by Sammy Hagar
In the liquor business, we were quiet underachievers. We had four employees. I didn’t spend any money marketing because we were doing fine, growing at a nice, beautiful, slow pace. The three-year average net profit was almost $7 million a year. I was happy making that much money. I didn’t need any more money. I liked keeping it guerrilla, maintaining control.
I went to the Skyy offices in San Francisco, very hip company, staffed by lots of young people. I felt at home and wanted to be involved with these guys. I told them maybe I would sell them 50 percent of the company. I went back and forth for about ten days, waking up in the middle of the night thinking, “Oh, no, I can’t sell this company.” I finally told them I couldn’t sell. By the time I paid the lawyers, taxes, bought off my partners, I told them, all I’d have left is a chunk of money that doesn’t really change my life. “What amount would change your life?” they asked.
“At least $100 million,” I said.
They called back the next day and said okay.
I couldn’t even calculate it. What do you do with $100 million? You can’t put it in the bank. It was making me more nervous than being broke did. I changed my mind and told them, once again, I couldn’t sell the company. That’s when Luca Garavoglia, the young, dashing chairman of Campari Group, and his side-kick with the food stains on his shirt, Stefano Saccardi, a man so relaxed and agreeable I never realized he was Luca’s attorney, showed up in Cabo for my birthday bash.
Luca could be the most impressive person I’ve ever met in my life. He is a brilliant, subtle, and classy human being, elegant and elevated with an extraordinary command of a wide array of details. He serves on the board of directors for Ferrari. His father died suddenly when Luca was fresh out of university, and he took over the old Italian aperitif makers. He blasted the company into the modern world. He started buying brands like Skyy Vodka, and took the company public on the Italian stock market. The Campari Group became one of the top liquor companies in the world.
Luca and Stefano told me that because they ran a public company, it would be difficult for them to acquire only part-interest in the tequila, but they could figure out a way so that I could keep 20 percent of the company. I was fine. With somebody like Luca Garavoglia owning the company, my 20 percent was going to be worth more than the 100 percent had been. Luca was the clincher. In May 2007, I made the sale.
I took my whole family on vacation to Italy for six weeks, even my brother and his family. We stayed for a week at this winery the Campari people owned in Sardinia, one of the coolest places on the planet. We went from Sardinia to southern Italy, up the Amalfi coast and through Tuscany and Chianti, all the way to Lake Maggiore in northern Italy. After a week by the lake, we went to Milan to visit Luca.
He showed me the new $100 million Campari factory. Only about five people were running the whole place with these efficient new machines that wrap and seal twenty-five hundred cases of Campari in, like, two minutes. He gave me some amazing numbers—$15,000 a second or something like that—but he wasn’t bragging. He was just showing me. Twenty years ago, they probably had six thousand employees. Now they have a dozen, most in the office.
“You ride with me,” he said, as we left the factory. “Let’s keep talking.”
We got into his Maserati Quattroporte, which is not that great a car. There were two guys with him. We got in the back. The other two guys sat in the front. They looked around, started it up, and punched it. In no time, they were hauling ass 140 miles an hour down the freeway. I felt every bump and I couldn’t roll down the window. We were hot. The air-conditioning was not working too well.
“I don’t like this car very much,” Luca said. “I like a Mercedes, but I’m on the board of directors for Ferrari and they wanted me to drive one of their cars. The Maserati is the only four-seater. The Ferrari, it’s not right for me—no four doors.”
We got back to the office and went through a metal detector. The two other guys pulled out the guns they were wearing in shoulder holsters. Nobody blinked an eye. Luca’s car rode so badly because it was carrying sixteen hundred kilos of bulletproofing.
A couple of years later, I started reading about the new Ferrari 599 Fiorano. Ferrari enthusiasts were comparing this to the greatest of the Ferraris—the 275GTB, the first Testarossas. I hadn’t bought a new Ferrari in a long time. I decided to buy one. I went to the Ferrari dealer and the salesman took my order. When we were finished, he tells me it will be a two-and-a-half-year wait and a $300,000 premium above the sticker price. I called Luca.
“It’s so funny you called me,” he said. “There’s a board meeting on Monday. I’ll see what I can do. What exactly do you want?”
