by Sammy Hagar
“We’ve got a band,” they kept saying.
“I don’t know,” I said to them. “It sounds great, but let’s talk about it. Maybe I’ll come back next week or something.”
They wanted me to stay, but I went home and took a cassette. We jammed a blues song and we had the other stuff that we worked up. After dinner, I put the tape on my stereo. I got the goose bumps all over my body. I heard it. I realized it was Cream all over again—my favorite rock band ever. There was something about it that was slow, confident, almost majestic. My rock had always been more intense. They were relaxed into this groove thing, even if it was up-tempo. Alex lay back, like Ginger Baker always did. Eddie played the way Clapton played, deep in the pocket. He didn’t speed up anything. I’d never played with guys like that before.
I called Ed Leffler and told him, “I’m doing it.” He told me I was crazy. He thought the Van Halens were nuts and that I was crazy to even think about doing it. Then he went right to work. “Let me see what I can do,” he said.
Leffler looked over their situation. Those guys were in bad shape financially—they had made a lot of money, but they had spent it all. They had overhead like crazy. When Leffler found out how much the guys made the year before, he told me I was going to have to take a pay cut to join the band. But once we started playing the music, I knew it was all going to happen.
EDDIE WAS A man of few words. His favorite line was “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” All he cared about was getting some rest, having a couple of beers, some cigarettes, and playing music. Eddie wasn’t really a driven musician. At one point, making the first album, I grew nervous with his nonchalance, his lack of concern for the whole thing. It wasn’t like he was the musical genius telling everybody what to play. Al played the way he wanted, Mike was playing what he wanted. Eddie didn’t even know what the lyrics were. He was just concerned about his guitar part. That’s all he paid attention to.
When I wrote the song “Love Walks In,” his wife, Valerie, was so in love with the first ballad they’d ever done, she made him listen to the lyrics. He got all choked up. “Wow, I never listened to lyrics before,” he said. He couldn’t sing you one song. He didn’t even know what fucking Dave was singing about. He was listening to his guitar and the groove and making sure that his part was okay.
Mike was my Ed McMahon, always ready to back the play, whatever it was.
Eddie and Al were tight as nails. They didn’t get too far from each other. Passed their cigarettes back and forth. One wouldn’t light one without lighting one for the other guy. They only needed one match. They never walked into the room with just their own beer. They always had a beer in their pocket for the other guy. It was beautiful unless they’d start fighting, then it was terrible. When they were both drinking, they’d fight at least once a week. I mean, go at it. Fistfights. Mike and I would try to pull them apart. We’d break them up and leave, Al would drive back after we left and they’d go at it again. The next day we’d come to the studio, the windshield would be busted out of the car, the trash can turned over.
I didn’t see much of Eddie’s wife, but Valerie, wow, what a cool chick. I pulled into the driveway one time and Valerie and Eddie were sitting on the hood of one of Ed’s cars, drinking a beer. I thought that was so cool. My wife would never do that. Valerie could hang with the boys. She wasn’t around a lot, because she was working. She pretty much always had a gig, some kind of little movie or TV part. She also spent a lot of time at their beach house.
The sense of family ran strong in Van Halen. When I first joined, their father, Jan, was always there, drinking and smoking. Mike Anthony was the most loyal dog on the planet. He was the flag-bearer. From the start, they trusted me and I became the motivator. They loved that and they rallied behind me. It was very family, very close. Us against the world. This is our place. We’re working on our record. We didn’t argue about nothing. It was a dream come true.
Still, there was a lot of doubt about Van Halen. At the time, no one seemed to have confidence in the band’s future. Roth had split with the road crew, the management, and he looked like he was going to launch big-time on his own and leave the band in his dust. People were suggesting that we call it Van Hagar, which was a terrible idea. (Funny though, I didn’t know it at the time—Dad always claimed to be Irish—but we were actually Dutch and our family name may have really been Van Hagar once upon a time.)
In spite of the doubt, we already knew it was going to work, because we were the ones in the studio working up the 5150 record and we knew we had some killer tracks. We had “Why Can’t This Be Love.” However, nobody but us had heard any of this, because we couldn’t tell anyone that we were even in the studio together.
