by Sammy Hagar
“I’ve got to play the keyboard part,” he said.
Ed would start the song, and then go, “Wait, wait, wait. I gotta change my amp.” He’d never get more than a couple bars into it. “Oh, no, no, wait a minute. This ain’t right. I gotta switch guitars.” He couldn’t make it through the damn song. About two hours later, Al pulled out a tape and played me an already recorded version. I loved what I heard. The keyboard sequence reminded me of “Why Can’t This Be Love” and another one of my favorites, “Mine All Mine.”
But the sessions were a mess. Al was in complete denial. I would try and talk to Al about his brother, but he wouldn’t hear it.
“You know him,” Al would say, pointing at Eddie’s signature painted guitar. “See all those stripes, whacked out things, all over the place? That’s the way his mind works. Everything this way, that way, scattered. Can’t focus. Can’t concentrate.”
We planned on recording an album in three months, but pretty quickly it became apparent we had three songs that were going to be all right, and there wasn’t going to be any album. We brought in producer Glen Ballard, who made Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill, a total pro who really tried to make things happen. I had written my lyrics. Eddie had piles of cassettes. We salvaged old tapes—sessions with Cherone? Roth? I don’t know—sliced and diced them into new songs and I wrote lyrics. We had all that ready within one week. It took three months for Ed to do the guitar parts to three songs and a couple of solos. The Eddie Van Halen I first met could have done that in an hour.
I was in there one day when Ed came in with a C-clamp. Glen Ballard asked me to come down and be part of all the sessions, try to keep the vibe good and help orchestrate this thing—help him, really. He didn’t want to be in there alone with this madman.
Eddie had this Telecaster he wanted to play, but he could never get it to stay in tune. Every time he tried it, it played differently. They had been working on this for three or four days when Eddie took the guitar to his workshop, C-clamped it to his workbench, and ran cables out of the studio down the driveway. It didn’t work, of course.
It seemed like whenever I went to the studio around five o’clock in the afternoon, Ed still hadn’t shown up yet. I’d hang around, but by the time Eddie made it down to the studio at nine o’clock, I was gone. He would burn out everybody, staying up working all night. When I tried to talk to him about it, he looked at me like I was crazy. “You know I can’t do anything unless I’m creative,” he said.
Ed decided he wanted to play bass. He wouldn’t let Mike play bass on these three songs. On one song, “It’s About Time,” it took him at least a week to do the bass part. Mike could have done it in an hour. When they finally laid down the rhythm guitar tracks, that was all I needed to sing. I didn’t need his guitar solos. I didn’t need any of the other production. As soon as they got that, I went in and knocked out my vocals on all three songs in two hours. Michael Anthony came in and we did all the backgrounds in another two hours. Half a day, we were done. Eddie was still asleep. By the time he came down, we were finished. I left. They spent the next three months doing Eddie’s guitars.
We started rehearsals for the tour. The concert was the hottest attraction of the summer. Promoters laid down big bucks and snapped up eighty dates. The Van Halens wanted a new bass player. I told them I would not do a reunion without Mike. They still managed to grind him down to a small percentage of what he would have earned as a full partner—Al, Irving, and I all gave up pieces to give Mikey some—and he signed away all further rights to Van Halen after the tour. They were mad at him. They were mad at me, too. I just didn’t realize yet how mad they were.
They were still pissed about Cabo Wabo, and holding on to the idea that I screwed them somehow on the deal. If anybody did that, it was Ray Danniels, their former manager. When the government put the yellow ribbon around the club, they wanted to shut it down and wouldn’t spend any money to keep it open. We were still fighting about that when the band broke up. Ray Danniels gave me Cabo Wabo in exchange for my interest in the Van Halen trademark. At the time, they didn’t care, but by the reunion, the tequila was everywhere and people were always coming up and talking about the cantina. It drove them nuts.
