by Sammy Hagar
The next time I was in Los Angeles, I went to his office for a meeting. I was very impressed with Irving. We were talking about my tequila business, and he said, “I know somebody who might be able to help. Let’s get him on the phone.”
He picks up the phone, click, click, he’s on with someone. “Hey, Joe, I’ve got Sammy Hagar sitting here. He’s trying to get his tequila in Costco. Think you can help us out?”
Irving knows everybody. He’s smart and he knows how to make things happen. He took me under his wing and did me right. I started making a little more money. Things start happening a little better for me. If I have a problem, I call him, boom, the problem goes away. He’s got power and smarts. Next thing I know, he’s making deals for me, managing me, taking his percentage. I never signed a contract. Never even shook hands. But he was very fair. He didn’t charge for expenses. He would send out a guy named Tom Consolo from his management team. Consolo would fly in and out, get his own room, his own transportation, pay his own way, and Irving charged me 15 percent of the gross after production expenses. A lot of managers take more than that. I thought Irving was great.
At this point in my career, I felt comfortable doing anything. I didn’t care about my so-called image.
I was open to all sorts of crazy ideas. Irving and I were sitting around his office, scheming about what to do for a tour in summer 2002. We were talking about special guests and opening acts and somebody asked if I ever thought about going out with Roth, just to piss off Van Halen and get the fans worked up.
“What a great idea,” I said, “but he’s never going to go for it.”
“Let’s see,” said Irving, picking up the phone. He called up somebody, and, what do you know, Roth wants to have a meeting.
I had never met Roth, only spoken to him on the phone once, so I was surprised when this tall, statuesque rock god walked into Irving’s office in full drag—big hat; shades; tight, shiny black outfit with pants that hung down over his boots. I didn’t know he was so tall, but when he sat down and crossed his legs, I saw that he was wearing five-inch platform heels. I was dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. He sat stiff on the chair, trying to stay taller than everybody else. I went to the bathroom.
“There has been a lot said between us,” Roth said. “Let’s forget it and take it from here.”
It would be the last sign of cooperation from him.
Right at the start, he rejected my suggestion that we sing a few songs together and make it a friendly thing. He envisioned something more along the lines of a WWF SmackDown. We agreed to do the tour, decided we would trade off headlining—Roth one night, me the next night—with the first date to be determined by the flip of a coin, but every day after that brought another new demand from his camp.
I knew about his business. A few years before, a friend booked him for a show in Tahoe for $10,000 and kept calling me during his show to let me hear how far off-key he was and how badly he was singing. Still Roth insisted on being paid as much as I was, even though we both knew what he’d been drawing at his solo shows. He couldn’t match my box office. He wanted ten times what he was making on his own. Irving convinced me to go along.
“You’re going to blow him off,” Irving said. “He’s got this bullshit cover band. The whole world’s going to finally see that you are the better of the two. Let’s go out and prove it, Sammy. Come on, don’t get greedy now. It’s about your future. All the promoters are going to say, ‘Sammy is better than him and he’s the one that’s doing the business and we’re going to pay him more.’ You’re going to double your money next time you go out by going out with Dave.”
We held a press conference and flipped the coin, but Roth kept renegotiating. He insisted on closing the shows in Los Angeles and New York. Irving finessed that by booking the show into a smaller venue in Los Angeles for two nights, so we could each headline one night, but the booking at Jones Beach in New York fell apart. Roth wouldn’t give in and I refused to let him win. We skipped New York on the tour.
It was like that the whole time. Roth wasn’t going over all that great. He lost his voice and could no longer sing very well anyway. His lame band played all old Van Halen songs, and the Wabos and I were ripping it up with new songs and my solo material, saving four or five Van Halen songs to play with Michael Anthony. The fans loved that. Roth never once asked Mike to play with him. My T-shirts were outselling his by more than four to one.
