by Sammy Hagar
I got the call at the club. Leffler had died. Just like with my dad. My brother was there—he saw it happen. I did the show and got on a plane the next morning. I went to the funeral, and did a little speech for Leffler. When he died, they put a gram of blow and a bottle of J&B Scotch in his coffin. His friends were characters. They didn’t take it lightly or unlovingly, but they did this crazy stuff. That was the end of Ed Leffler.
10
CABO WABO
In December 1983, I saw a photograph in People magazine from the wedding of Keith Richards and Patti Hansen. They were standing poolside at the Twin Dolphin, the only real hotel in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, at the time, and I thought it looked cool. He has always been one of my heroes, and I told Betsy we should go down, check the place out.
There was only one flight a week—one flight in, one flight out—and two places to stay with dirt roads from the airport all the way to the Twin Dolphin. There were no telephones, no newspapers, no televisions, and no air-conditioning. To make a phone call, you had to go to the phone company downtown and pay by the minute after they placed the call for you.
When Keith came down for his wedding, he’d planned to stay for a week, but didn’t leave for three months. His family went back after a couple of weeks, but he stayed, sleeping on people’s floors. Jorge Viaña, the bellman at the Twin Dolphin who eventually became the manager of the Cabo Wabo, took Keith everywhere. Keith liked to sit in with the mariachi bands. They didn’t know who he was, this crazy gringo in the rock-and-roll clothes, but he was drinking tequila straight from the bottle and handing out $100 bills, so they loved him.
Keith borrowed Jorge’s car to run into town and make a phone call, about seven miles into town from the Twin Dolphin. He never came back. Nobody had cars down there, but Jorge finally talked the manager into driving him downtown after midnight to look for Keith and his car. He saw his car parked in the service station, long-closed. He looked inside and there was Keith, passed out on the floor next to the service station guy, a couple of empty tequila bottles beside them. He probably just stopped to get some gas, and maybe some directions.
Betsy and I went down there shortly after I read about Keith’s wedding, and I fell in love. It was such a pristine, beautiful place. You would be walking on the beach and a wave would crash on the shore and blast a five-pound red snapper up on the sand. All you had to do was reach down and pick it up. You could snorkel anywhere in the rocks and pull up oysters. You could damn near catch fish with your hands. There was nobody around for miles.
The place was pretty much closed up during the summer, and if you didn’t want to eat the mediocre food at one of the hotels, your best bet was a local taco stand or somebody’s house. Latinos are very hospitable about inviting strangers to eat at their homes, even people they meet on the street. I used to go to people’s houses and eat, all the time, in Cabo.
While I was down there, I’d run across this place outside of town, called Guadalajara, a little palapa shack, no windows, no doors. Chickens were running around. I sat down and, in my little bullshit Spanish—Betsy could speak Spanish pretty well but I was lost—I asked, “What do you have?”
“Pollo, frijoles, arroz, and cerveza, chips, salsa,” the man said. Outside, walking across the street from the marina, he saw two kids, not more than eight years old, carrying a big swordfish on a stick poked through its eyeballs. Each kid had an end of the stick and they were dragging the giant fish. The guy turned around. “Y pescado fresco,” he said.
He goes over to the kids, gives them some money, takes a knife, and, whap, whap, cuts a couple of big steaks off the damn thing. They go off down the road to the next restaurant with the fish their pop had just caught. I ordered the fish. I thought I’d died and went to heaven. This was the coolest thing I’d ever done in my life—sitting there, having a brew, not a car anywhere, chickens running around. You’re throwing crumbs down, the chickens eat them. You see a chicken on the grill, you know where that sucker came from.
About the third time I went, still before I joined Van Halen in 1985, Jorge took me to town. It was all dirt roads. You couldn’t drive down there. You’d run out of gas in between gas stations. The first time I drove there, we had to sleep on the side of the road at a gas station, waiting for it to open. There was nothing there but little shacks for restaurants, but you could see the marina from anywhere downtown. I decided I wanted to build a bar. I had already tasted real tequila and fallen in love with the stuff. I told Jorge to find me a piece of property. I had a phone put in Jorge’s house, so we could stay in touch. They ran the wire from the phone company office, wrapped it around stop signs, and took it to his place. Fortunately, he lived right downtown.
