by Sammy Hagar
I put the goose bumps on her. She got them and I saw them. “That was sweet,” she said.
Again, I asked her back to my room. “No, I can’t stay over,” she said, “but I’d love to see you again.”
Whoa. Tonight’s not the night? I planted a big lip-lock on her. We exchanged phone numbers, and, the next day, I left town with the band. About four days later, I called her. “If I send a plane for you, will you come and see me on my birthday?” I said.
“Are you kidding me?” she said. “Of course I would.” She’s got to give me some pussy now. She ain’t got nowhere to go. I sent a jet to pick her up. It was kind of a last-minute deal. By the time she was delivered to the gig, I was already on the stage. I saw her on the side of the stage and my fucking heart just started flipping and fluttering. Pow. I fucking fell in love. I saw her and it was just like, shazam, there she is, my dream woman.
I am fucking anything and everything, four or five times a night, and, all of a sudden, I bit the bait. I swallowed it. I’m in the boat now, floundering around. I came off the stage while Eddie did his solo and, instead of having four or five chicks waiting for me, I’m sitting there holding hands with Kari like some schoolboy.
After the show, in the dressing room, the promoter and Leffler had a giant cake for my birthday, and a stripper came bursting out of it naked. Not just any stripper, either, but the fattest, ugliest, most cellulite-ridden babe they could find. There’s no explaining how a girl that looked like that could do this for a living. I sat there, looking at Kari, trying to be this high-class guy, and thinking this was blowing it. But she cracked up. I thought, “I love this girl.”
I told her she was not going home and she agreed to stay a few days. I had my Red Rocker tandem bicycle shipped out. I couldn’t be away from her.
When she went back, I tried to spend a week without her, to test myself. I never fucked another girl. I didn’t get a blow job. I didn’t do anything, because all I wanted was her. I couldn’t take it. And we were about to go home for the holidays after almost four months out. That was really rough.
She came and spent another week on the road. I was beat up. I did not want to go home. After she spent the week with me, that was it. I was done. I was in love. I was going to go home and give it one more shot with my wife. I arrived home about two weeks before Christmas 1991. Betsy had the house in Carmel all fixed up. I stayed three or four days, woke up in the middle of the night, and told Betsy I had to leave. She was on medication. She told me it was okay, to do whatever I wanted to do—this from Betsy, the most jealous woman in the world. This was when I wrote “Amnesty Is Granted.”
I thought I could finally leave Betsy, because she was on so much medication that she was able, at last, to handle it. I was never sure before. One of the reasons why I never left her earlier was that I worried she was suicidal. I didn’t want her to commit suicide because of me. I couldn’t live with that. Betsy is not like other women. She does not fully belong in this world. She is harmless, vulnerable, and sensitive, but it is difficult for her to function. She can’t be around pesticides. She can’t eat certain foods. She is very intelligent and talented, but she is not strong in any way.
Finally, one night in Carmel, I confronted Betsy. I broke down. I started crying. I told her I was going up to Mill Valley to get my head straight and figure out some stuff. She was so zonked on her tranquilizers and mood elevators that she treated it as an unremarkable event.
“It’s okay, honey. You just need some time. Whenever you’re ready, come on back. If you have a girlfriend and you want to move back in the house with her, I’m okay with it. I don’t care what you’ve done. It’s okay.”
I didn’t tell her I had a girlfriend, that I’d fallen in love, that I’d been with seventy-five girls a week, practically, and suddenly I fell in love. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I hadn’t been in love in a long time.
I got in my car and drove home to Mill Valley. I called Kari and told her to come out and see me. “I just left my wife,” I said.
“Oh, my God, that’s terrible,” she said, “but I’m with my grandma and my mom and dad. We’re starting our Christmas ritual. I don’t really think I can do this.”
She finally agreed and I sent her a plane ticket. I picked her up at the airport and we went up to the house in Mill Valley. I felt so fucking uncomfortable. It was right before Christmas, and leaving five-year-old Andrew was breaking my heart. Then Betsy called. She had decided we needed to spend Christmas together.
