by Sammy Hagar
He was standing on the asphalt in the driveway, holding the broomstick out in front of him with both hands. I looked at him and wondered, “What the fuck’s he doing?”
He’s going to jump over the broomstick while holding it in his hands.
At that moment, Claudio pulled around the corner in my car. Just as Claudio could see everything clearly, Al jumped over the fucking thing, caught his feet, of course—drunk, just shotgunned ten cans of malt liquor—and went down, face-first. He didn’t let go of the broomstick. We had to take the broom out of his hands. He hit the ground facedown and lay there, out cold. Claudio jumped out of the car, screaming. “Call an ambulance,” he said. “Oh, my God, he’s dead.”
He did hit hard. The momentum of trying to do it catapulted his head into the asphalt. When we picked him up, he had a pizza face. They took him away in an ambulance.
I went home, took the next day off, and, the day after that, I came in. Al was lying on the couch, his head wrapped up like a mummy. I laughed at him so hard, but he couldn’t laugh—that only made it hurt worse. He really did some pretty good damage to his face. That was just starting to make the record. You could only imagine what the tour was going to be like.
When it came time to actually record the album, we needed a new producer, because Ted Templeman, who was producing David Lee Roth’s solo albums, had supposedly been bad-rapping us to Warner Bros. behind our back, so we weren’t going to work with him. Despite Mo Ostin’s positive reaction when he’d heard us at 5150, and the fact that they weren’t paying much for it, Warner Bros. was hardly enthusiastic about the project. I suggested Mick Jones from Foreigner. I’d known him from the Montrose days, when he was still with Spooky Tooth. So Mick came on board and produced the album with us.
One day toward the end of the project, Mick and I were walking on the beach when he turned to me and said, “Give me one more song.” That was “Dreams.” He just sort of pulled it out of me. I didn’t know what key the song was in. I started singing in that register. Mick got really excited and helped me learn how to sing in this supersonic range that I’d never done before. He pushed me into a range that was an octave above where I normally sang. Mick got me to do things I didn’t know I could do.
We cut the album quickly, no more than a month, but we got hung up mixing. It took longer to mix than we expected, because Eddie’s studio really wasn’t a great place to mix. We would do the mixes, take them home, and not like what we heard, so we’d have to do it all over again. We had to cancel dates we planned at the start of the tour in Alaska and Hawaii. We wanted to start in some remote place, because we were really concerned about how the people were going to respond to the new material.
There was also the issue of the Van Halen catalog. I told the guys that I didn’t want to be in a cover band. I was not going to go do any shows until we had an album, and when we did, I didn’t want to play too much of the old shit. They were totally down with that. We all decided to go out and make a stand.
In the end, we were so late delivering the tapes that the album couldn’t come out until a week after the first scheduled date on the tour. Rather than start in some faraway place, we began it all in Shreveport, Louisiana. Even though the album was late, we went ahead with the show, because it had already sold out and we didn’t want to cancel or postpone it. The single “Why Can’t This Be Love” was out on the radio, so people had heard something, but they hadn’t heard the album.
We went to Shreveport, Louisiana, to do that first show, March 27, 1987, and I was a wreck. I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous before a show. We came out and opened with “One Way to Rock,” one of my songs. The barricade went down. The audience went crazy. It happened in an instant, a flash. It was killer. We knew we were on top of the world at that moment.
The ironic thing about that date is that it had been predicted a couple of years before by a psychic named Marshall Lever. I met him through this acupuncturist I’d been seeing and went to visit him at his home in Sausalito for an appointment sometime during the recording of VOA. This was after I had severed my ties with the girlfriend and was happy with the new baby, Andrew, but I still knew things weren’t right between Betsy and me. I felt the need to talk to someone. I needed some spiritual advice.
His wife met me, this red-lipped woman, very goofy, who showed me into the room. This heavyset gentleman walked in, sat down in a rocking chair, leaned back, and closed his eyes. His wife asked if I wanted to record the session and slipped a cassette in a tape recorder. His dog followed them into the room, lay down on the floor, and started snoring. Over the years, I’ve been to see this guy twenty times and this was the routine. That dog is snoring on every one of my tapes.
