by Sammy Hagar
We finally went in the studio to make the next album, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. We wanted that Led Zeppelin sound, so we went to Andy Johns, the British engineer who worked on the original Led Zeppelin albums. Too bad he was so trashed. He and Eddie were fucked up most of the time. We would start around noon, because I wanted to be home by dinnertime to help Betsy.
Making that album was kind of like pulling teeth. Betsy was under twenty-four-hour care and the situation at home was tense. I was trying to stretch out the process, not because I was being lazy. I wanted the album to be great and I wanted to be there as much as possible, but with all the problems at home, there were days I couldn’t go to the studio. Eddie and Al were there night and day, every day. They started hammering me a little bit about not being there. Eddie would call up and say, “We need you—when are you going to be able to come in?” I’d go in for a couple of days, sometimes a week straight, and sometimes I couldn’t come at all. I’d bring music home and listen. But it’s really hard to concentrate when your wife is curled up in a ball on the floor, crying.
Andy Johns was a disaster, but Eddie protected him. With Al sober, Eddie needed a new partner in crime and that was Andy. He was bombed a lot of the time. He crashed his car into the studio wall. I was not happy with the situation. There started to be a little tension. Then Andy erased one of my vocals. That was it. I wasn’t working with the guy anymore. I stormed out of the studio.
“Samster, come on, mate,” Andy said. “Just one more time.”
“Fuck you, Andy, that’s it,” I told him. “I’m done with your ass.”
It was hard enough getting a vocal with him because he was so disruptive and didn’t pay attention. I threw Andy Johns out and I brought back Ted Templeman, who not only produced Montrose and my VOA album, but handled the early albums with Van Halen when Roth was still in the band. Eddie and Ted didn’t get along, and Ted had bad-mouthed us when we’d originally formed before 5150. Still Ted came in and did all the vocals with me on For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge and helped with the mix. He saved the day for me.
The title was my idea. Around this time, the Florida rap group 2 Live Crew raised the issue of censorship in the record business. People kept asking us to take a stand. I thought, not to get all political, that we should call the next record Fuck Censorship. Leffler thought chain stores would refuse to carry a record with that title. Van Halen, the biggest band in the world? Every album number one? They’re going to do something, stuff the thing in a brown paper bag, something, anything. They’re going to figure out some way to sell the record, those greedy bastards.
At the time, Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, the former lightweight champ, had been training me. He came over a couple of times a week and put a hundred-pound bag of sand on my back and made me run up and down the seventy-seven steps that went down to the beach from my house. I was playing him some of the stuff, and he asked what we were going to call the album. “Fuck Censorship,” I said.
“Oh, wow, man,” he said. “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.”
I’d never heard that before, so he told me that in medieval days, when a woman was caught cheating, they’d lock her up in the town square, and hang a sign around her neck that said “F.U.C.K.”—“For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.”
“My mom told me that when I was in school,” he said. “First time I said ‘fuck.’”
“Poundcake,” the first single from the album, was a great video, number one on MTV, Rock Video of the Year in 1991 from Playboy magazine. We spent around $400,000 on that video, which had a ton of hot babes in it. That was the peak of MTV and the music video form and people spending money on them.
When I first saw the treatment to the video for “Right Now,” the next single from the album, I thought it looked like a terrible idea. That was the first serious lyric I had written for Van Halen, a big statement. All I could see was some of the director’s lines, like “I’ll wrestle you for food” or “Right now someone’s walking on a nude beach for the first time.” I read his treatment and, without seeing the video, thought he was nuts. This song was my baby. I went around in circles with Eddie and Al for six months on this. It was the last song we recorded for the album.
I had these lyrics, but Eddie couldn’t relate to what I was trying to say and he didn’t have any music that worked. I had been pumping these guys for months while we were playing video games or eating—“Right now, it’s your tomorrow…Right now, it’s everything”—but nobody was getting it. One day during a break, I heard Eddie fooling around on the piano in the other room. I went running in.