“We’ve got a Christmas tree in the back of the truck,” she said. “Andrew and I are going to come up. We’ve got a Christmas tree and a turkey and we’re driving up to Mill Valley.”
Betsy had this truck that I had made for her, an old ’53 Chevy pickup on top of a brand-new Chevy drive train. Betsy, the horse girl, loved the truck. It was about a two-hour drive for her. She had not understood a word I said about leaving her.
I couldn’t be there when Betsy and Andrew arrived. Kari and I jumped in the car and headed straight for the airport. First, we flew back to see her parents, where she had to apologize to her grandparents for missing Christmas. “If I’m going to do this, you’re going to meet my parents,” she said. “You’re going to look my grandmother in the eye and say, ‘I want your girl to come with me. I’m sorry. This is the first Christmas in her life she’s not going to spend with you.’”
We flew back to Richmond, Virginia, and I met her parents. Her stepdad was pissed off (“That son of a bitch,” I heard him say from the other room, “who does he think he is?”). We became best buddies later, but he didn’t like me running away with his daughter. We took off for the Virgin Islands, a French resort called La Samanna. I was hiding out. Only Leffler knew where I was.
We fell in love. We stayed a month. I kept calling Betsy every few days. She did not understand that I was gone for good. She would tell me to take my time and come home when I was ready. As far as I could tell, Betsy never got her mind back together. She’s very bright and sensitive, really human, and a great mother. But I sensed there was a screw loose that just wouldn’t tighten back down.
When I finally told her brother, Bucky, his first words were, “I don’t know how you did it that long.”
9
RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW
The For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge Tour had been our biggest ever. We sold out so fast. We were doing two and three nights in the amphitheaters, a growing end of the rock concert field in the eighties, these huge holes scooped out of suburban earth that held twice as many people as the indoor arenas (universally known in the business as “sheds”).
At the end of the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge Tour, we’d decided to do the live album, Right Here, Right Now, if only to get a record out quick. We recorded and videoed Right Here, Right Now in Fresno as the tour was ending. After that Christmas with Kari, she and I had taken off on a rocket ship. We flew to Maui and stayed there for three months, and while Kari and I were off on our rocket ship, the Van Halen brothers were supposed to be in the studio mixing the live record. It should have been simple, but the dumb-ass brothers decided to take the live album, because they were so bored, back in the studio.
That’s when we started bumping heads. Looking back, I can see what happened. Al’s marriage was washed up. Eddie’s marriage had been on the rocks for some time, or at least that’s how Valerie tells it. It got to the point where Eddie was pretty wasted much of the time. Eddie went to the Betty Ford Clinic. He did rehab a few times. It never lasted more than a couple of weeks. When Al quit drinking, nobody changed. Eddie was drinking in front of him. But when Eddie came out of rehab, suddenly the rule was no booze in the studio, not that I ever sat around drinking beers. Sometimes after we’d finish recording, I’d bring in a bottle of tequila and Mike and I would do a couple shots, laugh, and have a good time. And, of course, Ed would do them, too. He wasn’t sober. He would keep everything stashed in the studio, with Valerie at the house next door.
&
nbsp; He never wanted me to go home. “Why do you have to go home now?” he would say. “Wait a minute, I got one more thing. I don’t like that part. We’ve got to recut that. You’ve got to re-sing this thing here.” He wanted to keep me as late as he possibly could, because he didn’t want to go home. Because once he went home, he couldn’t get back out and get to his stash. And once my car left their driveway and Valerie saw the lights and heard the engine and the gate open and close, then she knew I was gone. It got to the point where he was getting all fucked up late at night and making stupid remarks, because he wasn’t on top of it. There was always some reason. He would never cop to that he wanted me to stay because he didn’t want to go home. Valerie’s home, he’s in the studio. Valerie leaves, he’s in the house, drinking.