There was a new development, called Terraso, going up on the most beautiful stretch of beach around. They only had one condo finished when I first saw it, but I bought a place on the spot and moved in for the whole summer. That time of year, Cabo was a ghost town. Everything was closed. You couldn’t even find a restaurant open half the time. The condo units were all empty. I had a couple acres on the beach and a giant swimming pool to myself.
I also started going down every October, because my brother’s birthday is October 8, my sister’s is October 11, and mine is October 13. I took my mom, my brother and sisters and their families to the Twin Dolphin, and celebrated our birthdays for two weeks. Bucky shipped down one of my hot-rod mountain bikes and I was biking the dirt roads around Cabo every day.
One year, Jorge told me about a triathlon that was being held by the local military base but was open to outsiders. I signed up. The city offered a $1,000 cash prize, so the race attracted a lot of interest. Pretty much the whole town turned out at the marina to watch, as maybe 150 contestants crowded the dock where they were to swim the first lap, a quarter-mile across the bay. I was wearing a regulation banana hammock, a pair of Speedos, but everybody else simply stripped to their underwear there on the spot and jumped in. I held back. A lot of these people didn’t know how to swim and they were splashing and floundering.
I dove in and swam across. When I got out, there was a short, stocky guy who started running down the beach, leaving me in the dust, but I was up there with the top four or five guys. We reached the third leg, the bicycle part, and Jorge was waiting, holding my bike. Only about half of the people still in the race, running down the beach behind us, had bikes. I didn’t know what the others were going to do. The bikes they did have were trashed, big, heavy clunkers, some even missing tires, and I had this lightweight, ten-speed mountain bike. They had never even seen anything like it down there. I was beginning to feel like the biggest asshole in the world. The short, stocky guy was chugging up ahead of me on his junky piece of steel. He was dying going up the hill when I went flying by him in my mid-gears.
I finished so far in front, I was barely breathing hard when he finally made it across the finish line. I looked at Jorge and handed the heavyset dude the trophy and the cash. He took them both, turned around and raised his hands above his head like he won the race. He never even said thank-you. Jorge and I laughed at that for days.
The more time I spent down there, the better it got, and once I was in Van Halen, Cabo became an important part of how I wrote songs. I would jam new tunes with Ed, Al, and Mike and make up lyrics by scatting along. Then I’d go to Cabo. I’d relax on the beach, finish my lyrics, come back and do my vocals.
A couple of songs from OU812 had actually come from my writing down there. “Sucker in a 3 Piece” came from Cabo. I saw this gorgeous chick poolside at the Twin Dolphin, who was married to this old dude, and this chick’s giving me some vibes even though I was married and she was with this rich guy, the “Sucker in a 3 Piece.”
One Sunday, about nine-thirty in the morning, I was driving to my favorite taco stand for breakfast, down a dirt road with a barbed-wire fence. Some guy was wobbling down the road in front of me. I couldn’t get around him. He bounced, first, off the fence into the road in front of me, and then back int
o the barbed wire. He had blood running down his leg and was missing a shoe. He was some local who’d been up all night drinking mescal. I watched him make his way down the road like that, and it occurs to me—this guy is doing the Cabo Wabo. I went back to my pad and wrote the lyrics. “Been to Rome, Dallas, Texas, man, I thought I’d seen it all—round the world, every corner, man, I thought I’d hit the wall.” The whole song spilled out of me, “Cabo Wabo.”
Since I had one of the only telephones in Cabo, I called up Eddie and said, “Eddie, listen to this.” I wrote the song, in my head, to the music from “Make It Last,” one of the first songs I wrote in Montrose. I sang it to him over the phone.
“Oh, man, listen to this,” he said. “Al and I worked this up last night.” He played some music that sounded very much like “Make It Last.”
