by Sammy Hagar
“You didn’t invite me,” Toby said.
“I’m inviting you now,” Eddie said. “Why are you wearing that cowboy hat?”
“I’m a country guy,” said Toby.
“No, it’s because you’re bald,” said Eddie.
Toby walked out onstage halfway through the song and the place exploded. Eddie went crazy the rest of the night. He destroyed his dressing room after the show. His son, Wolfie, was in my dressing room, scared and crying. I went to see if I could calm him down. We left Ed behind that night in Oklahoma City with his tour manager and a couple of security guys and went to the next city without him. When they took him back to the hotel, he kicked out the limousine window.
“That boy needs help,” said Toby, who drove down to the gig with his wife and teenage daughter in his truck.
Irving would come out a lot, but he wouldn’t go near Ed. No one wanted to go near him, because they figured it would blow up the whole tour if Eddie quit. I’m sure the contract was written the same way for him as it was for me, if he quit or went down. If he had missed three consecutive performances, I could have walked. He never missed one. Ed never lost his work ethic. The Van Halens come from good, hardworking Dutch stock. He was there every night, in the worst shape you could imagine, but he did the show.
He was starting to let his anger toward me show. We sold these deluxe thousand-dollar packages that not only included the special seating in the stage, but you could go backstage, watch sound check, and eat at catering. I never do sound checks. I’m a singer. I save my voice for the show. But some of my fans bought these packages and showed up wearing Cabo Wabo T-shirts. Mikey told me that Eddie would pick on them. “Where’d you get that shirt?” he’d say. “What a piece of shit.”
The last two shows were at a small amphitheater in Tucson. The second night, Eddie unwound completely. He knew it was the end of the tour. He knew he was done. He came up to me before the show, when I was talking to Irving, and rolled my sleeve down over my tattoo. I didn’t even acknowledge him. I just rolled it back up. He rolled it back down. I rolled it back up.
“Don’t be fucking with my shirt, dude,” I said.
“That thing ain’t gonna last,” he said, showing me his Van Halen tattoo. “See that? That’s better. That’s going to last longer.”
Like I cared. We had a crew on that tour of more than 120. I had a bunch of cases of tequila in my dressing room and I was sitting in my dressing room signing bottles for the crew. Eddie came in and saw what I was doing.
“Can I have a bottle?” he said.
I went over to my refrigerator and pulled one out. “I’ll give you a bottle,” I said. “These others are all signed for the crew.”
He takes a couple of big slugs and sets it down. “Why can’t I have one of these?” he said. I told him those bottles were for the crew and I had the exact right number. If you take one, I told him, somebody’s not going to get one. He walks away, over to one of my guests in the dressing room, a booking agent Eddie knew but mistook for the son of Warner Bros. Records chairman Mo Ostin. He proceeded to give this guy a ration of shit about something that made no sense to anyone but Ed. “And your dad, he was a great man, and you and your brother are nothing.”
He was raving crazy. He had already attacked Valerie’s brother, who made the mistake of showing up at the concert to see his ex-brother-in-law. People were screaming and yelling in the dressing room, and he was running wild, beating up people and smashing bottles against the wall. He lost it completely.
Irving took me aside. “When this show’s over,” he told me, “I’m getting you in a limo and we’re getting out of here.” My plane was waiting to take me home.
It was the worst show we’d ever done in our lives. Eddie played so bad. My nephew was standing on the side of the stage with me, watching Eddie do his solo.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “What’s wrong with him?”
He smashed his favorite guitar to pieces. Sprayed shrapnel into the crowd. He got on the microphone, crying. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You people pay my rent. I love you people.”
They tell me he pulled some crazy shit on the plane home. He had his girlfriend and her two grown daughters with him. Al was there with his family. Mike and his wife stayed over in Tucson rather than fly with Ed. Some funky shit went down on that plane. My man was completely gone and out of it. I went straight to my plane after the show and home to San Francisco. I never spoke to him again after telling him to keep his hand off my shirt.