Everything had been taking place in secret, because I was signed to Geffen and Van Halen were on Warner Bros. Although we didn’t know it, Geffen and Warner Bros. were already butting heads. As Geffen’s distributor, Warner Bros. was taking 50 percent of Geffen’s earnings and I was Geffen’s biggest artist at that time. Elton John hadn’t worked on Geffen’s label. Neil Young was a disaster—Geffen ended up suing him. Donna Summer didn’t have any hits for him. There was me; Don Henley, who had one big album; and John Lennon, who died shortly after giving Geffen his first album, although it did sell millions after he was shot. Geffen wasn’t likely to let his biggest act walk across the street just because he wanted to sing with another band.
Leffler and I went to see David Geffen. As we expected, he did not like the idea and wanted to talk me out of it.
“Why would you want to be in that band?” he said. “You’re as big as them on your own.” He was baffled. He was sitting on his desk, his hand on his head. “I don’t understand this,” he said. Like a lot of people, he thought David Lee Roth would be an impossible act to follow, and he said so.
After a few minutes of talking it through, he shifted his tone suddenly. “I would never stop an artist from doing what they want to do,” he said. “I’m David Geffen. I stand up for the artist. I’m for the artist. Number one, it’s about you and your life.” He said he would talk to Mo Ostin, the chairman of Warner Bros. Records.
With Warner Bros. over a barrel, Geffen told them he would let them have me for one album, if he could have a Sammy Hagar solo album immediately following. He wanted 100 percent of the solo album and 50 percent of the Van Halen records on Warner Bros. Warner’s chief Mo Ostin came to Eddie’s 5150 Studios to talk things over. He was, let’s say, cautious. He suggested changing the band’s name, and he also liked the Van Hagar idea.
Eddie and I powwowed about it and decided, no—we’re Van Halen. We loved each other. There was no animosity, no egos, no nothing. They wanted me to be in this band and I wanted to be in it, because we were making the music and we knew we were good. Mo asked if he could hear something, so we put on our instruments, and, while he sat there, we played “Why Can’t This Be Love” for him, live and in-person. He put his finger in the air and smiled.
“I smell money,” Mo said.
By the time we got the green light from Warner Bros. and Geffen, we were already halfway through the record. After that, we went full-force, and things started happening fast. Eddie and Al had a lot of music left over from what would have been the next Van Halen record before Roth split. They had a lot of sort of semi-formed ideas when I walked in on it. I had to write all the lyrics and melodies. I worked on their jams, picked them apart, and made songs out of them. I was kind of behind the eight ball on the lyrics.
We would jam in the studio for hours. I would have a handheld mike and headphones and would just sing and experiment. When something was good, I’d point at the engineer to tell him to make a cassette. I would take the cassettes of the parts that I wanted to keep with me when I drove back to Malibu, which was about an hour’s drive. I would drive home, ears bleeding, and listen to the songs.
Both Ed and Al smoked in the studio like chimneys. Those guys would be lighting them up, setting one down, light up another, put it in an ashtray. The
y would have three or four cigarettes going at one time. They were chain-smokers, lighting a cigarette off the other cigarette, letting the filter burn in the ashtray. Never put them out. Dropping them on the floor. I’d have these terrible headaches when I’d get home at three o’clock in the morning and go straight to the shower, because I stank like cigarette smoke.
One night, on the drive home, I was listening to this tape where Eddie had written the music and noodled the verses on guitar. He was trying to show me the phrasing of the verses, but he couldn’t, because he couldn’t play the rhythm and the lead at the same time. I didn’t get what he was doing. But, on the way home, I heard the rhythm of the thing, and I started singing it in the car. We didn’t have a chorus, and I just busted out with it, “Best of Both Worlds.” It hit me hard, right when I was pulling in the garage. Bang. The chorus hit.
I went in the shower, but I kept coming out to dry off and write some more lyrics on a notepad. Then I’d get back in the shower…and get right back out to scribble down some more. The song came to me like a flood.
