by Sammy Hagar
MTV did a whole “Name the Album” promotion, because I couldn’t go on tour. I was just going to call it Sammy Hagar, but some fan submitted the title I Never Said Goodbye, with a note saying, “Sammy’s left his solo career but he never said goodbye.” The record went platinum immediately. “Give to Live” and “Eagles Fly” off the album were big hits. I did a three-week promotional tour around the world—San Francisco to Japan to Germany, came home and went straight into the studio to start the new Van Halen album, OU812.
As soon as I came back home, I flew down to Los Angeles from San Francisco. Eddie and Al met me at the airport. I hadn’t seen them for a couple of weeks. I was really happy to see them. When we got in the car, Eddie and Al lit up cigarettes in the front seat and snapped a cassette in the player.
“We want you to hear something,” Eddie said. They played me the keyboard part for “When It’s Love.” I was covered in goose bumps. That was almost the inspiration for the whole album. We knocked that song out and knew we had something.
The songs were not my best stuff lyrically. “Black and Blue” was kind of quirky, cool groove and phrasing, but the lyrics were a little too eighties. “Source of Infection,” ugh. The last song we wrote was “Finish What Ya Started.” It was toward the end of the project and we needed another song or two. Ed was the best at taking an idea you gave him and turning it into something special, something unique. I told him we should do something like the Who’s “Magic Bus,” something with a lot of rhythm and acoustic guitars. Van Halen hadn’t really done anything with acoustic guitars.
I was in Malibu, lying in bed with my wife, about to get some, when I heard Eddie outside my door. Not even my front door, but the beach entrance directly under my bedroom deck. I could see him out there, cigarette glowing in the dark, no shirt, acoustic guitar around his neck, bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his hand.
“Ed, what?” I said.
“Come on, man. I’ve got this idea,” he said.
“Ed, it’s two o’clock in the morning,” I said. “I’m tired.”
“The old lady kicked me out,” he said. “Come on, man. Let me in.”
I went down. Betsy was pissed, but what could I do? He was my best friend and creative partner. She turned out the light. I wouldn’t let him in, because he’s got his cigarette, so we sat on the porch. He started playing me the riff for “Finish What Ya Started” and right away, I got excited. I went and got my acoustic and started doing my Tony Joe White thing. I was still thinking about going back upstairs and getting laid and started singing, “Come on, baby, finish what you started.” It never happened. Eddie and I saw the sun come up and I threw him out, but we had written just about the whole thing. I was imagining what was going to happen to me when I went back upstairs. That song is about unfulfilled sex.
It took a while to do OU812, more than it probably should have. Sober, Al played different. It was really weird. He wasn’t as good. When he was drinking, Al was always a radical drummer. He’d hit hard and do crazy fills. Drunk, he was off the hook, but sober, he was a lot more conservative. His timing was better, but he wasn’t as radical. In the end, it was easy to put aside things like that, because everybody was still getting along really good. The only problem was that I was starting to burn out, getting a little crispy around the edges.
Betsy, on the other hand, was losing it. I’d come off the VOA Tour, jumped into 5150, did the album and the tour, did my solo record, went around the world on the promotional tour, and straight back into the studio for OU812. And now we were going back on the road. She was crying, depressed all the time. Life was not good at home. I was not ignoring it any longer. Now I was concerned.
I went to Ed Leffler and suggested we do stadiums. We were in the biggest band in the world, and as it was, we were selling out four nights in arenas anywhere. Stadiums would allow us to go out for a couple of months instead of a year, and if things went right, we’d end up making way more money. Leffler thought it was a gamble, but worth taking.
We put together a bill. Kingdom Come was a new band from Germany that everyone thought was going to be big. The Germans sounded exactly like Led Zeppelin, but they told interviewers they never heard of the band. So they were history before they were out of the blocks. But they opened. Metallica, who went on second, had been my choice. They were a new band from the Bay Area, young and hip. Dokken, the third act, were ready to break up when the tour started, and following Metallica every night finished them. They broke up at the end of the tour. The Scorpions were also on that tour and they meant a lot. We called the tour Monsters of Rock and did twenty-seven shows between Memorial Day and the end of July 1988.