15
GOING HOME
We moved the whole family to Mexico before the 2005 school year started. Our daughters, Kama and Samantha, were each six months apart from the daughters of my Cabo Wabo partner, Marco Monroy. We were neighbors in Cabo and our kids were pals. We wanted to put the girls in school while they were still young enough to learn the language and soak up the culture. Kama was in fourth grade and her younger sister, Samantha, who was four years old, was in preschool. After the last year of Van Halen torture, I was ready for the beach.
We’d wake up in the morning to the waves crashing outside the window. The weather was fantastic. We had the Cabo Wabo and we could go down to the cantina and eat or have food delivered to the house. We had people working all over our home—maids, security, gardeners. Down there, everybody needs a job and they work hard for the money. Life can be very comfortable.
When you go on vacation for ten days, you spend the first seven days just getting relaxed. When you go on vacation to stay, you go through periods of boredom, where you break through to new levels of relaxation. You slide all the way down. When we returned after spending most of the year in Mexico, we’d changed. It wasn’t just our clothes, although Kari and I noticed when we stopped at the store on the way home that the clothes we were wearing looked a little ragged and dirty back in Marin County. We’d reached a place that had a lasting effect. When we returned to the city and got busy again, we now knew where that place was, and it was easier to get back there.
During the reunion, I kept the Wabos on full salary. The only gigs we’d done all year were my birthday bash at Cabo Wabo and the annual weekend at the new Cabo Wabo Cantina that opened in Harrah’s Lake Tahoe in May 2004. Ted Nugent, Toby Keith, and Bob Weir came opening weekend to play with me in the former South Shore Room, the big showcase off the casino where Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra performed.
The Lake Tahoe cantina was part of an expansion plan I had been working on for a while. Several years earlier, Don Marrandino, who worked for the Fertitta brothers and the Station Casinos, approached me about building a Cabo Wabo in Las Vegas. The Fertittas were great. I got to know them pretty well. The Fertittas bought the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a kind of extreme boxing that mixed martial arts and no-holds-barred wrestling with boxing. They booked their first big match at the Trump Arena in Atlantic City, and I went with them. They sent a G4 private jet to pick up first me in San Francisco, and then the rest of the party in Vegas. Atlantic City was shut down in a blizzard and we landed instead in Philadelphia. They put us in big suites at the Ritz-Carlton. We went out to dinner at some fancy Italian place and they just ordered the entire menu and cases of fine wine. The next morning, we flew into Atlantic City and went to their first fights. Their father started the Station Casinos. He was the first independent casino operator outside of the Strip. He started small, but he eventually ran eleven casinos, making more money than he would on the Strip. I was thinking these guys were the smartest people in Vegas.
Marrandino came to my house to show me the plans. He wanted to do a Cabo Wabo complex—an eight-thousand-seat arena, a bowling alley, and the cantina. We were scheduled to break ground in October 2001, but after 9/11, they changed their minds. The contract ran out. Don Marrandino went to work first for the Hard Rock Cafe, and then for Steve Wynn to build the Wynn. Marrandino ended up running Harrah’s at Lake Tahoe and immediately started plans to open a Cabo Wabo there. He’s got friends
in the music industry, and he hired them to come and play. He knew how to make a place cool and hip. Most of these old casino guys, they don’t know what the hell to do. “Where’s Sammy and Frank? The good guys are dead. We’ve got nobody to play here.” Marrandino knew there was a whole new breed of people out there.
Originally, I only wanted there to be one Cabo Wabo. I hated Planet Hollywood, and when investors behind Planet Hollywood and the Rainforest Cafe came to me to open dozens of cantinas, I sent them away without even listening to how much money I could make. The original was so special to me. But Marrandino convinced me we didn’t have to cookie-cutter them, so we opened the place in Tahoe (we have since also opened in Las Vegas). The Tahoe cantina comes with this great casino showroom, and my annual Cinco de Mayo run with the Wabos in Tahoe has become a high point on my calendar every year. Tahoe has a new Sammy.