On the phone, it worked. I flew back to L.A. early so I could sing that song. They had recorded the music while I was gone. I walked in. I took a handheld microphone. I was just going to scat, but I read the lyrics off my paper from beginning to end, and that song was done. On OU812, my vocals have a funny sound because of that bullshit little handheld mike, but it was such a perfect vocal take, we all decided to keep it.
IT TOOK HIM nearly four years, but Jorge finally found a piece of property for the bar I’d wanted to build, but it was going to be expensive. Even though I was in Van Halen, I didn’t have the money for a million-dollar project, more like a half-million-dollar project. But still, that was a lot of money to be putting into a town with dirt roads and no telephones.
The town had been building up a little bit though. None of the side streets were paved, but they’d paved the road to town and partway through town. The swinging set in Hollywood began to discover the town. The hipsters were coming down. It wasn’t just a little fishing village any longer. Boat-owners and private-plane pilots found the place. Private planes would land on this dirt strip. Walking around, you could sense the potential, it just wasn’t there yet.
I knew I was going to call the cantina Cabo Wabo. I had already written the song. It was going to be a tequila bar, a small place with a stage. I told Jorge to find an architect, and he found Marco Monroy Jr., son of the developer of Terrasol, who I had met. His father had showed me a smelly, old sardine factory earlier, when I was looking for locations. His son had recently graduated college and was starting to work for his dad. He had built a couple of houses that were the coolest houses down there. I hired him.
Marco did the plans. It looked fantastic. I thought the building was three thousand square feet, but Marco and Jorge were talking three thousand meters. I thought there would be plenty of room for a big parking lot. When they laid the foundation, it was three times larger than I figured. I was thinking of a nice, small room that would hold 50 or 60 people, 150 tops.
With everything going on, the plans for my cantina had begun to get a lot of my enthusiasm and Eddie and Al couldn’t help but notice. Finally, Ed Leffler had told me the other guys in Van Halen were beginning to feel like they were being left out. He’d taken me aside and gently suggested that I make the other guys my partners in the cantina.
“You want MTV to really support it, you want the press, you want the publicity,” he’d said. “Bring these guys in on it.”
We held a meeting and all of them, including Leffler, decided to join up as equal partners. They each gave me some $70,000 to repay the money I’d put up.
It worked. Van Halen played the gala grand opening weekend in April 1990. MTV spent millions of dollars on a big promotion. They filmed commercials and held contests. They flew a whole airplane full of people down there. Raquel Welch was there. Brad Delp from Boston, Steve Lukather from Toto. The whole town was excited.
Betsy’s freak-out on the plane had been the year before and she hadn’t been on a plane since. By the grand opening of the cantina, she was beginning to come around and the medication was starting to work, but she wouldn’t get on a plane. I still had my plane, but I couldn’t fly down there without her. I bought a motor home to drive us all down for the grand opening. I got my brother-in-law and my sister to come with me, Betsy, the nanny, and the kids. It took three days to drive down. It was my second time driving down and it was rough going. By the time I got there, I wanted to kill Betsy. In the middle of the drive, I sent my plane down to Cabo with her psychiatrist, our doctor, and their families, and a couple of friends of mine. I put eight people on that sucker and flew them down in my plane while I’m driving a fucking thirty-two-foot motor home for three days.
Betsy loved Cabo, but she was afraid of everything. She was afraid that she was going to have another panic attack. She hadn’t been back since she flipped out the last time. She was nervous about going back to the same condo in Terrasol. She was in kind of bad shape. We were on the outskirts of town, twenty minutes from the condo, showing our guests one of her favorite beaches, and she was getting disturbed. The psychiatrist suggested they go for a walk on the beach.
She was shaking and he was trying to calm her down. While they walked down the beach, we sat around, trying to give them some space. I snapped. I cracked. The pressure of the grand opening, and the Van Halen guys coming down for the first time. They were all freaked out, too—What, no telephones in the room? What do you mean, no room service? I stormed over to where Betsy and her psychiatrist were talking.