That Monday night, I received an e-mail from Luca with a letter from the CEO of Ferrari attached, for the dealership. I got my car in two and a half months and I paid sticker price. Ferrari even gave me a custom paint job, black with a red stripe. They reversed the color on the interior—red interior with black stitching. They put in a plaque that said THIS FIORANO MADE FOR SAMMY HAGAR, and delivered it on my birthday. On every other Ferrari, the symbol is always a black horse on a yellow background. They made mine red.
Life was good for a kid from the orange groves. I had wealth and fame. I was in the fucking Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I am blessed with a wonderful wife, great children, and a loving family. I had experienced success in every realm of my life. It had been a long road to Cabo.
I went back to Fontana in February 2007 to play “I Can’t Drive 55” at the NASCAR track they built on the site of the old Kaiser Steel plant. The stage stood where my father used to work at the open hearth. Family was everywhere. I got a huge ovation, bigger than the Hollywood celebrities there, whose names I couldn’t remember the next day. I took Kari and the girls and we spent three days with my mother at her place in Palm Desert.
After Mike died, she sold the farm I bought them and moved to a condo in Palm Desert near my sister Velma. My mom would have rather found a five-dollar bill walking down the street, or pick up tin cans and cash them in for twenty bucks, than have me give her a million. She wanted to win the lottery or a jackpot. She didn’t want anybody to give her anything.
I finally talked her into letting me buy her a house. She loved her condo. We furnished it and remodeled it, but this really nice house came up across the street from Velma. It belonged to one of the executives for Outback Steakhouse, who had been transferred to Florida. She loved it. We held big events there every year. She would cook giant dinners for Easter or Thanksgiving and we would surround her with family.
There was an extra bedroom for me and Kari. We kept some of our stuff there. I had a guitar there. She came to stay with us, too. She had her first heart attack at four in the morning while she was visiting. She finally confessed that she couldn’t breathe, and we took her to the hospital. They put two stents in her, but she had another heart attack a year later. She went under the knife for quadruple bypass surgery at age eighty. I was scared. I thought she would die. But she volunteered for the operation and she came out of it great.
When we stayed with her before the NASCAR event, she seemed tired. My mom was always a ball of energy, but she was sitting a lot. She stayed up late the night before we left, talking with me. My mom always kept a garden. She saved seeds and was careful to rotate her crops in their little plots. She knew all this stuff. “You can’t just take carrot seeds and plant them the next year,” she said. “It has to be the third year.” She talked about how peach seeds had to be wrapped with cotton and left in a jar with water all winter before they would sprout. She told me you have to plant carrots in a spot one year, and the next year put lettuce in that spot, and then the next year you leave it alone, and then you come back with tomatoes. She told me all these wonderful things about canning. I got up the next morning, went and did the NASCAR gig for my father, and went home. Two days later, she died.
My sister called at about six in the morning. She was putting Mom in an ambulance. Twenty minutes later, t
he phone rang again. She was dead. She didn’t have a heart attack. Her heart simply stopped beating. She was done and she just slipped away quietly. “A beautiful finish,” my sister Bobbi wrote. I miss her every day.
16
WHO WANTS TO BE A BILLIONAIRE?
I have a real hard time giving up on the record business. that has nothing to do with my livelihood. It’s just such a shame. People don’t realize how dried up it’s become. the only people that sell records anymore are brand-new little pop bands that kids buy. For me, there is no record business. that breaks my heart. I want to make records. that’s a big part of what I do. But even before Napster ruined everything, I was looking for ways around the major labels. I gave an album to the guys at tower records, who were starting a little label. the big companies had screwed me out of money for years. I just had been with MCA and the Bubble Factory with Marching to Mars and Red Voodoo, each of which sold nearly a half million. It was not the kind of numbers I was used to selling, but I just wanted to make records. I saw all that going in the tank. I saw record companies changing, not putting any effort into a guy like me.
All you need is one new song. I made a string of recordings, and released them as singles, like “Sam I Am” or “I’ll take You There,” the old Staples Singers song. Later I might put them on a record, but they were really little more than tiny treats for radio and my fans. I started spending my own money. I’d write a song, record it in my studio, print it up, hire a promotion man, have him ship it to all the radio stations, pay a little bit of money here and there, and get it played so that I could have a new song. That was fun, not profitable, but I make money other ways. I can have fun with my music now.