I don’t know about lyricists. Lyricist Bernie Taupin once told me that it’s the easiest thing in the world for him. Once he has a title and a concept, he can just go bam-bam-bam-bam-bam, it’s done. This song was coming at me like a tidal wave. I couldn’t even take a shower. Usually I get pieces that I can remember. I just keep singing them over in my head, and write them down later. I wrote the whole song while I was still taking the shower. I went in the next day and sang it. Everybody was blown away. That was “Best of Both Worlds.”
Before I wrote “Love Walks In,” Eddie had never really played a real keyboard ballad in his whole life up to that point. With Roth, the closest thing was “Wait” off 1984, which was a synth track, but it was a rocker. It wasn’t a beautiful melody.
I had been reading this book by Ruth Montgomery called Aliens Among Us. She claims to be an automatic writer. She just gets a pencil, closes her eyes, and goes into a trance, and the writing comes through her. The book was about walk-ins, aliens who come and take over your body in your sleep. A person can actually not die and still become a whole different person. They wake up one morning and can’t remember who the hell they were. I wrote about how love comes walking in and can make you a whole new person. After Valerie forced Eddie to listen to the lyrics, Eddie and I became the closest of collaborators, trusting and loving with each other from that point forward.
BEFORE I JOINED Van Halen, I’d already committed to Farm Aid in September 1985, and we decided that would be the place we would make the announcement. I wanted to really do this big-time. I rented a private plane for my band for our last show. I gave everybody a nice bonus. They’d all bought houses already, but I gave them enough to pay them off, if they wanted. I brought Eddie up to rehearse with us. Eddie and I wrote three songs in two days while he was in town. We rehearsed Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” with Eddie for Farm Aid. It was going to be great. Too bad I screwed everything up.
At Farm Aid, you could only do three or four songs. Willie Nelson, John Cougar Mellencamp, and Neil Young organized the twelve-hour marathon fund-raiser that was broadcast live on radio and television, largely a country show with acts like Kris Kristofferson and Jimmy Buffett. It wasn’t a rock show. Dylan was as hard-rocking as it had gotten when my turn came. I was going to open with “One Way to Rock,” follow with “I Can’t Drive 55,” and bring out Eddie, make the announcement that I was joining Van Halen, and play “Rock and Roll.” When I went out, right away, I had that stadium rocking. They loved me, were going crazy. I was scoring. It was big for me—ninety thousand people in Champagne, Illinois, one of my biggest regions. I could do two nights in Chicago, two nights in Champagne, two nights in Peoria. Illinois was my state. I was ripping it up when I stepped to the mike to introduce “I Can’t Drive 55.”
“Here’s a song for all you tractor-pulling motherfuckers,” I said and instantly they shut down the radio broadcast and turned off the live TV feed. I ruined everything. When I brought out Eddie, we were long off the air and nobody saw or heard a thing. He did a quick little solo, we made the announcement and went into the Led Zeppelin number. That was the first time we played together in public. Eddie was on the plane with us. We all flew back happy. It was a friendly transition from my band to Van Halen.
Many years later, David Lauser went to a cattle-call audition for drummers for Maria McKee, the former vocalist of Lone Justice, this country-rock band signed to Geffen that was going to follow us at Farm Aid. Back then, they’d thought they had the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt all rolled together, but Lone Justice was not to be. A number of years later, the singer was looking for a drummer and Lauser looked like he was going to get the job. He’s down to the final interview with the lady herself, and she says, “Tell me about yourself—what have you done in the past?” Lauser says, “I’ve worked for Sammy Hagar all my life.” She gets up and walks out of the room. I guess there was still some animosity about that. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.
When I first went down to join Van Halen, I moved into a rented house, but then a place in foreclosure came up for sale next door to Eddie and Valerie in Malibu. They lived on a bluff, a little house in the middle, and my house. It was all brand-new, but the contractor went under and the bank had it. I made them a ridiculously low offer and got the house. I moved in next door to Eddie. It was amazing that a place would come up on Broad Beach Road, one of the most desirable spots in North Malibu, especially at bargain-basement rates. It seemed like karma.
