Everybody Wants Some

by Ian Christe

  He acknowledged mysteriously on The Howard Stern Show that the technique was not yet legal in the United States, and suggested that the billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry was more interested in selling people chemo drugs and radiation therapy. “Cancer is a multidimensional disease,” he explained. “It’s spiritual, it’s how you think, and it’s emotional.” For someone best known for playing guitar really fast, Eddie sounded a lot like a would-be prophet.

  In January 2002, Van Halen drifted further off course, splitting with Warner Bros. after more than twenty-three years in business together. Their contract wasn’t up, according to Billboard, and the label described the break as simply a business decision, “not a function of where the band is at musically.” It was the culmination of a clean sweep that began in 2000, when most of the band’s long-term employees were shown the door. Along with the label, Van Halen also replaced the lawyer who had been with them practically since Sammy joined. For the first time in nearly twenty-five years, Van Halen was an unsigned band—and they would remain untethered, floating loose for years.

  Warner Bros. still possessed the master tapes to most of the early albums and more or less had legal rights to release outtakes and compilations. The original tapes to later albums, beginning with 1984, mostly still resided at Eddie Van Halen’s house—the label had never thought during the band’s fiscal heyday to send over a courier in a silver limo to demand the originals back. Warner representatives began compiling a box set including rarities, demo tapes, and alternate takes, but when they contacted acting manager Alex Van Halen, they were initially told to forget the idea.

  Even the most dedicated fans began to fade during this period. After six years, Van Halen’s fan quarterly, The Inside, ceased publication. The glossy magazine had begun in 1995 and for a while became the semiofficial mouthpiece of the band, offering editors tours of 5150 and access to tour rehearsals. The last two Van Halen studio albums published the magazine’s address. But now publisher Jeff Hausman stopped the presses, citing “a big lack of news.” For all his trouble, David Lee Roth sued Hausman afterward over licensing issues but dropped the claim in May 2002 after agreeing The Inside had done nothing illegal.

  It took him a while, but Roth eventually accepted that reunion negotiations had collapsed, and his three or four new songs with Van Halen had no future. Afterward, he was brutal—yet behind his well-crafted words was genuine sorrow. “I’m about right here, right now. What the Van Halens are about is wasted time. If you think one second isn’t valuable, then ask the little girl who just missed getting a gold medal at the Olympics by one second. If you think one month is not valuable to somebody, then ask the lady who just had a premature kid how valuable that month is. Eddie Van Halen and his sister have wasted years.”

  18. Get the Party Started

  Meanwhile, Sammy Hagar ventured forth successfully as a solo artist reborn, often with Michael Anthony in tow. With his new wife, Kari, and a growing young family started during his last months with Van Halen, Hagar was buoyant. After turning fifty, he had become an all-around lifestyle impresario on the back of his music and the Cabo Wabo Cantina. “It’s almost like Cabo Wabo in some ways broke the band up the first time,” Sammy told KSHE. The band had bailed on the club after discovering a whopping bill for back taxes. “Van Halen didn’t want to do it, and they were part of it, and they wanted to give it to the government. I said no way, you’re not gonna take my place from me, that’s crazy. So I bought them out. And ever since then, they hated it, because it’s been successful.”

  Twenty years after he began drinking at age thirty, Sammy the son of a terminal alcoholic had become a tequila magnate and self-promotion machine. The success of Cabo Wabo Cantina made it possible in 1996 for Sammy to partner with the small Miravalle tequila factory from Jalisco, Mexico, supplier of his house tequila. Rebranded as Cabo Wabo after a successful trial run in Hawaii, the elixir made its way to upscale liquor stores nationally with the help of distributor Wilson Daniels. In 2000 and 2001, all three varieties of Cabo Wabo tequila won Taste Award Gold Medals and Best of Show medals from the American Tasting Institute, a trade group of thirty thousand restaurant workers.

  Fortune profiled Sammy in 2000 and estimated Cabo Wabo’s catch that year at $19 million. Hagar figured that he made more money from tequila than record sales but claimed his partner Shep Gordon was the bean counter. As far as the public was concerned, Hagar’s role was fun-loving tequila promoter and taster-in-chief supervising the product down to its hand-blown glass packaging. “When a fan of mine pays this much for a bottle of tequila, and he probably doesn’t even like tequila, I want him at least to have a nice vase to put on the table.”