We had fifty-six trucks, three complete stages, and production systems that had to be put up all at the same time so that we could go out and play three shows a week. It cost $350,000 per show and it was easy to lose money. The shows broke even at forty-four thousand tickets and the tickets were expensive.
But the fact that OU812 went straight to number one made selling tickets easier. It went on to sell 4 million records and had the big hits “When It’s Love” and “Finish What Ya Started.” Meanwhile that tour made a lot of money, even if it didn’t do so hot in some places. We sold out two Detroits. We sold out two Texxas Jams. Sold out Candlestick Park in San Francisco. We sold out a couple of New Yorks. But, in Miami, we did around 25,000 people, and a hurricane blew in and ripped the concert to shreds. We had to stop in the middle. Big loss. We played a couple of other markets where it didn’t do so good and we ended up giving a lot of money back to the promoters. It wasn’t a disaster, far from it, but it wasn’t the home run we expected.
On the first song, opening night, I fell on a metal step. Everything had been running late and we didn’t have a full production run-through the day before like we normally would. The stage was done barely in time for us to play on it. I didn’t know the stage. I tripped and landed right on my tailbone, spent the whole night after the first show in the hospital. I was getting steroids shot into my ass every day for my broken tailbone. I was getting massages, and I had to sit on ice packs. I had a grapefruit on my lower vertebrae.
On days off, I flew home to see my doctor. On one of those trips back, I hobbled into the waiting room and there was Miles Davis sitting in a chair. The doctor opened the door and out comes Sting and his wife, Trudy. “Look. It’s Sammy Hagar,” Sting said. They left and the doctor said, “Sammy, have you met Miles?”
Fucking Miles Davis sitting there, dressed like a woman in his shiny, crazy-ass clothes, skinny corn rows in his hair. Miles puts his hand out, without standing up, and as I reach to shake his hand, he reaches out with his other hand around my forearm, and he pulls himself to his feet. He’s using me to get up out of the chair. I almost went down with him.
I had an ear infection. I had a sinus infection. I had a broken tailbone. That whole tour, I couldn’t sing because of my sinuses. Every night, I couldn’t sing. It was too big of a deal to cancel because it was so expensive.
We got to Texas, standing out in front of sixty thousand people at the Cotton Bowl, and I couldn’t sing. I was about to cry onstage. Texas was my country. I owned Texas. I was a headliner there long before Van Halen. I stopped in the middle of the first song.
“I can’t sing,” I said. “I promise you, Van Halen will come back and do a free concert for Dallas.”
We cut the show short, and the brothers went nuclear on me afterward. They crucified me for that. It was three years before we made good.
Earlier that day at the Cotton Bowl, we’d had an opening band called Krokus, who were handled by Butch Stone, a Southerner I knew from Montrose days when he managed Black Oak Arkansas. They planned to broadcast their set live on the radio, but Ed Leffler pulled the plug on them. Butch was really upset. There was a screaming match. That night at the hotel, after the bar closed, somebody jumped Leffler in the elevator and beat the shit out of him, knocked out a couple teeth, broke some ribs, really busted Ed up. He spent two weeks
in the hospital.
Still we rolled along. I told Betsy I was only going out for one month, but we came back and Leffler started talking about going back out to hit the other markets. The band had me in the backseat of a car coming back from some press function—Ed and I were drinking and doing coke—and they started drilling on me. With Al sober, he couldn’t sit around the house all day.
“I need a life,” he told me.
Eddie liked to be on the road, too. He and his brother would have played seven nights a week, if they could. They were really pressuring me.
“I just can’t do it,” I told them. “I love you guys, but I’m going to lose my marriage. I’m going to lose my family. It isn’t worth it to me.” It wasn’t like a fight, but we were bickering.
“We got you in the band, we thought you were committed,” Alex said. “If we would have known this, we would have gotten somebody else.”