As the mess got bigger, our conflicts grew. Eddie Van Halen, who had been the humble guy under his big brother’s thumb, wanted to take over his band. He’d always been kind of passive-aggressive, but it got difficult to deal with. He would be humble and back down from confrontations, but then he would go behind my back and complain to Leffler that I wasn’t working hard enough.
And that was what happened when Kari and I went to Hawaii. The Van Halen brothers started freaking out, getting down on me big-time because I wasn’t around to rehearse the new studio sessions with them. I’d left my wife and now I didn’t want to go and rehearse. Fuck that.
The problem was they’d rerecorded almost the entire live album. Because Eddie was out of tune, or Al had sped up or slowed down, they’re fixing things. They fixed everything. Only now that Eddie was playing in tune, my singing’s off-key. And where Al sped up in “Runaround,” now I’m singing ahead of the beat. Now I had to go back in the studio and redo all my vocals. I wanted to kill those guys.
Kari and I flew back to Los Angeles from Hawaii. I told Eddie to stay the hell out of there. They put me in a room with the video of the concert, gave me my microphone, and I stood there and sang the whole fucking concert one time through. Just like it was a live performance. I barely went back to fix anything. It took me three hours and then I went to dinner.
The brothers were pissed. They took out the microscope, trying to find places that weren’t reasonable, that I needed to fix again. When they found something, I went out and fixed it. Fuck you.
Meanwhile, as Kari and I had been grooving in foreign ports of call, Betsy had filed for divorce. I hadn’t gone home since I left at Christmas. It broke my heart to leave five-year-old Andrew behind, and it was going to be a few years before I saw him at all. The split was not going to be amicable. It was going to be difficult and expensive. Betsy hired a lawyer who was picking over everything. He wanted to pay a recording engineer to go through and catalog all the unrecorded music and song ideas on cassettes I had at home, in case I wrote any songs in the future based on material I started when we were still married. I tried to head off everything with a settlement offer that would have actually given her more money than she got three years and millions of dollars in attorneys’ fees later.
Leffler figured out a way I could pay for the entire settlement in one swoop. He told me Geffen would pay huge money for a greatest-hits album—I’d never done one—and if I came up with a couple of new songs, there would be generous publishing advances for each of those. He worked it out so that the one album with the two new songs would pay for the entire divorce.
I went to see my attorney, who had drawn up the deal, and sitting in his office, next to each other, like they do when they’re insecure, were Eddie and Al. They didn’t want me to do the album. I told them I was going to do it and that it was going to pay for my divorce. They argued and argued. They said it would be bad for the band. It wasn’t like they said anything before to my face. They were real behind-the-back guys. They had a couple of conversations, worked each other up, started freaking out, and began to look into ways to keep me from doing something I wanted to do. Eddie didn’t know anything about his business. He probably didn’t even know where his money was. When my lawyer mentioned something about my getting paid on a publishing deal, Eddie wanted to know how he could get one. I told him he already had a publishing deal. They just didn’t want me to do anything they couldn’t control. It wasn’t long before they started seeing attorneys of their own about possibly suing me or throwing me out of the band.
SINCE RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW was going to be a double-record album, Warner Bros. raised the price. That hurt sales. It went to number five on the charts, our first album not to go number one. In the summer of 1993, we went out on another huge tour to promote the live album, and we made tons of money on it.
Even though the tour was big, the Van Halen brothers were still working that attitude on me that I wasn’t doing enough. “If you could sing five nights a week, think how much money we’d make.” They didn’t care about my voice. “If you can’t sing, just dance,” they’d say.
We started getting into it more often, and things weren’t as friendly. Eventually, I started flying on my own. I’d fly home by myself, and I’d come back. I’d stay in different hotels. By the end of the tour, Eddie and I weren’t getting along.
What complicated things was the fact that Ed Leffler got really sick in the middle of that tour. At the start of the tour, he’d found a lump in his throat and it was cancer. He had it taken out and came right back out on the road. He even stopped smoking for a while, although that didn’t last. But you could tell he wasn’t doing so well. He was always sweating, kind of pale, and losing weight.