  The brilliance of Hagar’s burgeoning empire was how the music sold the tequila and vice versa. His friendly, outgoing personality already endeared him to casino and club owners. Now bars that stocked his booze promoted his music around the year—while, in turn, gigs once or twice yearly in casinos in Atlantic City or Foxwoods in Connecticut jacked up awareness of Cabo Wabo. “The way I live my life is the Cabo Wabo lifestyle,” he told Tequila Aficionado. “Everything I do, it promotes itself because I don’t have to go out and say I am selling this, I am Mr. Cabo Wabo! Between the club, my stage show, which is built around the Cabo Wabo, and the tequila—it’s like a snow ball thing, it all promotes itself.”

  The annual Branded Entertainment Summit conference was impressed enough to invite Sammy to host a luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hilton. “While known for his rock n’ roll exploits,” the press release read, “Sammy is also an extremely successful entrepreneur and someone who naturally recognizes the value in a brand.”

  Sammy seemed to be beachcombing for the blown-out flip-flops of Jimmy Buffett, the musical entrepreneur whose midlife-crisis anthems spawned a multimillion-dollar empire of T-shirts, paperbacks, clothing, and music celebrating the vacation mind-set of Key West, Florida. As Buffett’s fans called themselves Parrotheads, the Red Rocker’s followers became Redheads and put on red afro wigs. When a branch of the Cabo Wabo Cantina opened in the basement of Harvey’s Casino in Lake Tahoe, California, in 2004, Jimmy Buffett cover bands became a staple, alongside looping videos of Sammy Hagar with Van Halen.

  Sammy had figured out how to sell not just music, but a part-time party lifestyle to middle-aged businessmen who looked at him and saw one of their own. With his sunburned nose, beachcomber shades, and shorts, he looked more like a tourist who had recently lost his inhibitions than the spry rocker of the early 1980s. “I don’t like hats, I don’t like socks, I don’t even like shoes,” he said. “I don’t even like clothes period but you know you gotta wear a T-shirt and some shorts.”

  Rock fans of a more selective morality began calling him “$pammy” Hagar. The potshots came all too easily, but the very nature of his goofy enthusiasm deflected criticism. For one thing, Hagar was still genuinely enthusiastic about playing music.

  While Eddie made infrequent appearances at celebrity golf tour-naments, Hagar continued to record and perform, pausing only for a guest appearance as a bartender on a 1998 episode of Nash Bridges. After leaving Van Halen in 1996, Sammy formed the Waboritas with boyhood pal and drummer David Lauser, who introduced bassist Mona Gnader. The band’s hotshot guitarist, Vic Johnson, came from the Bus-boys, a versatile eighties crossover act that had been featured alongside Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in 48 Hours. Waboritas keyboardist Jesse Harms was another old friend, a producer of solo Hagar prior to Van Halen, as well as albums for REO Speedwagon and Eddie Money.

  At first the band were weekend warriors, but 1999’s Red Voodoo album rose to number 22 on the Billboard album chart. Returning to the fresh-faced hard rock of his pre–Van Halen solo albums, Hagar showed that he had emerged from years of sensitive balladry and electro-pop unscathed. A reworking of Gary Glitter’s stadium singalong “Rock ’n Roll Part 2,” Sammy’s “Mas Tequila” served as both a commercial for his drink empire and a slap in the ruddy faces of old bandmates who couldn’t hol
d their liquor.

  As he thrived in his new life, his appearance completely changed. Wine and pasta added some pounds to his midsection. He went under the shears in November 1999 on The Tonight Show, cropping his trademark curls for the benefit of Locks of Love, a nonprofit organization producing human hair wigs for children with long-term medical hair loss. Afterward, with giant red shorts and shades, he looked like a mascot for a minor-league baseball team, or the footloose descendent of Cyndi Lauper’s former manager, Captain Lou Albano.