He started by telling me that I was involved in a relationship that I was just finishing. “She was your sister in your past life in Greece,” he said. “You were separated when she was nine and you were eleven, and your parents were killed in a boating accident in the Greek islands. They put her in a convent and you went out on a fishing boat and never returned. You never saw her again, and you missed her. When you saw her and you smelled her”—he’s talking about the smell, this chick drove me crazy with her smell—“when you smelled her, you realized who she was and you didn’t ever want to be away from her again.”
He went on to tell me about Betsy. “Betsy was also your sister in a past life,” he said, “and you lived in Spain. Neither one of you ever married. You were in love but you never had sex because she was your sister and you lived together your whole life. Betsy was your big sister. Your mother died giving birth to you. Betsy cooked for you, just like your wife, but you never had sex even though you were madly in love. You were an instrument-maker named Crulli, C-R-U-L-L-I.” He spelled it out. “And your instruments can be seen in a museum in Barcelona.”
He turned his attention to Betsy. “When you met your present wife,” he said, “you had an extremely strong sexual relationship and it’s really what keeps you tied.” That’s really what we really had. Our sexual relationship was fantastic, even twenty years into it. How did he know all this?
“In eighteen months,” he said, “you’re going to go on a brand-new adventure, very much like what you’re doing now, but different. More powerful, bigger, more like ‘this is it.’”
That’s when he gave me that date. He said it was going to start on that date.
I refused to sing “Jump.” It was just hard for me. I write my own songs. “Jump” was tough for me lyrically—“Can’t you see me standing here, I’ve got my back against the record machine, you know what I mean, you know what I mean? I might as well jump.” That was hard for me. I couldn’t sing the song with any heart and soul. I’ve got to sing something that I mean.
“Hey, hey, hey you, who was it? Hey, baby, how you been?” I just couldn’t sing that shit, great as it was. The first night, in a moment of panic, I pulled a guy out of the crowd to sing it. The audience went nuts. The band thought it was great. When the guy got to “I might as well,” I’d spring in the air like a maniac. It worked. We kept it. On the entire tour, I sang “Jump” maybe twice.
Before I joined the band, Van Halen didn’t have a particularly tight show. Roth would talk. They’d do another song. Ed would play a twenty-minute guitar solo. They would do another song. Roth would talk some more, another song, Al would do a drum solo for thirty minutes. On the 1984 Tour, they told me they were doing eight songs in a two-hour show. And they ended every song the same way. They had the classic heavy-metal ending—four crashes, a crescendo…one, two, three. At the end of that, Al would usually do something, smack this, clang that, just because he was quirky. I decided we needed a new ending.
“Great idea,” said Eddie, as always. So, pounding beers, Al learned a new ending. Good. The next day at rehearsal, back to the same old ending again. If he learned it, he learned it for one day maximum. Nothing stuck. We kept the same ending on the tour.
On the road, the crew worked around Al carefully, try
ing to figure out ways that he wouldn’t pass out during the show. Al would sleep right up to the time before we went onstage. I would come to the dressing room from the hotel—I never did the sound checks to save my voice—and the two of them would be asleep on the couch or in a chair. They never went back to the hotel for their naps. Everybody tiptoed around them.
“Shhh, let them sleep,” they would say. “Don’t wake them up or Al will start drinking too soon.”
They would wake up Al about twenty minutes before show-time. There was always a case of tall Schlitz cans. He would shotgun three or four beers and get his buzz on. He would walk out onstage with a couple more cans in his hands, pound those, and drink the rest of the case during the two-hour show. The crew would put out these big rubber trash cans for him to piss in during the show. After practically every song, he’d piss in the trash can, pound a couple of beers, and start playing again. Sometimes he’d really be fucked up. In the middle of a song, he’d just get up off the drums to take a piss or chug a beer. Eventually he started wearing one of those helmets with beer holders on the side, and straws. At the end of the tour, he needed some help.