That’s been the great gift of Cabo Wabo. The tequila business pays for me to still be in the music business. I could make money on tour, but I wouldn’t be traveling in a private jet and staying in nice hotels when I’m an opening act or playing small venues. I wouldn’t be making any records.
My band gets paid like a big-time band. I don’t take much money from my musical career, which makes me love it more. It takes the business out of it. That’s been the most successful thing I’ve done, take the business out of my music, because now, anything I do comes from my heart, baby. I am also free to do things like the Staples Singers song. I love to not be bound by my image or what people think of me. I loved that song. I was so happy to record it. It was like “Sam I Am.” I felt like I could write and record anything I want. There’s no industry out there anyway.
Bottom line is, I want to make records. I want to write songs. I want to go out and play new material for people. That was one of my main reasons for putting together Chickenfoot with Chad Smith on drums, Joe Satriani on guitar, and Michael Anthony on bass.
It had begun several years earlier, when Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers started coming down to the birthday bash every year. He bought a house down there. We would jam, jam, jam. I told him to never go to Cabo without calling me first. I’d call him and say I was going to Cabo the next day and he would get on a plane and come down. He and Michael Anthony and I would play every night. We called our little trio Chickenfoot. We played cover tunes. We played any damn thing we wanted. I’d let Mike sing lead. We used to do a great medley of “Come Together” and “Give It Away” by the Chili Peppers. We did James Brown medleys, “Hot Pants,” “Give It Up,” “Turn It Loose,” “Superbad” into “Cold Sweat.” We were rocking, having a really good time. Chad kept telling us. “This is it,” he said. “Let’s start a band.” It took me about five years before the light went on.
I promised myself I would never play with another genius guitar player, but I realized, for this band to work, it needed some kind of superstar guitarist. I can’t play guitar and sing. That is way too much work. I can jam, but if I had to play everything every night, I’d be struggling a lot of the time. The first person I thought of was Joe Satriani.
I had called Satriani about playing together a number of years before, and he told me, “I don’t play other people’s music.” But I’d seen him a few times since and he seemed pretty cool, quiet and aloof, distant, not too outgoing. This time, he was much more interested.
Super Bowl weekend 2008 in Las Vegas, and I had a gig booked at Pearl, the big room at the Palms Hotel. Serious fun. We were sold out. Joe came home from tour. We picked up his amp and went to Vegas. Mike and Chad met us there. We talked it over in the dressing room—just talked though. We didn’t rehearse. We decided we all knew “Goin’ Down,” Traffic’s “Mr. Fantasy,” and Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.” We didn’t discuss arrangements or anything. We just went out and did it. I did the show with the Wabos, and for the encore, I announced we were going to have some special guests, while the crew laid out Joe’s gear and adjusted the drum kit for Chad. Mike’s amp was already set up.
From the first thirty seconds of “Goin’ Down,” that audience went through the roof. I felt it. Everybody onstage felt it. Our wives, the crew, management—they all knew. Everybody in the hall felt it. It was electric. I had just done a great show with my band, played every hit you could possibly play, but this band did something else to that audience that was unique. This was a real band.
From that first time we played, I knew we had stumbled on an impossible combination of musicianship and chemistry. The cool thing about Chickenfoot was not just that the chemistry was instantly right, but also that we were all grown-ups, with our own careers, our own money. No one needed it. We played music that we liked. We weren’t trying to be like this or be like that. We were exactly who and what we were, and we let whatever that was happen. That made it like jazz, in its own way. It wasn’t jazz, but it was like jazz, in the sense that we were four guys playing exactly the music we wanted to play, the way we wanted to play it. For us, it worked.
I knew a so-called super-group would get more attention. Record companies could get behind it, and we could go out and play all new stuff, give me a break from “I Can’t Drive 55.” I love those songs, but I don’t enjoy beating them to death. The first Chickenfoot record did well. It went gold. We made a profit. I have a hard time spending a few hundred thousand dollars on a record and only make a hundred back, but that’s the way it is. The record industry has really died off.