Ted Nugent and Kid Rock stood onstage to introduce me in Detroit. After the show, Kid Rock dragged me into Roth’s dressing room and asked why we weren’t singing some songs together. He said we were ripping off the fans by not doing it. Roth agreed to do it and we shook hands. When I sent the tour manager to see him the next night about what songs we were going to do, he came back and reported that Roth was in a bad mood and wouldn’t come off the bus. When I went up to Roth later, he said he stayed up all night with Kid Rock and couldn’t sing.
“My throat,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
He repeated that routine again and again. It got to be a running joke. I’d beat on his dressing-room door and yell, “Hey, Dave, what are we going to do tonight?”
He would go to any lengths to grab the spotlight. The Los Angeles Times sent a reporter to write a feature about the tour to St. Louis, my number-one market. Roth refused to give the guy an interview until right before I went onstage. The reporter decided to watch my show instead.
He pulled bullshit like that all along the tour. We rolled into Fresno and Roth called to say his bus broke down. I either had to go ahead and open the show or wait until after midnight, past curfew, to headline. We went out and opened the show and he pulled up in time to take the stage after us. What a jerk. Instead of showing any gratitude for the big business we were doing, pulling him out of nowhere and putting him back on arena stages, he was impossible. I finally shot my mouth off to a reporter for the Page Six column of the New York Post.
“He’s a fucking bald-headed asshole,” I said, “a swaggering, middle-aged prima donna who was out there pretending to be something he no longer was. He’s a nostalgia act who has to wear a wig and he even spray-paints that.”
We were at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Charlotte, North Carolina, when Roth saw the piece. David Lauser was walking through the dressing room, wrapped in a towel, on his way to the showers. “Hello, ladies,” he said.
“Fuck you,” Roth screamed. “You calling me a faggot? You fucking fag.”
I stepped out of my dressing room when I heard the yelling. “Dave, you need to lighten up,” I said.
“Fuck you,” he said.
A couple of the road crew jumped between us, but Roth traveled with five large bodyguards and they waded in, knocking the roadies to the floor. We called the cops. After that, a plywood barrier was erected to divide the dressing room at every gig. He wasn’t allowed on the premises until I was finished and I couldn’t show up until he was done.
I had originally hoped that Roth and I going out together would jar those lame-brains from Amsterdam into joining up for a stadium tour by Sam and Dave and Van Halen. It would have been the biggest tour in the world. But that was never going to happen. The Sam and Dave tour was a huge financial success, but a personal disaster.
DESPITE THE FRUSTRATION of the Roth tour, I kept trying new opportunities. I jumped at the chance when I was invited to play with the Dead on Valentine’s Day 2003 at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, the first time those guys got back together and used that name since Jerry died. Kari and I went to dinner before, so we arrived a little overdressed, but just seeing the marquee reading THE DEAD was heavy to me. I went over to Bob Weir’s house a few days before and he told me to pick a song to jam at the show. I chose “Loose Lucy.”
We talked it over on the break backstage. Phil Lesh was really cool. When I asked about the arrangement, Phil told me to just feel it. I asked how many bars before I came in singing. “Come in when you want,” he said. “When you come in, th
at’ll be the verse.”
I’d sat in with these guys years before, when they were the Other Ones, but I just played guitar on the last song, “Fire on the Mountain.” This time they were backing me, big difference. We did a great version—Deadhead tape traders love it. I sang a verse and let it rest. I looked around to see if anybody was going to cue me. These guys were off in their own vibe. They didn’t care. When I came back in, everybody fell behind me. I really felt what they do. I didn’t think it was one of those goose-bump moments, but the audience accepted me. It wasn’t like when they introduced me, I got a big roar of recognition, more like, “Huh, what’s he doing here?” But after I started singing, I could see they were digging it. When I came off, Mountain Girl came up and gave me a big hug. I’d never met Garcia’s old lady, but I knew who she was.
“Sammy, you owned that song,” she said.