  By 2002, the Waboritas were upbeat purveyors of party rock par excellence, rampaging through two-hour sets with Hagar solo hits, Wabos originals, and Hagar-era Van Halen songs like “When It’s Love” and “Finish What Ya Started.” He still stayed away from Roth-era songs, claiming he didn’t know the words. As Sammy rifled his Rolodex, his band welcomed guests ranging from Ted Nugent to Metallica, who joined him onstage for renditions of old Montrose songs and hard rock standards, such as a crowd-pleasing Led Zeppelin medley of his own design called “Whole Lotta Zep.”

  Sammy Hagar and the Waboritas’s 2002 album Not 4 Sale kicked off with “Stand Up,” which he’d written for the fictional heavy metal band Steel Dragon in Rock Star. Though the movie story was based on Judas Priest, who had replaced their singer with someone from a Priest cover band, the comparison was funny—the movie told the story of a replacement singer going through the ropes with a brand-name hard rock band.

  Sammy claimed Van Halen’s inactivity was not his fault. “I think if they could do anything right now they would have done it,” he said in early 2002, after they had ignored calls to join him or Dave for any kind of Van Halen tour. “No one has heard anything, they don’t have a record deal. They’ve just fallen completely apart. I think it’s the worst thing that could have ever happened to one of the greatest rock bands in the world.”

  Heralding a strange new century, in 2002 the former Van Halen singers Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth teamed for a rivalry-packed summer tour dubbed “Song for Song: The Undisputed Heavyweight Champs of Rock and Roll.” The Sam & Dave package was announced on April 15, the dreaded deadline for income taxes. When the pair finally met for the first time, they seemed to regard each other with the affection usually reserved for IRS agents.

  In the years since he commanded center stage, Roth’s quirky personality had accelerated to the hilt. Flaunting his bare chest and wearing low-cut flare pants as he approached fifty, he immediately jump-kicked into grizzled warrior mode, reportedly dismissing Hagar as “a mediocre talent.” He had begun 2002 on the wrong end of a lawsuit from a booking agent who accused him of nonpayment of tens of thousands of dollars in fees.

  “I never knew Dave,” Hagar said. “I suspected from what everyone’s always told me that he’s not an easy guy to get along with. He’s like an egomaniac—in a positive sense, that he really, really thinks he’s the greatest thing that ever walked the planet.”

  As details of the forty-plus concert dates solidified, the appeal of seeing two eras of Van Halen merge onstage became clear—the pair possibly trading verses of “Jump,” or the off-the-wall possibility that Roth might take a stab at a latter-day hit like “Runaround.” Sammy held even higher hopes—to reconcile with the Van Halen brothers after seven years and possibly instigate a full-fledged Van Halen tour. "My idea was that that maybe this Sam and Dave tour would motivate a Van Halen reunion,” he said, “which would still be one of the greatest things ever for the fans.”

  With the two foils alternating headlining slots in each city, the bout was Diamond Dave, with highly processed and aged blond mane, dressed in blue-sequined suits, against the Red Rocker, who dressed like a beach bum or a hockey fan, draped in Mardi Gras beads and fronting an energetic band that included an ex-machinist girl bass player and a black shredder guitarist. In his corner, Roth had plucked guitarist Brian Young from Atomic Punks, a Van Halen tribute act that was doing very well at giving the public the classic Van Halen it wanted.

  The two came out from their corners fighting. “Sammy Hagar is upset with me because he knows I’m better than he is,” Roth told a TV interviewer.

  Tempers flared backstage at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, where Hagar and his band were relegated to a small backstage dressing room while Roth scored a sumptuous receiving area with colorful furniture and wardrobe. Roth delayed his arrival until Hagar was nearly ready to perform, then attempted to steal the show with an entourage of a half dozen security guards and a trio of masked blonde Playboy models wearing silver bodysuits and cat ears. “This is the parade down Main Street—this is P. T. Barnum,” Roth told VH1 while Hagar simmered.

  Crowds appeared at the “sans Halen” shows waving anti-Eddie signs and mutilated cardboard Eddie cutouts. The spats in the audience were minimal—fans from the Roth and Hagar camps tolerated each other like teenagers told to share a backyard party with younger siblings. Hagar and Roth split a basic crew, though they hired separate sound and lighting specialists to hedge against sabotage. Beneath the enmity, the two did seem to share a psychic survivors’ bond—it just happened to be a very bad one, joined in a very harmonious understanding about not liking each other.