“That’s it, that’s it,” I said.
“I played this for you on the last album and you didn’t dig it,” said Eddie.
It fit like a glove. He didn’t have to rewrite anything. If Eddie had gone off and played video games instead, or if I’d sat down and started making phone calls like I usually did on breaks, it would have never happened.
I felt protective of the song. I did not want to do the dumb video. The Warner Bros. brass tracked me down in Hawaii. They were trying hard to convince me. I told them okay, but let me and Al come up with the script. This director had scenes in his treatment like me looking in a mirror with a poster of the old Van Halen in it, while it says, “Right now, Dave wishes he was Sammy.” We started writing together and began coming up with some pretty good lines. I still wasn’t convinced, but I started to feel enthusiasm stirring.
When it came time to shoot, however, we were in Chicago in the dead of winter, stuck inside a blizzard. I had been ill with pneumonia and forced to cancel two shows. I had been trapped in a hotel room for days, sick, in a bad mood and pissed off. The director was so vague with us—“Just stand over here”—and I couldn’t see the point of anything he was doing. At the end, there’s a shot in there where I’m folding my arms, standing there looking disgusted. And that’s exactly what I was doing. I wouldn’t even sing. I was just throwing my arms in the air and he shot it and put it in the video. At the end of the day, I had a 102 temperature and was dying. I walked out of the warehouse where we were shooting into the bathroom we used as a dressing room. The guy with the camera followed me all the way. When I reached the door, I turned around and gave the cameraman a dirty look and slammed the door in his face and it goes MEN on the door. That’s the way the video ends.
Mark Fenske, the director, what a great artist. It was the biggest video of our career, one of the biggest MTV videos of all time, and Crystal Pepsi paid us 2 million bucks to use it as a soda pop commercial. I can’t believe all those people had to beat me up so bad before I caved in, but the treatment really was bad. The video was brilliant.
MEANWHILE, BETSY WAS back home, giddy happy. She was getting better. They put her on drugs and she snapped out of it, started doing real good. She had lost a lot of weight—Betsy wasn’t hugely overweight, but, like any woman who’s had a couple of kids, she had to struggle with her weight. The drugs slimmed her down. I was ready to start taking them. I was running every day on the beach or riding my bicycle into Santa Monica and back. She had her roses and her horses. Betsy was a Beatrix Potter kind of girl. She started taking tennis lessons. I should have been happy, but, instead, I was going, in my head, “I am damn near over this.”
She had worn me out. I was done with that marriage. I wasn’t going to leave her, I was going to make sure that she was okay, but I was over it. In that one year, she’d worn me out. Every night I had to hold her and rock her to sleep in bed. I had to feed her. I had to make sure she ate. To me, it was like having an invalid child. When she was on her medication, she was doing great, riding her horses, playing tennis, walking on the beach, and just being a normal person, like she had never been since I met her. I was glad for her, but she had been holding me down so hard for so long.
She didn’t remember who she was. During that year, she was all broken down, really in trouble, in and out of mental hospitals. She forgot who she was. When she started taking Prozac and came out of he
r trance, she came back and was this happy person living in this beautiful house in Malibu with nice cars, horses, and money to burn. She flat didn’t remember anything. She became like a shopaholic. She had clothes in the closet, expensive designer sweaters and gowns, things that she wouldn’t wear in a million years, things that she just bought and shelved. She put something like a million dollars on her credit card that year. It didn’t even register.
Once she’d leveled out, Betsy went back to wanting me to quit the business, especially since my other businesses were continuing to do well. She needed something to distract her. I told her to go find a realtor and look at property. She had a $2 million budget. I knew that would keep her busy.