For the summer of 2003, I made plans to go out with Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Party of a Lifetime” they called the tour, only to have surviving Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington collapse at the start of the tour from heart problems. The band canceled a string of dates. I came up with the bright idea of putting Montrose back together as my special guests and going ahead with the shows on my own. I offered the three of those guys ten grand a night to split, all expenses paid, private jet, road manager, the works. Bill Church and Denny Carmassi jumped at the chance. Ronnie Montrose was less eager.
“Okay, Hagar,” he said, “but you sure you got the private plane?”
It turned out pretty great. I did my whole show and came back for the encore with Montrose. We did “Rock the Nation,” “Bad Motor Scooter,” “Rock Candy,” “Space Station Number 5,” and we always got an encore. They got paid more money than they’d ever made, and there were moments when we were really fucking good. But Ronnie started ego-tripping with my band, trying to tell my guitarist, Vic, where he could put his gear onstage, stupid shit like that. It was inevitable, I suppose, but I only did it a couple of more times.
But Irving didn’t leave it there. He wanted some kind of Van Halen reunion and, since I looked like the sane one in the bunch and I was the guy he managed, he started working behind the scenes to make that happen. He got Al to give me a call on New Year’s Eve 2003—the dawn of what turned out to be a very big year.
I love Al, always have. Even after I left the band, he and I would sometimes call each other on our birthdays or New Year’s Eve. It was our way of staying in touch even when things were bad. The brothers had accomplished very little since I left.
They’d made an album with Gary Cherone—who’d later told me that they had auditioned him while I was still in the band. Ray Danniels managed Cherone, because he managed Extreme. First, he tried to get Cherone into Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. Later, Danniels told him he was going to be the singer in Van Halen. Gary’s a talented guy. Good singer, good physical shape, a healthy guy, not a druggie, really a cool guy. Wrong for the band? A hundred times over.
The album, Van Halen III, was the only Van Halen album that didn’t go platinum. According to Gary, Eddie insisted he do exactly what he was told on the record. He told him what melodies to sing and even wrote some of the lyrics. He had never done any of that before. I remember Ray Danniels telling me, “Eddie wants his band back.” I heard Eddie fired Al twice during the making of Van Halen III. Eddie played the drums. I always told him he should do a solo record. It took years to make the record, because of the condition that Ed and Al were in.
I don’t know how they managed to tour, even the short one they did. Al couldn’t play very long. Eddie was hobbling. The tour for Van Halen III didn’t do great business. They canceled a lot of dates. They did sixteen hundred people in Sacramento. I heard they played forty minutes and Eddie walked off the stage. I wasn’t there, but Gary told me after we’d become friends. I brought him to play with me at a free concert at New York’s Irving Plaza I did for the firefighters after the World Trade Center went down. He said Eddie also walked off the stage in the middle of the show in Boston and didn’t come back for a half hour.
They fired Cherone after the tour and started trying to get back again with Roth, which didn’t last. They tried about five abortions with Roth. They would decide to get together, book a tour or start working on new material, but nothing ever happened. I knew what was going on. I kept in touch with Michael Anthony.
Meanwhile, I was doing well with the tequila. The Cabo Wabo Cantina had turned into an oil well pumping money, and so it wasn’t like I needed the dough from a reunion tour. But the brothers were a different matter. They told me they were almost broke. Al had gotten a divorce and lost a lot. When he got divorced, he was largely in debt, but Al had been deep in debt when I left the band. They’d made some bad business decisions. They were kind of low on funds and they needed the money.
When Al called me on New Year’s Eve 2003, I told him on the phone that Kari, the kids, and I were coming down to stay at Laguna Beach and he should come visit. He brought his new wife and their kid. They showed up around noon and stayed until midnight. We laughed, joked, and drank. Al drank coffee and I had a couple of glasses of wine. Late in the evening, Al’s phone rang and it was Ed. He flipped the phone to me. Ed started drilling me.
“Why did you quit the band?” he said.
It was late at night. I figured the guy was wasted and shined it on.