This was the golden era of arena rock. I had been doing arenas since 1982 and Standing Hampton. I was raised on arena rock. Montrose opened for everyone in arenas. I never played nightclubs and theaters. I wouldn’t even know what it was like. I was used to going out with the big moves, hands as far as you could stretch them, running across the stage, jumping as high as you could to get to those people at the back of the giant arenas.
Van Halen was the classic arena-rock act. At the end of our run, arenas had gone away. People started playing amphitheaters for more money. Arenas were smaller and more expensive. You couldn’t bring a giant production into the amphitheaters. When we first started doing arenas, Ed Leffler and I came up with a way to streamline production and stage design so that we could sell an extra two thousand seats in the back, behind the stage. Those seats were pure profit. We didn’t put a canopy on top of the lighting, so people could see the stage. We raised the PA system. We learned all the tricks and invented a few of our own. When we were running through arenas after VOA, we made more money than the other bands, because they weren’t selling those last twenty-five hundred seats. When I joined Van Halen, they had been draping off the back of the hall, cutting their capacity in half and walking away with a few thousand dollars. On the 5150 Tour, we designed the stage so we could be seen from everywhere.
The arenas were so big and grand, and had roofs all the way to the back. You could extend your production as far back as you wanted and you could have as many as fourteen spotlights. When you came out, it was big-time rock. It was loud. It was inside a building and sound didn’t just disappear like it does outdoors. The sound was contained in the hall. It was massive and thunderous and the audience felt it in their chests. You could darken the entire building and, then, pow, hit these four little guys up there with four massive spotlights apiece. Arena rock is how rock stars became rock gods.
For the 5150 Tour, we built this giant stage with steel gratings that went up to another stage about eight feet higher, which went all the way to the back. That way, I could work the crowd in the back. We had an eight-foot lift, where the drum riser was, that was like another stage. I would go up there and Eddie would go up there. Mike would go up there. You could be closer to the rear sections than the front row, even exchange high fives with the crowd.
We had two other platforms on each side. Our stage was massive. We had these trusses of lights that I had been using since the Three Lock Box Tour, with catwalks on them. It came down as an X across the front of the stage at a point in the show, and I went up there and out over the audience twenty or thirty feet above their heads. We carried the show in fifteen trucks, a huge amount of production, some special effects, but mostly sound, staging, and lighting.
I was one of the first to use the headset mike so I could run around all over the place. We were all wireless. We used to come out on this massive stage, and we wouldn’t see one another again for ten minutes. Eddie would be running one way. Mikey would be jumping off in another direction and I’d be somewhere else. Only Al was stuck where he was. Sometimes I’d put my hand up over my eyes so I could see where Eddie was on the stage. We kept our monitors out of sight, under grating on the stage, so the stage was clean except for the tall amps. And they were loud. If you went in front of either of the amps, you’d better hold your ear. Van Halen played loud. The PA had to be so loud because it was coming off the stage that loud. That was arena rock—Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Rush, Van Halen. Rock stars.
On the tour, there was a former Playboy bunny from California hanging around, who used to see one of the other guys in my old band. Somehow she hooked up with Leffler, although she had always been after me. She was good-looking, but there was just something about this chick that was not to be trusted. She saw my name on Leffler’s rooming list and came knocking at my door in the middle of the night in Detroit. I answered the door without any clothes—I sleep naked—and she pushes the door open, throws me on the bed, and starts blowing me. That’s kind of tough to get up and walk away from. “Son of a bitch,” I was thinking, “I’m fucked now.” And sure enough, I was.
About ten days later, Leffler gets the phone call. She’s pregnant. I smelled a setup. I was so pissed off. Betsy would commit suicide. We hired an attorney and started dealing with her. I knew it was not my baby. It was extortion.
