by Sammy Hagar
Ed and Al wound me up for two months auditioning people before they told me they wanted Ray Danniels. He was married to Al’s wife’s sister and managed Rush. They told me I got my man the last time and they wanted their guy this time. Ray Danniels had been lurking in the background the whole time.
Before he was even our manager, Ray Danniels had told the Van Halen brothers about a publishing deal Leffler made on the live album that I didn’t know anything about. It was no big deal, but Ray Danniels made the brothers think they’d been screwed. They made me pay them back a substantial sum. Alex Van Halen never wrote a song in his life and he was taking the same amount of publishing money as me. Danniels gained the confidence of the brothers that he was going to be on their side, not mine. Ed and Al were really going against me at this stage. They thought Leffler and I fucked them. We didn’t fuck those guys. We saved them. They made ten times more money in one year than they’d ever made in any year before we came into the band. Nobody fucked anybody.
I told Ray to his face, “They’re going to sign with you. I’m not. You get zero of my money.” The deal I made was they paid management. I didn’t pay management. He didn’t do shit for me. He wasn’t my manager. I would find my own manager. I did not like the guy. I wanted to bite his face off. And he was scared of me. He didn’t want to come into a room with me. He stayed away from me, always holding meetings with Eddie.
Ray Danniels went to Warner Bros. and renewed our contract. He negotiated a few extra points for the band’s early albums—the ones I wasn’t on—other than that, nothing changed. He renegotiated the same deal we had to begin with. Except for one thing. When I joined Van Halen, Ed Leffler had put in the contract that after every Van Halen record, I had the right to do a Sammy Hagar solo record for big money. I only did the one. Ed Leffler called it my golden parachute. Somehow they took that out.
I walked into a dressing room backstage in Toronto, Ray Danniels was there with his briefcase. Ed and Al were signing papers with a notary. They were signing the record deal and they didn’t even want my signature on it. “Don’t worry about it,” Ray Danniels said. “Ed and Al are all that matters in this band.”
A FEW MONTHS after Leffler died, the cokehead manager down in Cabo called in early 1994 to tell me he gave the keys to the employees and that the government had wrapped a yellow ribbon around the place and closed it down. I couldn’t think what else to do, so I called Marco Monroy.
Marco discovered the manager didn’t pay any bills for the whole year. He spent all the money. Marco said the cantina owed around $300,000. The place was trashed. The furniture was shot, the equipment broken. He wanted to be my partner. He offered to pay the debts and invest another hundred grand into fixing the place up.
Jorge, by now, was long gone. He hooked up with an American “actress” with some bad habits. The problem was that everything was in Jorge’s name. He was gone. We didn’t know where the hell he was. It wasn’t pretty.
I needed to take complete control of the cantina. The Van Halens had already told me to shove the place up my ass, and after Leffler died, our relationship got even worse. I went to Ray Danniels and asked him if I could buy out the other partners. He was trying to get on my good side. He cooked up a plan with our accountant where they could get their money back by taking the loss. They wrote it off on their taxes. They gave it back to me after I agreed that if I ever built another one, they would have the first right of refusal to invest. If I sold it within five years, they would get their investment back, although that would be a little tricky after they already took it off their taxes. I had to indemnify them against the debts and any other legal problems. It was a little complex, but I went for it.
Marco wanted to bring in someone he knew to manage the cantina. Tito was a tough hombre, married to a wealthy Mexican heiress. They lived in a mansion Marco built. Tito cleaned house. He not only tightened up the staff, he got rid of the drug dealers and lowlife’s who were hanging out at the place. Marco and I decided to get the title to the property back and get the business into shape. When we couldn’t find Jorge, we went to his ex-wife, who still lived with her kids in Cabo. We offered her $25,000. She didn’t speak English, but we brought an interpreter. She got up and walked out. I have no idea why, because she ended up with nothing.
We finally dug up Jorge and he hard-nosed us. He wanted 10 percent. Marco and I each gave up 5 percent to get him to sign off on everything. Before long, he came crawling back asking for his job. He left the chick. He was straightened out. He moved back to Cabo, and we let him come in. He’s been there ever since and he’s been, as much as Marco, a savior of the place.