I built a brand-new studio in Marin County for the Wabos. I told them to make sure they got together and rehearsed at least once a week, but they were in and out of that studio all the time. They stayed tight. After the Van Halen reunion tour, I was so happy to get back with the Wabos. After refreshing my recollection of the pressure on the big-time rock bands, the high ticket prices, the giant production, the big crews, and all that crap, I was glad to go back to a band that can just go play. If I wanted to bring the band down to Cabo to play for free in the cantina for a week, I did. I took off basically that whole year in Cabo. I wrote my next album, Living It Up, pretty much about everything I was doing—“Feet in the Sand,” “Living on the Coastline,” all those songs.
I was still recovering from the reunion tour when Irving called to talk to me about Van Halen being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At first, he said something about only the original band getting invited. I went nuts on Irving. I was in the band longer than Roth. He was in Van Halen seven years. I was with them eleven years. I sold more records than he did. How could they do this to me?
We didn’t know that the brothers were fooling around with Roth again. Mikey and I were both on the outs. Irving called back and said everything was okay. It probably never was a problem. That’s one of the things he does—makes problems happen so he can make them go away.
It was Van Halen, R.E.M., Patti Smith, Grandmaster Flash, and Ronnie Spector. I told Irving that we should all suck it up and make a united showing at the ceremony. He came back with their word. “If you’re going, they’re not going,” he said. I thought they were bluffing. Right up until I was standing there giving my speech, I half-expected Roth to bust in and do something stupid. Mikey and I wanted to play. Ed and Al pulled the plug at the last minute. Velvet Revolver was set to induct Van Halen. Irving managed them, too, which may have something to do with how they landed the assignment. Since Van Halen wasn’t going to perform, Velvet Revolver planned a medley of one Dave song and one Sammy song.
Roth called up Slash, the Velvet Revolver guitarist, and told him if the band played “Jump,” Roth would come and sing with them. When Slash said that the band didn’t have a keyboard player, Roth told him to put the part on tape. He and Slash got into it. Slash told him they were a rock-and-roll band and they played their own instruments and weren’t going to pretend like they had a keyboard player just for Roth. Slash offered to play “You Really Got Me,” or “Runnin’ with the Devil,” but for Roth, it was “Jump” or nothing. When the Velvet Revolver vocalist Scott Weiland got wind of Roth’s phone call, he told Slash he would quit the band if they let that motherfucker anywhere near the stage. By the time I called Slash to suggest that Mikey and I join them for a couple of numbers, there was no way that was happening. I called Paul Shaffer, bandleader for the event, and he accepted my offer for Mike and me to do “Why Can’t This Be Love” with the house band. No way I was going and not playing.
Kenny Chesney insisted on coming with me. Emeril Lagasse flew in. Mike and I were there with our wives and everybody was giving us so much love. Annie Leibovitz, the photographer, came up and hugged me. Keith Richards’s daughter wanted to meet me.
“I’ll take a picture with you if you take me and introduce me to your dad,” I said. She dragged me over to his table.
“Hey, mate, Sammy, good job,” he said. I can’t tell you how I felt. It was like the first time I felt respected in this business in my life.
I did my speech. “I’m sorry the brothers and everybody’s not here,” I said. “God bless ’em, but you couldn’t have kept me from this with a shotgun.”
At the end of the evening, they built a jam around Patti Smith and her song “Power to the People.” She is not my kind of gal (and I’m not her kind of guy), but I did record her song “Free Money” early in my career. Stephen Stills was up there, a little bit gone and stepping on everybody, rolling across them. Eddie Vedder was there, in great form. The R.E.M. guys were there. At the end of the jam, I was standing next to Keith Richards. He looked at me and winked.