They put it in the contract that I could not wear any Cabo Wabo T-shirts onstage or mention anything about the tequila or the cantina on the mike. I went straight to a tattoo parlor and I got this giant Cabo Wabo tattoo on my shoulder. I knew we would be carrying giant video screens and that, as the lead vocalist, I was going to get plenty of close-ups on those giant video screens. I didn’t need a T-shirt.
They didn’t know I did this. I made a point of wearing long-sleeved shirts. But Mikey knew. He would walk into a rehearsal and slap me on the shoulder. “How ya doin’?” he said. It hurt like a mother with all that black in the tattoo. Mike kept slapping me on the shoulder and making jokes, but the Van Halens didn’t know what I’d done.
Rehearsals didn’t go well. Eddie was having trouble finishing songs. Something would go wrong with his equipment. It was the same routine as when we’d first started messing around in the studio months before. He would start songs, but wouldn’t finish. I left at dinnertime. Al would stay up all night with him. Eddie never played the whole set at rehearsal. All he wanted to play at rehearsal was the three new songs. He wouldn’t learn the old songs. Something was always wrong. I’d walk into a rehearsal and he’d be tearing apart his speakers. The three new songs were all he knew, kind of, and he didn’t know them all that well. We could play the keyboard songs—with the keyboards on tape—and he could noodle along, “When It’s Love,” songs like that. We never got through the other songs—“Runaround,” “Top of the World,” “Finish What You Started.” He could not play “Why Can’t This Be Love.”
Photographic Insert II
At the construction site for the Cabo Wabo Cantina in 1989.
My Merlin 3 plane that I bought not long before Cabo Wabo opened.
The Cabo Wabo grand opening weekend.
For the grand opening of the cantina, Van Halen came down for the weekend and performed.
Van Halen, “Poundcake” time, 1991.
With Eddie on the Right Here, Right Now Tour in 1991.
With my brother, Bobby Jr., in Malibu on Grammy night, 1992.
Ed Leffler and his second wife.
Kari and me at our wedding dinner with the Van Halen members and their wives.
With Kari and Kama on Kama’s first day home from the hospital after she was born in 1996.
With John Entwistle from the Who at my Cabo Wabo birthday bash in 2000.
At the Cabo Wabo plant in Jalisco, Mexico.
With my daughter Samantha in 2001.
At the Cabo Wabo agave fields in Jalisco.
With the Wabos in Sacramento, 2009.
The party onstage.
Lars Ulrich of Metallica at my Cabo Wabo birthday bash.
Singing with my son Aaron at the Cabo Wabo in Lake Tahoe.
From left to right: Mickey Hart, me, Bob Weir, and Mike Anthony.
Jamming with Mikey and drummer Matt Sorum at my Cabo Wabo birthday bash, 2008.
The backstreets of Cabo.
With Kari in our Cabo front yard.
At my mom’s seventy-fifth birthday party in Cabo. From left to right: me; my brother, Bobby Jr.; my mom; and my sisters, Velma and Bobbi.
Aaron’s family (including my two grandchildren) and my family together in 2009.
The Cabo tattoo.
Eddie’s samurai hair during the reunion tour with Van Halen. (Photograph courtesy of Getty Images)
With Joe Satriani from Chickenfoot.
With Chad Smith at Cabo Wabo.
Chickenfoot at the Cabo Wabo Cantina in Lake Tahoe, 2009.
Fun with machetes in Maui, 2010. (Photograph by ShootingStarsPhotography.com)
At home in Maui, 2010. (Photograph by ShootingStarsPhotography.com)
Outside Skywalker Sound studios with my custom-made Ferrari Fi
orano.
He fired the monitor guy, fired the sound guy, fired the keyboard tech, fired at least five guitar techs, and that was just during rehearsals. Something is wrong when a guy blames everybody else—like the keyboard guy, who’s just hitting a button that triggers the keyboard part. It was the craziest, most whacked-out stuff. I knew it was a disaster. I told Irving.