I go solo backward. People like Phil Collins or Peter Gabriel leave a band to go solo. I’ve always gone solo first and then joined a band. They go solo because they are tired of being in a band. For me, I join bands because I need the inspiration. I learned so much in Montrose—how to play guitar like Ronnie, how to lead a band, how bands work—and I used it all in my solo career after Montrose. Ten years later, I was selling out multiple arenas, had five platinum albums in a row on Geffen, and I was ripe to join Van Halen when they asked. I was tired of doing my own thing, thinking of taking a year off, and didn’t know what to do anyway. I needed to be around other musicians to make me grow again. Ten years with Van Halen, and I was ready to go solo again. Too bad I stayed that eleventh year. I’d already learned everything I could from that band.
I wanted one last hurrah. I have been threatening to retire since 1984. Something always comes along that keeps me from quitting. Chickenfoot is the only new classic rock band in a long time. We fortunately avoided being called a super-group. That’s always impossible to live up to. We certainly were super players, everyone in the group. When we got together, Joe would start playing a song idea. Chad would chime in. Mikey learns faster than anyone—he’d act like he knew the song already. I would scat along, make up lyrics on the spot or write words later. That’s how we wrote every song. Joe would bring a new idea. By the end of the day, I had my part. Everybody knew what he was going to play. Magical performance. No teeth pulling. No having to extract anything out of anyone. With Chickenfoot, we simply went in and ripped it up.
We decided we wanted our record to sound classic. We thought about working with Brendan O’Brien or one of the other hot young producers, but we hired Andy Johns, even though I’d
refused to work with him on For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. As much as I wanted to kill him, and eventually fired him from the Van Halen record, he made the greatest classic rock records ever, Led Zeppelin III, Exile on Main St. Joe had worked with him, too. We both knew he came with a lot of personal problems, but when Andy Johns sets microphones up around a drum set, it fucking starts rocking. The Chickenfoot album was one of only twelve albums to go gold in 2009.
With Chad’s whacked-out energy, I became the straight man. Anyone else would lose the groove twenty times by turning the beat around as often as he does, but he keeps the groove and plays everything you can possibly play in every song. He’s one fierce drummer. He brings Joe out, makes Joe not be so conservative. And Joe can be a technician’s technician. But not with Chickenfoot. There is nothing like the ’Foot. Chickenfoot is never going to make me a billionaire. Why am I doing this? Working so hard?
If I wanted to be a billionaire, I probably could. I could take all I have right now and leverage it like Donald Trump. That’s what he did. I could work for it, too. Another couple good ideas and who knows? I could invent so many different places that are fun, which would be successful, that I’m sure I could do it, if I wanted. It’s probably not that hard. But I’m not interested. I don’t want to be a billionaire. That would be the biggest fucking waste of time on the planet.
When I came up with Sammy’s Beach Bar & Grill, I knew it was a great idea, but I had to wonder why I would do it. I didn’t need the money. I learned I can do it and how to do it, and it seemed like the easiest thing in the world for me to do. I just couldn’t think of a single reason to do it. Then I thought I could do it for charity. Kari and I like to support charities that help children.
I’m involved in this charity with the Beach Bar & Grill in Maui, helping desperately ill kids on the island. All our Beach Bar & Grills support charities in the cities where they’re based. We helped pay for a kidney transplant for this girl. We didn’t pay for the surgery, but we paid for her family to come with her to San Francisco, where she was having the operation. We built a number of these airport restaurants—Las Vegas, St. Louis, JFK Airport in New York—and they kick down a steady stream of income to local charities working with children. This guy I work with on the Maui charity asked me if I would talk to these teenagers that had been in orphanages. They get released and they don’t have anybody. They don’t have a brother or a sister. They don’t know where their mom and dad are. He said these kids get in trouble. They don’t have any other choice. He runs a shelter for them. They don’t have any self-esteem, he says. They don’t believe in themselves one bit. I can fix that. I can help these kids, because I can say to them, first of all, no matter who your parents are, no matter where you’re born, everyone is born with the same gifts. You’ve got the same ability as I have, as anybody has. Just because you don’t know who your parents are, don’t think that you don’t have the ability to get whatever you want.