She ended up buying a house in Carmel by Big Sur. All Betsy ever had wanted in life was to live in Big Sur. One time, maybe ten years earlier, we were at the Highlands Inn in Carmel and I was jogging through the neighborhood. I ran past the coolest house I’d ever seen. Right on the cliff, waves splashing into the windows, it was a Frank Lloyd Wright–type house that looked like an upside-down boat. It had this big copper roof with this big spine on the top, like the keel of a boat. I took Betsy to see it and she didn’t even notice it, because of some storybook castle across the street. It was just as well. I had never dug it there—too big-spacey-heavy-lonely for me. We’d go down there from time to time and spend a week hiking and sitting there looking at the ocean, but it never felt like a place I could be in regularly.
Anyway, ten years later, Betsy was on her house search, when she called to say she found a place. We drove down and it was the same house I tried to show her ten years before. We bought it and Betsy threw a fortune in the place, totally doing it up.
Unfortunately, it didn’t change things much. She was busy, sure, but the situation between us was as strained as ever. Our relationship was over, but I didn’t feel I could leave her, because of the history. I’d been in this position before and wanted to leave Betsy a couple of times—not out of cruelty, out of necessity. It was like, “I can’t live like this anymore.” So many people go through that and stay together. They just learn to live separately for the rest of their lives, in separate bedrooms or whatever. We were still sexually active, so we weren’t sleeping in separate bedrooms. But the only thing that was left in our relationship was sex, our kids, and an empire. We had houses, businesses, and cars. The thought of divorce was ugly. I’d never have gone through it if I’d known how ugly it really was. It wasn’t just the unpleasantness of divorce, though; I just didn’t want to leave her. I still cared about her.
I’m the kind of person who can put my head in the sand pretty good, as well as put my head in the clouds as good as anyone, too. I’m really optimistic about everything I do in life. I don’t believe there’s a downside to anything when I go into things. I’ve been let down a few times, believe me, but it doesn’t destroy my optimism. I figured things were just going to get better. I was so busy all the time in my brain, it barely mattered.
Once I knew that she was okay and that she could be by herself, I decided I was willing to stick it out. I’d go back out on tour as much as I could and just keep fucking around and get out of the house whenever possible. I envisioned her getting better, maybe, but not our relationship. I didn’t think that was ever going to come back around. It wasn’t even on the top of my list. I was worn out from that year of taking care of her. I wasn’t going to put more effort into it now, or try to make this relationship happen, like I’d done a year earlier when I’d told the guys I wasn’t going to tour. I wasn’t going to do that no more. I was optimistic that she would get better, but meanwhile I was just going to do my thing. I accepted that this was going to be kind of fucked up.
I went out on the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge Tour, and I really started to mess around. I wasn’t off the leash completely, and I was very careful not to get caught, very careful not to bring home some infection. I wasn’t reckless. I was very, very cautious. I cared about my wife. It wasn’t like I didn’t love her. It’s just that we’d grown apart. Everything else was the same. I still loved her family. I still loved our family. I even loved our lifestyle. She just couldn’t stand my career and I loved it. She was in love with horses and I couldn’t have cared less. We had become entirely different people.
Once I got out there on that tour, I was partying a lot more than I ever had. I had always been pretty conservative with the partying, but once Betsy was getting better, all that changed. I’d call home at night after she was dialed in on Prozac. I’d say I was going to dinner and might not call later. “Okay,” she’d say, “then call me in the morning.” Free pass.
I started having as much fun as a rock star could have on that tour. I had all the money in the world, all the babes a guy could want. I was having a really good time. Lead singer in the biggest rock band in the world and I took full advantage of it. I was eating in the greatest restaurants, drinking the finest wine, flying on private jets, walking onstage to sold-out audiences going crazy for us. The only thing missing was…I don’t think anything was missing.
I fucked everything that walked. I had my own little tent underneath the stage. Eddie had his tent. Al had one, Mike had one. We all had our little tents. Mike and Al were on the other side. Eddie and I were on the same side, because Eddie was a dirty dog, like me. I sent roadies into the crowd to bring back girls I pointed out. During Eddie’s guitar solo, which was always about twenty minutes, I’d have five or six girls in my tent, naked, all of us, having brutal sex while Eddie was out there doing his thing. When I went back out, I had to stuff my hard-on back in those tight pants. I’d wear my robe for the next couple of songs. That was every night.