Irving is really a professional. He knows how to get things done, but Irving is not a confrontational guy. He preferred to schmooze things, but right after we started rehearsals, Irving agreed to hold an intervention with Eddie. He brought a big, beefy security guard and met Al and me at 5150. Eddie walked in, carrying his wine bottle. Irving did all the talking. He told Eddie the tour was going to be difficult, that he needed to go away for a week or two, that we could postpone some dates if we needed. We all agreed Eddie needed to clean up.
He smashed the bottle. “Fuck you,” he said. “I will kill the first motherfucker that tries to take this bottle away from me. I left my family for this shit. You think I’m going to fucking do this for you guys?”
That’s how sick the cat was at that moment. It was going to be a long tour.
The opening show in Greensboro, North Carolina, was phenomenal. Eddie wasn’t phenomenal, but he was okay. David Fisher designed a set from an idea by Al and me that used the Van Halen rings as a way to put special seating sections in the middle of the stage. The first time I stepped out on that stage, it blew me away—the band was so powerful, the fans were so great. That carried me a long way.
But from the start of the tour, I couldn’t listen to Eddie. He made some terrible mistakes and it seemed like he couldn’t remember the songs. He would just hit the whammy bar and go wheedle-wheedle-whee. I’d listen to Mikey to find my note.
Whenever he came out with no shirt and his hair tied up samurai-style, he seemed fucked up. That was his little signal. I don’t know what it was. He would come out first with his hair down, go back to change guitars, or after Al’s drum solo, and come back with his hair up and shirt off. I’d look at Mike and we’d roll our eyes—here we go. Some nights he’d come out at the beginning of the show with his shirt off and hair up.
He looked like a bum in the street. His hair was matted. One time we got on a plane after a show and he spent practically the whole flight in the bathroom. When he finally came out, he had this hairbrush, the kind with the fur bristles, twisted up in his hair, hanging down. He was soaking wet, covered in water, like he tried to take a bath in the airplane sink. I made Kari look at me. I didn’t want the guy in my face. He flopped down on the floor, fussing with the brush caught in his hair, and never went back to his seat, landed that way. Hospital-crazy.
When we didn’t have our kids out on the road with us, Kari and I shared this big Gulfstream jet with Eddie and his girlfriend, Al and his wife, Mikey, and some management and security people. After one show, Mike and I stayed back, like we normally did, and showered. Ed didn’t shower. He jumped into the limo right off the stage and went straight to the airplane. When Mike and I rolled up, laughing, joking, eating a couple of barbecue sandwiches we had ordered, Eddie was sitting there drinking his wine out of the bottle. He went off on us.
“Don’t ever fucking make me wait,” he said. “Without me, you’re nothing. You need me. You’ll see. At the end of this tour, you guys will have nothing. You’re going to have to call me if you ever want to tour again.”
He was facing one direction, I was facing the other. I turned around and said, “Ed, shut the fuck up, man. Come on. We just did a gig.”
“Fuck you,” he said, and started bashing his bottle on the plane window. One of the security guys tried to calm him down, but he kept yelling and pounding the bottle. I turned my back on him. My guy from Irving’s office was looking at me, shaking his head and zipping his lips. The stewardess and the pilot started freaking out. They were reluctant to take off with this madman on the plane. Finally Al got him to take it easy and we took off.
When we arrived at the next hotel, Eddie started asking everybody what my room number was. He didn’t know the alias I used when I checked into hotels. The tour manager reached me on the room phone and told me Eddie was looking for me.
“Bring that motherfucker over here,” I said. “I quit. This is done. I’m going home tomorrow. I’m not going to work with this guy ever again. He’s trying to bust the window out of a fucking $40 million jet. He’s got no respect for anything or anybody. Fuck him. I’m done with this tour.”
I called my attorney. He wasn’t very happy with the contract I had signed, once he read it. Irving and his attorney had drawn it up. Outside of dire medical emergencies, if I canceled any shows, I was liable for all lost income. He thought it could cost $5 million to leave before I finished the shows. I was trapped. Eddie apologized, but I was never flying in a plane with him again.