“Fuck this,” I told the psychiatrist. “I’ve got shit to do. We’re getting out of here.” She actually snapped out of it. It woke her up. We got back to the condo, and I knew I couldn’t be too heavy with her.
We left to do the sound check. Betsy’s doctor came. The guy had never seen me play before. He was just a psychiatrist who knew Eddie. The doctor was blown away by the sound check. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” he said.
The grand opening weekend went great. Van Halen played a couple of nights. We had MTV and Mexican TV. It was a really big deal that went sour almost immediately.
The first week, everything went great. As soon as we left and the town emptied out, nobody came to the cantina. The locals didn’t go to Cabo Wabo. We didn’t have much of a restaurant, only a big taco bar. We served drinks. There really wasn’t much to do there. We didn’t have a live band. We played music over speakers. It was a fourteen-thousand-square-foot echo chamber. It was dark. We had a lot of low lights and everything was black. It really didn’t have any charm yet. We built this place and opened it. Marco wasn’t involved. Jorge, who never did anything like this before, was running the business. Once a week a plane would come in, and there would be people in town. Once or twice a week, the place would do well, but not that well. The rest of the week, it was empty.
T-shirts were selling well when we first opened. We could never get Jorge to send the T-shirt money. Jorge stopped because he didn’t have any money to buy more T-shirts. He didn’t have money to buy more booze, more food, pay the employees. The place was dying. It was losing about ten grand a month, which is plenty of money. Jorge didn’t know what he was doing.
Leffler was still alive and healthy when all this was going down. He’d flown down to sort things out and on the plane he met the Deadhead son of the man who owned another hotel in another town. I knew him from the hotel. He sat at the bar, drinking all day. Leffler fired Jorge and put the Deadhead in charge. Didn’t do a damn bit of good. He had more business sense, but the guy was doing drugs and drinking and the Federales were shaking him down because they knew he was dealing.
Van Halen only played Cabo one more time, after a Mexico City concert in 1992 on the cantina’s second anniversary, but Mikey and I used to take David Lauser down to play my birthday bash in October every year. Eddie and Al weren’t happy about the place. Every time they turned around, we were asking everybody for money. They each put in another ten grand a couple of times. That would support the place for six months or so. It was losing more than a hundred grand a year. After a couple of times, they said they weren’t going to put any more money in the c
antina.
Finally, Mike and I decided that every time the cantina needed money, we’d go down and play. We’d do two or three nights, the place would be packed. We’d charge five bucks at the door. That way we kept it going. We played the cantina five times that year and never had to put money in it again.
One night, our Deadhead manager asked if he could introduce me. He seemed so coked up, his jaw was going from left to right, grinding his teeth. He got up there and started telling jokes and stories. People were throwing stuff at him and yelling. We had to drag him off.
In the office, I told him to open the safe and he was so addled he couldn’t work the combination. He finally opened up the safe and the only thing in there was a bag of coke. I fired him. I went back and told Leffler. The band was all pissed off. It was a mess.
He later cleaned up and told everybody he was sorry. He had a family and lived down there. He was trying to get it back together. Leffler cut him some slack, because we didn’t have any choice, but the whole situation had made all of us—especially the Van Halen brothers—anxious about Cabo and where it was headed. They refused to sink any more money into it and seemed like they were done with the whole idea of the place. I thought we could keep it going, but I knew it needed help. What I didn’t know was that after Leffler’s death, things would only get worse.
11
FATHER’S DAY
When Leffler died, we auditioned managers. I wanted Shep Gordon and Johnny Barbis—Shep was Alice Cooper’s brilliant manager and Barbis was one of the best-liked people in the business, ran labels, was pals with U2, Elton John, everybody. The brass at Warner Bros. liked the idea. We met with them. The brothers didn’t like them. I called David Geffen and he suggested his old partner, Elliot Roberts, Neil Young’s manager. We met with him, too, and the Van Halens blew him out in about five seconds.