That way I could sort out the good ones. After the show, we’d carry on. I had so much sex that it got to where I couldn’t come. I’d go for two or three weeks without coming. It was like I was empty. I could fuck five girls all night. Some of the best sex I ever had in my life. John Kalodner loved this. He’d come out on the road with us and he’d line them up in his room. I’d go up there like a machine. “I’ve just never seen anything like this,” he said.
And then Kari entered the picture. I met her at the end of the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge Tour in October 1991. Every night I had been with a different woman. Our tour manager Scotty Ross was celebrating his birthday in Richmond, Virginia. Leffler liked him a lot and threw Scotty a party in his hotel suite.
Kari and two of her girlfriends came to the party. They were invited because her boyfriend was Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly, who knew the concert promoter. I was trying to pick up one of her girlfriends, because she seemed a little more available. Kari looked like a fun girl, really cool, good-looking, but I was chasing pussy.
Betsy was home, on medication. She was fixing up the house in Carmel, her dream home practically on the cliffs of Big Sur. I didn’t even want to come home.
When Kari said she had to leave to go judge a beauty contest at some nightclub, Eddie and I, both trashed, volunteered to go with her. We went back later to Ed Leffler’s party. I was good and hammered, still trying to pick up on Kari’s girlfriend, when something we were eating fell on the floor. I looked down and saw Kari’s feet. They’re like fingers—really bony and, I was thinking, gorgeous, the most long, beautiful toes I’d ever seen.
I looked back up. I couldn’t help myself. “You really have beautiful feet,” I said.
When I looked up and saw her face and her eyes, I realized how beautiful she was. “You like those cheetos?” her girlfriend said.
She called her toes “cheetos.” “Yes, I do,” I said. “I’d eat them fuckers right now.”
I started trying to hit on Kari. Everything was cool. We were having a good time just talking. At the end of the evening, around two o’clock in the morning, I invited her to come to my room.
“Oh, no,” she said. “We’ll walk you to your room. You’re trashed. You need to get some rest. You have a show tomorrow.”
She and her two girlfriends
walked me to my room. I opened the door and she gave me a little hug. “Damn,” I thought, “I’ve wasted all this time and I’m going to bed by myself?” I asked her if she wanted to go to the show the next night.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’ve got to take my grandmother to a wedding.”
The lead singer of Van Halen, headlining the Richmond Coliseum, inviting her to the show and she’s not going? She’s going to take her grandmother to a wedding? I dug it. She got me, right then and there.
“What time are you leaving?” she said. “I’ll try to make it back.”
I gave her my hotel alias. She called the next night. “We’re hauling ass in the car,” she said. “We’re going to try to make it. If we don’t, put our name down on the list. We’re coming.”
They arrived just in time and Kari was wearing a bridesmaid’s dress. They went into the other room and started ripping off their clothes. I peeked. They weren’t getting naked, but stripping down to bra and underpants and throwing on some jeans. Kari, to me, looked like one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen in my entire life. And, I’m thinking, tonight’s the night.
We were backstage at the gig. Scotty Ross pushed open the dressing-room door, still feeling the effects of his birthday party. “Scotty, this is Kari,” I said.
“Nice to meet you,” he said and puked all over the floor. Here I was, on my best rock-star behavior, and this guy comes in and blows it all over my dressing-room floor.
She was okay with it. On the way back from the show in the back of the limo, I tried to kiss her. She gave me little pecks. I had my arm around her and, for a second, I looked at her knees. Kari has these long, beautiful legs, skinny fingers and arms and toes. She’s a slim, beautiful, smooth-skinned woman. Her knees looked like they were made out of porcelain. I leaned down and kissed her knee.