It was the Sam and Dave tour all over again, only it was Sam and Eddie. They kept us apart as much as they could. Irving knew better. We flew in different jets. We stayed at different hotels. We had our own limos. They had their bodyguards. Mike and I had ours. I stayed in my own dressing room on the other side of the hall. The only time I saw that guy was when we stepped out onstage. Once in a while I’d go over to his dressing room before the show and see how he was and the times I did that it was usually great. He’d start playing, I’d start singing, jamming around, like old times. Other times, he’d start telling me crazy shit, like, “I pulled my own tooth—this thing was bugging me so I got a pair of pliers and pulled it out.”
I didn’t think he could make it. I kept thinking each week would be the last. He was going to land in the hospital. He collapsed a couple of times. He told us one time that he had been hit by a car. He was lying down, and he was so fucked up, he couldn’t get up.
“I got hit by a car,” he said. “You guys don’t understand.”
He would go until he collapsed. Then he would pass out for a day or two in a hotel. He would wear the same clothes for a week. He would run offstage and not change, go straight up to his room. The next morning, he would be wearing the same clothes. That night onstage—same clothes. He wore those boots with the tape around them the whole tour.
His solo turned into a disaster. It used to be the highlight of every show. Now he would play nothing, just garbage. He would try to play “Eruption,” one of his greatest pieces, and screw it up. He would just grab the whammy bar, hit the sustainer, and start making all this noise. The audience wasn’t buying it, either. I saw his solo many nights. He would say unbelievable things to the audience. “I’m just fucking around,” he would say. “I love you people. You pay my rent.”
This got so bad Al threw drumsticks at him once. Another time he couldn’t even stand up—he sat on the drum riser. Al had dropped a stick. He picked up the drumstick and started using that on his guitar solo. It was like a little kid banging on things.
I didn’t go near him onstage. No more Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. If he’s over there, I’m over here. When he comes over here, I’m going over there. No bad vibes, just no vibes.
It seemed to me that Ed was going through the motions, like he didn’t care about his playing. He didn’t care about the way he looked. He just went out there and took the money. He was embarrassing. Al, Mike, and I did it from the heart. We played our asses off every night. Ed went out there and jerked off.
We went through three sound guys. He would take a board mix after shows and listen to it. The sound guy would bury his guitar because he was playing so bad. He was playing so loud onstage anyway, he probably didn’t need to have his guitar pumped through the main house speakers, but he would crucify the sound-man and fire him the next day. Al and I would argue to get the guy back, but that never worked.
Those two often shared a high school mentality. They hated every other band. It was always competitive with them. Everybody else sucked. I don’t like everything, but I like music, and when I hear a musician I like, I want to embrace him, bring him backstage
, make him welcome. Eddie was usually a rude wise-guy. I brought Kenny Chesney backstage on that tour and took him to meet Eddie. Eddie shook his hand and turned around.
“I gotta take a shit,” he said. He walked into the john with the guy standing right there.
“Let’s get out of here,” Kenny said.
That was their only meeting. It was the first night I met Kenny. We went back to my dressing room and played acoustic guitars, singing “I’ll Fall in Love Again,” “Eagles Fly,” and all these songs of mine that he loved. We were drinking tequila and singing until three in the morning. He became one of my dear friends. But Ed? “I gotta take a shit.” That usually meant he was going to go and tie up his hair.
Another time, Toby Keith came to see us in Oklahoma City, not far from his hometown. I decided to do his “I Love This Bar” during my acoustic segment and worked up this whole deal with Toby. I was going to say that since he was from around these parts, I was going to do one of his songs, even though I knew he was out of town. Then he would walk out midway through the song and sing the rest of it with me. Toby told me later that while he was waiting backstage, Eddie cornered him and tried to keep him from going out. “Why would you want to go on with him?” Toby said Ed asked. “Why didn’t you come out with us?”