“Good job, Sammy,” he said. “Good job, mate. Congratulations.” Pretty cool.
Still the Van Halens wouldn’t leave me alone. That fall of 2006, I decided to go out with the Wabos and book small theaters, underplay all my best markets, no more than two shows in each city, a special treat for my hard-core fans. Irving and I discussed the strategy. He agreed that it would help stir up excitement, and the music business desperately needed some excitement. Irving thought it would help business the next time through the markets. We booked the whole tour.
It was around then we started to hear about another Van Halen reunion with Roth. We didn’t believe it would happen. Mikey didn’t think so, but he was out, replaced by Eddie’s sixteen-year-old son, Wolfie, and, out of nowhere, the reunion was on. The label threw together another greatest-hits package, all Roth-era tracks. Irving wound up acting as the band’s manager for the tour and he put Van Halen right on top of me.
They played the same cities the same week. Either they had just left town or I had just left. It was as if we were on tour together. We did great anyway, sold out all our dates, but it was such a chicken-shit move. Obviously, Eddie and Dave made him do it. The fans had waited a hundred years for the reunion with Roth and all the radio stations were talking about it. When I asked him about it, Irving acted like it was no big deal. He told me the same thing he said about the Sam and Dave tour—let them see how much better you are. When I asked him if he would send the Eagles out on top of Don Henley, he said that would be fine—it would make people talk about Henley.
As much as I respect him and as smart as he is, Irving couldn’t help himself. He was making a lot more money on that big Van Halen reunion tour than off me playing those theaters. I needed a new manager. I went back with Carter, the guy who’d signed me to my first record deal. We’d never lost touch and he had been very successful in the management field since his years at Capitol—most recently, at that point, with Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Paula Cole.
WHILE ALL THESE tours were happening, the tequila business had been mostly running itself, but it had grown to the point where I could see it needed some proper management. My accountant took over the business, and he fielded an offer from this big-shot investor Gary Shansby, who had billions of dollars to spread around and already owned companies like Johnson’s Wax, La Victoria Salsa, and Famous Amos Cookies. Shansby wanted to buy the tequila company for $38 million, but it was a complicated deal. He was only going to pay me half. I would maintain a 50 percent interest in the business and, after he spent three years building up the company, we would split everything after he sold out for $160 million. When I asked him what he would do differently with the company, he said, “Put some feet on the street.”
My accountant wanted to sell. I didn’t. It was one of the worst deals I’d ever seen. If his plan didn’t work and I wanted to buy back the company, he would make me pay some heavy-duty interest on the money he advanced me for the sale. Nothing doing. Shansby hated me for not selling and started his own tequila brand. I turned around to my accountant, now r
unning the company, and told him to do what Shansby said he was going to do. The accountant hired a marketing person. He hired six regional sales guys in the field. He hired a manager to run the salesmen. He opened an office. He spent 4 million bucks on overhead that year. Nothing really happened.
In the meantime, as my accountant, he got me into a restaurant deal in San Francisco. He found these other two investors, and the three of them went to Mexico and met everyone at my plant, making plans to start their own brand. I began to see there might be a problem. He sat down with me and told me that he and his investors wanted to buy the company from me and they would pay $22 million. I already turned down Gary Shansby’s offer of $38 million. What was this guy thinking? I fired my accountant.
He did have a piece of the company. When he sued to get back my shares in his San Francisco restaurant, I made a deal for his end of Cabo Wabo and he went away. I brought in a liquor business old-timer named Steve Kauffman to run the company. He was somebody I knew, who came from Seagram and had done some work for me as a consultant. He was going through his fourth divorce, the poor bastard. He needed a job. Once he took over, the business exploded overnight.
A little more than a year after Kauffman came to work for me, Skyy Vodka approached him to buy the company. He took a lunch with an old friend from Skyy and showed him the numbers. The guy called me up from the lunch and offered me $70 million for the company. I almost fainted.