She wanted an apartment in New York and anything for that kid that my children would have. I didn’t want to pay a penny, but Leffler convinced me the smart thing to do was give her the money until the baby was born and see what happened at that point. She was living with her boyfriend, a musician in New York, in the apartment when she had the baby. She called Leffler from the hospital. “Tell Sammy to call me,” she said. I didn’t want to talk to her, but Leffler talked me into it. She tells me the baby is so cute, looks just like me, she’s madly in love with me, she’s so sorry, shit like that.
A couple days later, Leffler gets another call. The baby died. I don’t believe that she ever had a baby. She may have had an abortion early on. Marshall Lever, my psychic with the sleeping dog, told me about it. “It’s not your baby,” he said. “She’s living with her boyfriend in New York. She has a boyfriend that’s a musician and this is probably an extortion case. Don’t worry, just relax, and once she has the baby, it’s all going to go away.”
I never heard from her again. Obviously, it wasn’t my baby, and they knew it. They just extorted me as long as they could. No one ever saw her again.
Three weeks into the tour, we were sitting in Atlanta and Ed Leffler called a meeting.
“Billboard, number one,” he said.
It was the first number-one record for any of us. The album sold 600,000 the first week and another 400,000 the next week. It was on fire. It went platinum faster than any record in Warner Bros. history. Every one of our records did. When I was in the band, Van Halen was a huge, quick seller. Every album went to number one. It was an un-fucking-believable run.
8
MONSTERS OF ROCK
As soon as we finished the first tour, I had to make the solo record for Geffen. That was the deal he’d made with Warner Bros. We were worried about Eddie and his drinking and drug problem, but first we had to deal with his brother. We put Al in rehab as soon as the tour was over. His wife staged an intervention. I didn’t even know what an intervention was.
It was hairy. I cried. It broke me down and I wasn’t even the guy under the gun. They went and got him out of bed, six o’clock in the morning, before he had another drink. He was getting up at four o’clock in the morning, chugging a bottle of vodka, and going back to bed. He wasn’t a sipper. He wasn’t a nurser. He just plowed himself to the point of passing out.
We put him in a hospital. He took the oath and never drank again. I love Al. He is the strongest guy, but weird. He’s a chain-smoker, but he’d qu
it smoking every Monday, for the one day, just to torture himself. Al’s the kind of guy that I’d call every day, just to bullshit.
Once Al cleaned up, Eddie didn’t have anybody to drink with. Al still smoked. Al would drink coffee and Eddie would drink beer and do a few other things. It was Leffler’s idea to have Eddie coproduce my solo record and play bass. He always played bass with Van Halen, two or three songs on practically every record. He was a great bass player. Eddie’s a great musician, period.
So off we went into the studio, with Jesse Harms on keyboards, David Lauser on drums, and Eddie on bass. I played guitar. That way, we’d keep Eddie busy. We cut that record at these brand-new studios A&M Records built in Hollywood, where Tom Petty, John Cougar Mellencamp, and Stevie Nicks all had been working. Pink Floyd was in the room next door, without Roger Waters, doing “Learning to Fly.” Eddie and I would ride in together from the beach every day in a different car. I had about seven Ferraris down there. The Pink Floyd drummer, Nick Mason, is a big Ferrari collector. The guitarist David Gilmore owns Ferraris, too, but he’s not in Nick Mason’s class as a collector. Mason owns one of the original Ferrari GTOs, a car probably worth 30 million bucks. They didn’t have their cars with them, so they’d be waiting on the sidewalk every day to see what I was going to be driving. David Gilmore is one of my all-time guitar heroes and it was really cool, having those guys admiring my cars every day. I was showing off. After I’d run through all the cars I had down south, I sent Bucky back up to Mill Valley, to swap out a couple more cars.
Pink Floyd was auditioning drummers for a shuffle they couldn’t nail, even with their drummer Nick Mason there. They had Omar Hakim trying out, fresh from Sting’s band, but they didn’t use him on the track. I did. He overdubbed drums on a couple cuts on my album. Pink Floyd was so particular about that shuffle, they were still working on it by the time I finished my entire album.