14
SAMURAI HAIR
I had been waiting at Eddie’s 5150 Studios for more than an hour when he finally showed up. I hadn’t seen him in ten years. He looked like he hadn’t bathed in a week. He certainly hadn’t changed his clothes in at least that long. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He had a giant overcoat and army pants, tattered and ripped at the cuffs, held up with a piece of rope. I’d never seen him so skinny in my life. He was missing a number of teeth and the ones he had left were black. His boots were so worn out he had gaffer’s tape wrapped around them and his big toe still stuck out.
He walked up to me, hunched over like a little old man, a cigarette in his mouth. He had a third of his tongue removed because of cancer and he spoke with a slight lisp.
“Are you all right, man?” he said.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Well, you look a little beat up,” he said.
I glanced at Al, who was laughing. Kind of. the thought flashed through my mind that I should get the fuck out of there—this guy is crazier than a loon. But he gave me the give-me-a-hug move, an awkward embrace for sure. He was not only the weirdest I’d ever seen him, he was more tore up than anybody I ever saw. But I hugged him. My idea was, if we were going to get along, we would make a new record.
“Let’s go play some music,” I said. “Play me some stuff. What do you guys got?”
He went digging through all these tapes and played me a bunch of song ideas, just him and Al jamming, like always. Some of it was really cool. I was going, “I like that, I like this, I don’t necessarily like that.” I stayed down there for a few days and tried to write with them.
The earliest the day would start was noon. There were times Eddie did not come down to that studio until nine o’clock at night. He lived next door. Al would go check on him.
“He had a hard time last night,” Al would say. “He was up trying to write songs.”
He may have lost a chunk of his tongue to cancer, but he was still smoking cigarettes. He claimed the cancer came from putting the guitar pick in his mouth while he used his fingers to play. I told him cigarettes killed our manager, Ed Leffler, but he didn’t buy that. He walked around all day drinking cheap Shiraz straight out of the bottle. That’s why his teeth were all black. “Ed, why don’t you get a glass for that?” I said.
He held up the bottle. “It’s in a glass,” he said.
He was living with a pathologist, who kept taking slices off his tongue, to check for cancer. He beat the cancer. He told me he cured himself by having pieces of his tongue liquefied and injected into his body. He also told me when he had hi
s hip replacement, he stayed awake through the operation and helped the doctors drill the hole. What a fruitcake.
I don’t know what he was doing, but he would keep going for what seemed like three or four days at a time. He used to hang out with one of our opening acts on the tour and come into their dressing room before the show. Whatever he was doing, he kept it out of view. I never saw what it was, but he was doing something. Plus drinking wine all day. He would never be in one place longer than twenty minutes.
“I’ll be right back,” he would say. “I gotta take a shit.” Gary Cherone told me he did that once in the middle of a show.
His marriage was over. Valerie was gone. He finally invited me over to this giant, extravagant, sixteen-thousand-square-foot house that he and Valerie had built before she split. It looked like vampires lived there. There were bottles and cans all over the floor. The handle was broken off the refrigerator door. It was like a bum shack. There were spider webs everywhere. He had big blankets thrown over the windows. The mattresses were stripped off the beds and leaned against the wall for soundproofing. He was making music and trying to get the sound right. He said we were going to record a lot over there. He had dug a trench to run wires from the studio to his house. We never used it even once for the three songs we eventually did record.
He was sleeping on the floor with a blanket and a pillow. There was no food in the cupboards. I had never seen a dirtier place in my life. It was like the house out of that movie Grey Gardens.
This was Eddie Van Halen, one of the sweetest guys I ever met. He had turned into the weirdest fuck I’d ever seen, crude, rude, and unkempt. I should have walked, but Eddie’s got a very charming, cunning side to him, where you feel like he’s got a good heart. He’s going to come through. He’s going to clean up and we’re going to get this thing done.
I thought some of the music was great, but it was all recordings. Getting him to actually play music proved more difficult. He started to play the song that became “Up for Breakfast” on the Greatest Hits record. The keyboard part was already digitally recorded. Al and Eddie were going to play live to show me. I had a microphone in my hand. I was ready to jam with them like we always did. He started, and stopped.