut off all my hair. I canceled the last four dates on the tour after I hurt my foot—twisted my ankle in Connecticut and couldn’t walk on it. I tried to do one show like that, gave up, and went home. We had done ninety shows that year.

  My Ferrari 512—the car from the “I Can’t Drive 55” video—was sitting in Claudio Zampolli’s shop in Van Nuys, where I’d bought it. He was an Italian mechanic, who doubled as a salesman (he’s actually the guy I’m talking to at the beginning of the “I Can’t Drive 55” video). He didn’t run a dealership or anything, but he’d buy a car for you. He used to work for Ferrari as a test driver. It took nine months to get the 512 after I ordered it. they made, like, twelve that year. Anyway, after I’d had the car for a little while, it needed a tune-up, which, on these special cars, is a very big, expensive operation. It’s really a race car, and a tune-up can cost as much as an ordinary new car. I went home without picking up my car.

  Eddie Van Halen drove a Lamborghini, a Countach, and Claudio worked on his cars, too. Eddie saw my car at Claudio’s and asked him about it.

  “Hey man, nice car,” he said. “Whose car is that?”

  “Sammy Hagar,” said Claudio. “You should call him and get him in the band.”

  Everybody knew that vocalist David Lee Roth had left Van Halen a couple of months earlier. He quit the band almost as soon as his little solo single, “Just a Gigolo,” started to do something. It was too soon to say they were floundering, but their predicament was public knowledge.

  “You got his number?” Eddie said.

  At my house, the phone rang. It was Eddie Van Halen. “Hey man, what are you doing?” he said.

  “I just came off tour and I’m just kind of nursing my foot,” I said.

  “Would you like to get together, come down and jam,” he said, “and maybe join Van Halen?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I’m burnt. I’d love to meet you, but…”

  I’d only met Eddie briefly a couple of times. We’d done a couple of big festivals together, and he’d come to my dressing room. “I’m such a big Montrose fan,” he had said. “What a nice guy,” I thought, “so humble and sweet.” When you shook his hand, he was always holding yours with both his hands and adding in a little bow.

  “How about tomorrow?” he said.

  “No, man, I can’t,” I said. “I’m burnt. A couple of days, at least. Let me call you back.”

  We exchanged numbers and hung up. I started thinking. Maybe if they’re broken up, I could get Eddie in my band. I could use a gunslinger like him. Or maybe I’ll just write some songs with him and get him to play on my next record. I was a big fan.

  But I hated Dave. The guy rubbed me wrong. I’m sure I rub all kinds of people wrong, so it’s not like I’m putting him down. The guy was a great front man, great attitude in rock, and had an image from hell, but I just couldn’t stand the guy. He was the opposite of what I believed in and what I am. First of all, the guy’s not a great singer and he acts like he’s the coolest, hottest guy in the world, when to me, he looks gay. The guy was never believable to me.

  The call didn’t come as a complete surprise. Ted Templeman had been the one to tell me that Roth had split a few months earlier, and at the time, I’d told Betsy, “They’re going to call me, you watch.” Who else were they going to get? There was Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie James Dio, and me. When Eddie did call, I was sitting there with goose bumps on my arm. I went down to see him a couple of days later.

  I walked into their place in Studio City. Alex Van Halen took one look at my short hair and started laughing. “You look like somebody put a doughnut on your head and cut it off,” he said. I had the sides shaved and left just a little bit on top. I was taking a year off. Alex was drunk on his ass. He was drinking a case of tall malt liquor cans a day. He pounded them, too. He could shotgun like nobody. He always wanted to have contests. He would pass out a couple of times a day, wake up and shotgun two or three beers, crack one more, and walk out of the room. Eddie drank all day, too. They both woke up, grabbed a beer, lit a cigarette, and that was the way they started their day. Midday, around four o’clock, they would take a nap. They were both big nap-heads.

  Eddie lived in a very humble house with his wife, Valerie Bertinelli, the actress. It was actually Valerie’s house—Eddie just moved in with her. She also had another place, sort of a beach house in Malibu, and they split their time between her two homes. The main one though was up in the hills off Coldwater Canyon. It was just an ordinary two-bedroom house with a garage that he’d converted into a studio. They called the studio “5150,” after the police code for picking up a crazy person. It was not a rock-star home, and the studio was a dump. They were recording through a homemade board that could have come out of a Cracker Jack box, built by engineer Donn Landee. Landee could make the board sound brilliant, but he was a genius and knew how to work it. To anybody else, it was like model airplane gear.

  The studio was filthy. Beer cans everywhere, ashtrays full of cigarettes. Donn Landee had to blow away the cigarette ashes just to plug something into the board. The place smelled like the worst bar on the planet. I don’t think it had ever been cleaned. Eddie’s guitars were lying on the floor. Nothing on racks, nothing in cases, just on the floor, on chairs, leaning against amps, against the wall, a pile of them in the corner. It was beautiful, but I’d never seen anything like it.

  Eddie walked in, wearing a pair of those shades with louvers in them. He’d been up all night, drinking, trying to write some music. I didn’t know these guys. I didn’t know what their routine was. But they were beat up. Eddie was wearing a pair of wrinkled pants. When I went into their house later that day, I saw why. He and Valerie were living out of their suitcases. They had been off the road for a few months, but they didn’t have their stuff hanging in their close
ts. It was sitting in their suitcases on the floor. There were piles of stuff everywhere. It was weird. They could afford maids, but they didn’t have them. They were kids. If you really look at it, they had been out on the road for five years and had only recently come home.

  Eddie never bothered to unpack. He was always pulling clothes out, finding something halfway clean but wrinkled. I found all this kind of humorous, like, “Far out, these guys really don’t care.” I thought that was pretty cool. I came from a different world, Betsy’s world. My clothes were pressed. My socks were ironed, folded, and put in the closet. I was actually wearing a suit—Armani linen jacket and slacks, T-shirt, and tennis shoes, kind of Miami Vice. I ate in good restaurants and drank fine wine. Eddie would throw a hot dog and bun out of the freezer in the microwave, nuke it, plow it into his mouth, and chug it down with a beer. There were old pizza boxes lying around. The refrigerator was full of frozen burritos.

  Al was the crazy one. He was obnoxious, drunk, making comments, laughing about stupid things, smoking cigarettes. “Here,” he would say, “shotgun this beer.” I don’t drink beer.

  When I got there, they’d been up all night writing. They had what became “Summer Nights” and what became “Good Enough.” Eddie, Al, and the bassist, Mike Anthony, had stayed up jamming. I arrived at about noon, and they still hadn’t been to bed yet. And they were ripped. They had been drinking the whole time. I went down to check out Eddie. In my head, there was no way I was joining Van Halen.

  We started playing, and the engineer Donn Landee recorded everything we did. I made up the first line on the spot—“Summer nights and my radio.” It just popped into my head the first time I heard that riff. The rest of the song I scatted my way through. I did the same thing with “Good Enough”—I really had my scat together. Eddie couldn’t believe it. Dave apparently didn’t have good rhythm and wasn’t a great singer, didn’t have any range. I was singing Eddie’s guitar licks with him. After five hours, they were freaking out.