The town was all starting to come together. The big dream was really happening in Cabo. The road was paved now. There were more hotels. Three or four planes were coming in a day. The town was packed. From the first day, Marco and Tito really turned Cabo Wabo around. They cleaned the place up, made it nice. Boom, within the first month, we started making money.
The place looked fantastic. We were putting money back into it and taking money out without any out of our pockets. The first year we made around two hundred grand in profit.
The brothers weren’t happy. They started accusing me of running the place into the ground so that they’d give it back to me. I wish I were that smart. Scotty Ross, our tour manager, sort of a big-mouth guy, came back from Cabo and walked into a Van Halen rehearsal and slapped my hand. “Cabo Wabo was packed, dude,” he said. “You’re making tons of money. The place looks great.” The Van Halens weren’t smiling.
Mikey and I were still going down almost every other month. Mike was willing to roll with me. He was planning to go down with me for my birthday that year, but they wouldn’t let Mike ever go again. Mike wasn’t allowed to go to Cabo. They really thought I fucked them.
AS CABO WAS coming together, I was spending as much time as I could with Kari. She and I just wanted to go do things. We spent every night together. We lived in Hawaii, Mexico, Mill Valley. We’d go to New York. We’d go to Malta. We went to Italy. We went anywhere we wanted to go.
We had such synchronicity. We were walking around at the Hana Ranch on Maui, we had eaten some mushrooms, when the idea came up to get a parrot. We walked a little farther, and there’s a cage with some parrots. This one little gal came to the cage and rubbed her head against the bars, like birds do. We cut a deal and took her back to our room. Her name was Spooch. That bird slept with us under the covers.
As soon as we got home to Mill Valley, we were sitting in the backyard by the pool. We clipped Spooch’s wings so she couldn’t leave. She was sitting on our shoulders. Spooch was a nanday conure and we were talking about how we had to get Spooch a boyfriend, when out of the sky flies a motherfucking nanday conure, who lands on Spooch’s cage. Spooch was talking to the bird. The bird went into the cage to drink some water. Boom. We got us another bird. We called him Spooky. He never got along with Spooch—they fought like crazy—and we eventually had to give him to Bucky, but that happened to us.
Shortly after we got together, we were in Boca Raton, near where Kari’s father lived in Florida. She wanted to go see her father. He bought houses, would move in for six months, fix them up, move out, and rent them. We took a limo—it was more than an hour away—and went out to dinner. In the limo after dinner, we smoked a fat one and started to get a little sexy in the backseat. We found her father’s place around midnight, and Kari grabbed the key from the top of the water heater. We let ourselves in, turned on the living room light, and started rolling around on the couch. I put my foot on the floor and, hey, stepped on a pair of men’s shoes. I jumped up naked and turned on some more lights. There’s a shirt across a chair, an ashtray with cigarettes in it. Somebody has rented the house and is living in it.
We ran out of there, stoned on our asses, half-naked, throwing on our clothes, into the limo. Our hearts were pounding. We could have been killed, but we couldn’t stop laughing.
So many things happened with Kari an
d me because we were in sync. With Betsy, I was living a lie. I was lying to her about everything, and I was therefore lying to other people on the phone, because she could hear. I was this whole lie—so far out of sync that things weren’t working for me. As soon as I fell in love with Kari, I opened up and never lied again. I felt spontaneous. I felt free. Everything we did was the right thing to do. Things came to us that we wanted. You would think it, and it would happen.
We could laugh over anything. Another night, after we moved back to Mill Valley, at the Sweetwater, the town’s tiny rock club, I met Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. Kari and I ran across him sitting at a table with a girlfriend, drinking Suntory scotch straight out of the bottle. We sat and drank together until the place closed at two in the morning. “Let’s go to my house,” he said.
The smart thing to do is have everybody come to your house and then they have to drive home, not you. “No,” I said. “Let’s go to my house.”