Betsy was grooving. She dug the house and she liked the beach. She didn’t care about Malibu, but there were horses right down the street. You can rent a villa in the South of France for what we paid for her horses at the Malibu stables, but she was happy. When I joined Van Halen, it shook up Betsy bad, at first. She’d been ready for me to slow down and get out of the business. She wasn’t ready for me to start over with a totally new band. But when the house came up in Malibu, she started to see things differently. I would go to work every day and come home at night. We were recording the album and rehearsing for the tour. She was living in this beautiful beach house. She had her roses in the garden and her horses down the lane. She drove either her brand-new Jaguar or the Land Rover.
I used to drive to the studio with Eddie every day. He and I had the cars. We’d take either the Ferrari, the Lamborghini, my E-Jag, or my Cobra. On the way into the studio one day, we drove past a dealer and saw an E-Jag sitting there. I stopped. I went in and got my business manager on the phone, handed the salesman the phone, and the two of them put the deal together. I went out to get in the car and drive to the studio. I slid in behind the wheel and, wait a minute, what’s with the seat? I’m not that big myself, but whoever drove this car before was one short dude. Whose car is this? It belonged to Ronnie James Dio. I loved that.
Eddie and I did crazy shit like that. We’d race home, me in one of my Ferraris, Eddie in one of his Lamborghinis, driving 140, 150 miles an hour. He would always be drunk.
Every day, we’d go from two in the afternoon until past midnight, unless Al passed out. Al was a bad drunk, but Eddie used to nurse his beers. He’d always be drinking, but didn’t get all fucked up. Al would get fucked up, puke, pass out. You’d have to slap him around, let him rest for a couple of hours, get him up, and bring him back. We would limit the amount of beer he could have and he would duck out for a pack of cigarettes, run downtown, buy a bottle of vodka, and drink it in the store.
Their father liked to drink, too. If we were in the studio at two in the afternoon, it wasn’t like Eddie got up at eight in the morning, more like noon. I’d get to the studio and the three of them would be sitting there drinking, having gone through a couple of six-packs already. Their dad, Jan Van Halen, was a great guy. I felt close to him. He was a sax player. He liked my chops, liked that I could sing.
But those guys drank. Al was a drunk like my father. He couldn’t stop. He drank until he passed out, woke up, and started
over again. He would find people in bars and offer them money to put out a cigarette on their arm or shave their head, while he videotaped the whole deal. Completely nuts.
When I first made their scene, they were still laughing about Al’s birthday performance. Legend has it they’d all gone to a Benihana. He was already drunk when he got there. It’s his birthday. He’s drinking hot sake and everything else. He gets up on the table, takes his shirt off, and starts to dance—right on the hot grill. The guy just finished cooking dinner on it. Al pulls his pants down to fuck with the people in the place. He trips himself because he’s got his pants around his ankles, and lands on the grill on his back. Ssssss. He can’t get up. He flops over like prawns. Ssssss. Ahhh, ahhh. Sssss, ahhh! He couldn’t do anything. He was on the grill. They had to pull him off and, of course, take him to the hospital. He had burns all over.
Like Leffler said, these guys were crazy, very high-maintenance, but good-hearted. Another time, during the 5150 sessions, we were waiting for Claudio to bring back one of my cars around two in the afternoon.
“I bet you I could shotgun ten beers,” Al said.
He’s got ten talls of malt liquor. “I bet you a thousand bucks,” he said. Al’s a betting man. One time he lost his BMW to me on a bet. I made him pay up, too, and gave it to our tour manager for Christmas. Al was a great guy, but just a total fuckup. I was not betting him.
“Oh yeah?” he said. “Watch this.”
Michael Anthony was standing there with me. Pow, pow, pow, pow—Al opened them all first and then drained them, one at a time. How can you even hold that much in your belly? I thought, “Oh, no, this day is over.” Al walked out into the driveway, big belch, and grabbed a broomstick. “My dad used to do this,” he said. “You ever see anybody do this?”