  In Detroit, Kid Rock tried to broker an onstage collaboration between the pair, which Hagar had wanted since before the tour began. Though Roth agreed, the powwow never materialized. Kid Rock learned it was easier to marry bombshell Pamela Anderson and lure her to Michigan than to unify the oppositely charged particles of David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar. Hagar put on a futile show of banging on Roth’s backstage door every night, making a game of his rejected overtures. Roth stopped answering the door.

  Hagar couldn’t resist getting in his digs in the press, laced with lots of jokes about Roth’s hair. “Dave comes out with all his glitter and glamour, and we come out with the real deal—it all just folds together into one great rock show.”

  Michael Anthony joined Sammy and the Waboritas onstage as a guest for many dates, his first appearances onstage in over three years. He reported that back at home the Van Halen brothers did not have a problem with him joining the tour—at least not with Hagar, though anger at Roth was still a definite possibility. He also let slip that he hadn’t spoken to Eddie or Alex since February.

  On August 1, before the tour rolled into the Big Apple, the New York Post broke a sensational headline: VAN HALEN’S GETTING VICIOUS. Given a platform to vent his frustration with Dave, Sammy delighted in comparing Roth to Liberace, criticizing his hair and calling him an “asshole.” Roth retorted two weeks later in a Nashville interview, joking about Sammy’s increasingly portly physique. “I think I saved Sam from having to do celebrity boxing for a living.”

  The karate black belt Roth and the ex-boxer Hagar mostly exchanged verbal blows from a distance, but they did appear onstage together once during the tour at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. They traded scripted banter as they presented an MTV Video Music Award to Linkin Park. “Relax, Dave, all these people aren’t here to see you,” Hagar read from the prompter. “It’s really good to see you after fifty-five shows—where have you been all summer?”

  “I’ve been on the Celebrity Deathmatch tour,” Roth said, laughing.

  While in New York, Hagar arranged a free show at Irving Plaza, giving out five hundred tickets over the radio, and reserving another five hundred for uniformed police and firefighters. One year after the September 11 attacks, Sammy’s gesture was appreciated. A grateful official representative presented Hagar with a 9/11 memorial plaque. A cop in the audience went further and gave Sammy the uniform off his back. As Sam puffed a joint and slapped hands with the crowd, it was hard to tell who needed to blow off steam more: the shell-shocked first responders of the World Trade Center disaster, or the working-class singer who had been forced to battle all summer with sharp-tongued David Lee Roth.

  Also at the Irving Plaza show, two former Van Halen frontmen sang together on the same stage for the first time—Sammy Hagar and Gary Cherone. Though Cherone ha
d toured with David Lee Roth while still in Extreme, he had never met Hagar before joining Van Halen. With Michael Anthony pumping away on bass, Hagar and Cherone clasped one another and banged out Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.”

  Three years onward, Cherone was starring in a community musical theater production of The Wall, and preparing to release the first record by his new band, Tribe of Judah. He showed no signs of bitterness toward Van Halen. “I guess due to some personal, frustrating moments on my part, it just seemed the time and place to move on,” he said. “All I can say is that those guys were absolutely great to me.”

  After the show, Hagar beamed to Mike. “It’s the same shit as the old days—only on some other level.” He still wanted to compete with young rock bands, and he still had things left to prove. Ultimately he had to be satisfied climbing back onto the Cabo Wabo jet as an older man, still sweating, still reigning over a joyous room, whether the press or the music insiders understood his success or not.

  Business-wise, the tour succeeded beyond expectations. Apparently fans felt two ex-singers doing Van Halen songs was better than no Van Halen at all. The Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth summer dates did $9.6 million worth of business, selling over three hundred thousand tickets. On a personal level, Sammy got to know David Lee Roth. “There’s just so much about Dave I don’t like,” he admitted.

  Maybe surprising themselves, most audiences gave the decision to Sammy’s show over Dave’s. Still, Sammy wondered whether it was worth it. “I spent five years of my life with the Waboritas, building my audience, trying to shed myself of Van Halen,” he told Guitar World. “Once I got involved with Dave, I realized that I was thrown right back into the Van Halen arena and all I was was an ex–Van Halen singer.”