He pulled into my driveway in this beat-up old Corvette that hadn’t been washed in years. My driveway is pretty wicked. There wasn’t even a curb, just a sheer drop that goes down 250 feet. Bob brought a mason jar full of buds. His scotch was almost gone. We started smoking weed and continued drinking. We played a little guitar. We peed off the deck. About four in the morning, I’m wasted and shot. I told Bob it was time for them to go. We let them out the door and Kari asked wasn’t I going to help him get out of the driveway. I didn’t see it. He was Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. He could take care of himself. I started up the stairs.
A terrible loud scraping noise outside—Kari’s going, “Oh, my God”—and I come running back down. Instead of backing up and turning around, he has driven straight forward, off the driveway, and his car was now sitting half on and half off the driveway, facing down, the rear wheels off the ground. Kari and I dashed out and sat on the trunk. Weir, sitting in the car next to his girlfriend, looked dazed. “I think I need to pull forward,” he said.
I told him to sit very still and have his girlfriend climb out carefully. She crawled out over the back and sat on the trunk with us. He climbed out after her. The car could have gone down in a second. No seat belt, convertible, down the hill—he’s dead. Bob Weir dead at Sammy Hagar’s home. It was horrible and five in the morning. I told him to walk home. He took his mason jar of buds and wandered off down the hill with his girlfriend.
The next morning, I had to meet some people and I was very hungover on about three hours’ sleep. I backed out my Ferrari down the driveway, trying to maneuver around his car and not knock it down the hill, and broke off my goddamn $1,600 side mirror. I called a tow company. When we got home around five o’clock in the afternoon, the tow truck left a note saying they couldn’t take the car. There wasn’t enough room behind the car and they were worried about pushing it over the hill.
It took two tow trucks and three days to get that damn car off my driveway. I even paid for the tow truck. I was pissed at Bob, but Kari and I only laughed.
After a while, Kari started wanting to settle down a little more in the house in Mill Valley. She started putting some of her own items in there. She’d been living in Betsy’s house, sleeping in Betsy’s bed. She started making changes. I began to see her domestic side. Before long, she started talking about how she would like to have a baby. Andrew was about ten. I was reluctant. But when a woman says she wants to have a baby, you don’t tell her no. But I wasn’t into being a father again.
Aaron was grown and living in Los Angeles, but Andrew was a heartbreaker. At first, Betsy wouldn’t let me see him. She finally started letting him come up for weekends, but it was tough on the little guy. I’d catch him crying in his bedroom. The divorce was hard on Andrew. That’s something I’ll always carry with me. Being a father again didn’t look all that attractive.
Then I remembered what Miss Kellerman had told me about moving to Northern California: “Someday you’re going to have two daughters.” I realized everything else Miss Kellerman said came true.
Sure enough. Just by bringing it up, Kari got pregnant. We were in the Jacuzzi, out by the pool, middle of the day, and we threw it down right on the grass. I knew it. We made wedding plans.
KARI AND I had been together almost four years. Leffler had been dead almost two years. The band had not toured since that last weekend in Costa Mesa. We had been working for months on a new Van Halen album, Balance, and I took a little break to get married in November 1995. We got married in Mill Valley at the amphitheater on top of Mount Tam. Beautiful, sunny day. My mom was happy. Kari’s grandmother was there, her mom, all my family. My pal Emeril Lagasse, the great New Orleans chef, flew out and cooked for the wedding. We had ten pounds of white truffles imported from Italy. Ed and Al were there. Everybody posed for the picture in People magazine. Someone overheard someone talking to the brothers, saying, “This fucker’s making too much money.”
Eddie was supposed to be sober, but he wasn’t and he could be trouble. He couldn’t drink around Valerie, and Ray Danniels was all concerned that we keep Eddie straight. I had taken Eddie to the Bridge School concert in 1993, the all-acoustic benefit for a school for children with severe learning disabilities run by my buddy Neil Young. I did a couple of the shows by myself and I was terrified. I don’t lack confidence one bit, except for when I’m by myself with an acoustic guitar, and then I’m a wreck. Neil Young is a fearless musician. He starts stomping his foot, slapping his guitar and singing at the top of his lungs. He doesn’t have any inhibitions. James Taylor was sweet backstage. “Sammy, what do you mean you’re nervous?” he said. “We all want to be like you.”