Alex sober was a head-tripper. Drunk he was just tripped out. Eddie would always back him, no matter what. You could not come between those two guys in a million years. They’re not just brothers. They came from another country, didn’t speak English when they got here, and were tight. They’d fight like a cat and dog, but don’t get between them.
The brothers decided that Mike Anthony wasn’t making enough of a contribution to continue earning a full share of the music publishing. Truthfully, Mikey didn’t write. Ever. He basically played on bass what Eddie would tell him. He was a quick study and he would add to what he was given. Mike was a creative bass player. He had an incredible background voice that made a big difference in the sound of Van Halen. But the brothers needed money.
Al was almost broke. We were making tons of money, but Al was many million dollars in debt. Leffler helped consolidate his bills and arranged a five-year window with him just paying interest. He had a little real estate crash. He’d bought a $2 million house that he sunk even more millions into for rock-star junk like a rubber room, and then sold it for a big loss. He was making really bad deals.
We held a meeting and took a vote on reducing Mike’s partnership to 10 percent. Leffler and I voted no, but Mikey sided with the Van Halens and voted against himself, 3-2.
“I understand what you’re saying,” he said, “and I’m okay with it.”
I knew going back out was inevitable. We spent fall 1988 on the road. We didn’t do as hard a tour. We went back to some of the markets that we’d canceled. We went to some of the secondary markets we missed, trying to keep the record alive and make up for the bad press from the Monsters Tour. Everyone thought it bombed. It really didn’t. We made a lot of money, and we took care of everybody. No one lost money. But attendance wasn’t what it was supposed to be.
We were also doing whatever we could to pump album sales, which were, again, great, but not what they were supposed to be. As a result, we started making music videos. For 5150, Van Halen made no videos. Ed Leffler figured he didn’t want to compete with old Van Halen videos. Also, Warner Bros. refused to pay for the videos and they could be expensive. When we put out the first single, “When It’s Love,” from OU812 without a video, too, Warner started to freak out. They thought if we had put out a video with 5150, instead of selling 7 million, we would have sold 10 million. We were already out on tour when the second OU812 single, “When It’s Love,” came out, and Warner finally agreed to pay for a video. Leffler insisted it be a performance video. No acting. It needed to be shot on one of our off days from the tour.
They sent the Warner jet for us, flew us to Hollywood. We spent twelve hours shooting the video and I blew out my voice. At two in the morning, they loaded us back on the jet and sent us back to the next town on the tour. They had shot some B-roll with an actor and actress, and she was around for the shoot, wiping down the bar in the background of the shot or some such. We really connected, but I never even got the chance all day to take her in the back room.
The second video was “Finish What Ya Started,” where director Andy Morahan wanted to shoot everybody individually. He wanted to make sure everybody looked good all the time and you can never do that with four guys all at once. Someone always gets caught with his eyes crossed, his finger in his nose, his chin doubled. Leffler insisted on another performance video again. They shot us in high-contrast black-and-white against a white backdrop. We each played the song for about three hours. When we walked in, the place looked like the men’s department at Macy’s, there were so many racks of clothes. We wore what we were wearing. We didn’t let the stylists touch our hair or do our makeup. A lady put a little powder on and that was all. We would see all these dolled-up, blow-dried bands on MTV and laugh at the assholes. We weren’t going to do that.
WE WENT AND did those extra four months’ worth of shows, but by the time I came back home, my marriage was coming apart. Betsy was getting a distant look in her eye. I started worrying about her. Al’s marriage was also falling to pieces, and the four months on the road didn’t do that any good, either. With Al sober and Eddie still fucked up all the time, they were fighting like crazy. We broke up fights constantly. Over stupid things.
“Hey, Ed, you got a cigarette?”
“Hey, Al, why don’t you buy your own fucking cigarettes?”
“Hey, fuck you, man.”
“Well, fuck you.”
Boom. They’d just go at it because he asked for a cigarette. There was always tension between them. When they didn’t want us to know what they were arguing about, they would shout at each other in Dutch.