The cancer came back. He hit it with chemotherapy and radiation, and it spread. He was done. It was only a few weeks. He went from a guy out on tour with us, getting pussy, doing blow, drinking, having a good time, in his mid-fifties, and now he was going to die. He was weak and sickly, but stayed on the road with us.
On the last two nights of the tour in August 1993, we were playing at an amphitheater in Costa Mesa, outside Los Angeles. I was feeling blue about Leffler, so I decided to switch the acoustic number I usually did, “Eagles Fly,” to “Amnesty.” Since we were back in town, all Eddie’s bad-news friends showed up with the drugs and the women, and he was wasted. In the middle of my song, he decided he needed to change the tubes in his amplifier. I’m out there doing this song and Eddie’s over there panicking, taking his equipment down behind me. I’m trying to do this sensitive song, and it was really pissing me off. I’m playing acoustic and singing “Amnesty Is Granted” and Eddie’s checking his tone out to see if the tubes were working, fucked up out of his mind.
I came off the stage and grabbed him. We got into it, but Leffler pulled us apart. I came out for the encore, waiting for Eddie. I was going to kick his ass right here, right now. Leffler shoved me in the back of a car and off it went. Later I got a call from Al telling me that not only was that the first time we didn’t do an encore, but Ed Leffler had collapsed. His legs went numb on him and he fell down and couldn’t stand. They had him lying down.
Eddie apologized and I came back the next night. He was like that. He would do the worst shit you could ever imagine, and the next day he’d be humble and whiny, crying and hugging you. It was easy to forgive this guy, because he went all the way to the ground with his humility. Next day? Whole different guy.
The next night, the final show on the tour and our second night at Costa Mesa, we did one of the greatest shows we’d ever done. We were worn out, beyond tired. It was the end of the tour. We went out there and played from a whole other place for the first time in a long time. We played a real emotional show. Every song felt like everybody meant it. We weren’t just doing a regular show. We burned our encores and everything down to the ground. The next day, Ed Leffler went into the hospital.
We did all this crazy shit to try and help Leffler stay alive. I found a lady who took urine specimens to Mexico, where they took the neurotransmitters out of your pee and returned it in little vials. You shot it up every day, in the muscle, not intravenously. I made Ed do it. I did it with him. And then there wa
s this purple goo, slime that dyed your skin violet. We put his feet in it, supposedly to suck all the toxins out. We tried everything. He was walking around, breathing oxygen out of a tank.
We kept him alive for a month, maybe, with all these different things. He didn’t have any hope. Leffler would just look at you and say, “Sure, okay, I’ll try it.” He was a real smart guy, but he didn’t believe in hocus-pocus.
By October, I was getting ready to go to Mexico with Michael Anthony for my birthday. I went to see Leffler in the hospital the day before. He was in bad shape. They were taking a liter of fluid a day out of his lungs. He was on morphine. He asked me to massage his hands. He couldn’t feel anything. I’m massaging Leffler’s hands. I ask him who should we get to manage the band. “Just stay away from Howard Kaufman,” he said.
I couldn’t believe it. Howard Kaufman managed the Seattle rock band with the two Wilson sisters, Heart, and Leffler was holding a grudge from a while back when Kaufman had pulled Heart and all the other bands he managed out of my travel agency because he thought Leffler owned it. Leffler didn’t care who managed us after he died, but he took his enemies to the grave.
A couple of days later, Eddie and Al called me in Mexico to say that if I want to see Leffler alive again, I’d better get right back. I had a big celebration planned for my birthday and didn’t want to leave. I called the hospital and talked to Leffler, who told me everything was fine, to stay where I was.
The next night, I was going with my brother to play at the cantina, and I felt a cold wind blow through me. I looked at my brother.
“Wow, I just got the loneliest feeling—I feel lonelier than I’ve ever felt in my life,” I said.
I didn’t think Leffler had died. I wasn’t even thinking about Ed Leffler. Honestly, I was thinking about the gig. I walked out in this beautiful, warm Cabo night, and something walked right through me. I felt like the only person on the planet.