“What do you mean,” I said. “Scared?”
The year I brought Eddie, the headline act was Simon and Garfunkel. Eddie and I were both very nervous, but we did well. Three songs on piano and Eddie played a solo on this tiny amp with a kind of acoustic setup and he was great. We didn’t go over as well as you might have expected, but it wasn’t our crowd.
We went back to our trailer and we did some blow. Paul Simon was in the trailer next to ours and I started talking with him, while Eddie was getting more trashed. He finally wandered out to see what was happening. Paul Simon invited him to play on a song. “Do you know ‘Sound of Silence’?” he said.
“No, I never heard of it,” said Eddie.
Simon took him in the trailer and tried to show him the song. He was supposed to take the stage in about twenty minutes. Eddie couldn’t get it. I guess he was too wasted. “Wait,” he said. “What key again?”
He tried his finger-tapping to the song. Eddie’s a great musician, but very methodical. He doesn’t simply jam those things. He finds the melody and plays that. He was looking for the melody while Paul was singing and playing him through the song. And he couldn’t get it. “Never mind, Eddie,” Simon said.
“No, no, no,” said Eddie, leaning over his guitar again. Simon finally dashed off to the stage and did call out Eddie, who went out there and butchered the song.
We were making the Balance record, but it was over for Van Halen. If it wasn’t for the producer Bruce Fairbairn, we never would have finished that record. He had to throw Eddie out what seemed like every night. Eddie would come in seeming drunk and fucked up. You’d go into the bathroom in the studio and there’d be a hole in the wall. Reach down and there was a bag of cocaine. A bottle of vodka was underneath the sink. Chewing gum and cigars were everywhere. “Al,” I’d say, “your brother’s fucked up. What is this bullshit, everybody saying he’s clean and sober? The guy’s ripped out of his brain.”
“You’re crazy,” Al would say. “That’s just the way Ed acts.”
I’d get in Eddie’s face. “Ed, get the fuck out of here. You’re fucked up. I don’t want you in here while I’m working. I’m doing my vocals. Get the fuck out of here.”
“I haven’t had a drink for five months, you motherfucker,” he said. He’d break down and cry, bust up things.
It got ugly. Fairbairn and I were staying at the Bel-
Air Hotel, and, the times when Eddie became thoroughly disruptive, he would call the session and the two of us would drive back to the hotel together, sit in the bar, eat a bite, and drink a couple of cocktails. Eddie was really on edge, because, number one, he needed a hip replacement and was taking painkillers all the time. And number two, it seemed like he was drinking and hiding it from everybody. When I started to do my vocals, Eddie, for the first time ever, started making suggestions about how I should sing. That got out of hand so quickly that Fairbairn took me to Vancouver to finish my vocals by myself.
I knew they were trying to get rid of me. Eddie was trying to make me quit. He would find something wrong with every lyric I’d write. He’d never said a word about a lyric before. Suddenly he didn’t like anything.
“That’s wimpy,” he said. “Make it ‘Don’t tell me what love can do.’” I had this strong, positive thought—“I want to show you what love can do”—but Eddie wanted to switch it around. I want black, no, I want white. Okay, I’ll go with white. No, I want black. Okay, I wanted black to begin with. You know what? I want white. It would drive me crazy. The brothers were dead-against me.
I wrote that song, “Don’t Tell Me What Love Can Do,” about Kurt Cobain. I wanted it to say, “I want to show you what love can do.” Ed and Al fought me on that. They wanted more of a grungy, bad-attitude song. “Don’t tell me what love can do.” That’s not what I had in mind. I was talking about somebody who could have saved Kurt Cobain’s life.
I do believe that. You can save people. Drugs kill people. People think drugs are what made Jimi Hendrix great. No, drugs are what killed Jimi Hendrix. Kurt Cobain could have been saved. The people around him let him go, for some reason. They had to have seen that coming. So I wrote that song about it to say you have control over your destiny. It’s your life. You can do what you want. But then I wanted the chorus to say, “But I want to show you what love can do.” I wanted to make it a love song. Not about me and Kurt Cobain, but about what people could have done for him, people that he knew and loved.