We didn’t sell out everywhere on the second leg. We still did big business, but we were doing eight thousand out of twelve thousand seats, and twelve thousand out of fifteen thousand, instead of two or three sold-out nights. Some cities, it was always there, others we had to work harder for.
Even though the OU812 album sold 4 million, people thought it wasn’t successful, since 5150 had sold 7 million, almost twice as many. Maybe the honeymoon’s over. Big pressure on me now. Now we’ve got to do a great record and go out and tour the rest of the world. We hadn’t toured the world yet. I was resisting. I didn’t want to go. That’s when Betsy had her nervous breakdown.
It all went down shortly after I had bought this airplane, a Merlin 3, and started spending a lot of time in Mexico. We had used it a few times, and I decided to buy it, a seven-passenger twin turbo prop, small and fast, the biggest plane you can have with one pilot. I was stretching a little bit, buying this plane. I could afford it, but it was a very big luxury. I redid the interior with all this white and beige, cream-colored leather and suede. I put in a flushing toilet. I had a seat that folded down into a double bed so that the kids could sleep.
The first trip we took on the new plane to Mexico, Betsy kind of freaked out. We arrived and she was all nervous. She couldn’t sleep and started shaking, getting really bad anxiety and panic attacks. With us was Bucky’s ex-wife, Joelle—they were divorced by then. Bucky had been living with their son, Benny, and Joelle was working for us as a nanny. We had to leave Mexico, because Betsy was feeling terrible. We got on the airplane. We were cruising at twenty-six thousand feet, halfway up the middle of Baja, when she started screaming and pulling her hair out. She tried to open the door and jump out of the plane.
Aaron wasn’t with us. Andrew was. He was a baby, about two years old, sleeping. Joelle had me hold Betsy down, and I yelled at the pilot to land. He told me I did not want to land in the middle of nowhere in Mexico with a crazy woman on the plane. “You’ve got to let me try to get to San Diego,” he said.
I had some booze on the plane, and Betsy was willing to drink it at this stage. She never drank, did drugs, or anything, but she was freaking out so badly she couldn’t breathe. I poured tequila down her throat, while Joelle held the baby’s ears.
Betsy finally calmed down. She passed out. She was drunk. When we got to San Diego, I hired a car to drive her to Malibu. We were originally on our way home to San Francisco, but we had our house in Malibu. I took Andrew with me on the pla
ne and she and Joelle went by limo to Malibu. Joelle was her good friend. She really took care of her. By the time she got home to Malibu, Betsy was in bad shape.
I called the doctor and he came straight over. He gave her shots that calmed her down. He told me she was having a panic attack. I had never even heard of a panic attack. There was a psychiatrist who lived across the street. He started coming over to our house for an hour or two every day. He put her on Prozac, Xanax, every kind of antidepressant, mood-enhancing drug you can take. Betsy had never taken drugs in her life.
I had twenty-four-hour nurses. I couldn’t leave her. I couldn’t even go to the grocery store. If I told her I was going to the store, she would fall on the floor and curl up in a little ball. I was the only one who could bring her out of these trances. We’d try to pry her open, get her to get off the floor, put her on the couch. Her pupils would dilate and she stared straight ahead at nothing. Nobody else could talk her down. I had to be around.
I held a meeting with the guys in Van Halen. I told them I cannot go in the studio. I cannot go on tour. I’ve got to get my wife healed.
WE TOOK A year off in between the OU812 Tour and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. Ed Leffler and I both believed that time off was good for a band who had been in everybody’s face so hard for so long. Promoters, record companies, everybody involved with making money off you will tell you to stay out there while you’re on top. They tell you the public forgets real fast.
They don’t. The Stones prove it every time they go out. Pink Floyd waited as long as they wanted to go back out. It’s the bands that tour, tour, tour that go down. Pretty soon nobody wants to see them anymore after they’ve seen them twenty times the last two years.
Eddie didn’t like being home, not doing anything. I was watching over Betsy every night, every day. Ed and Al were really putting pressure on me. They would be writing and come up with something cool, like “Poundcake.” I would hear what they were doing and really wanted to be working on it. I’d go in for a day or two.