ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON FEB. 27, 2011
By Steve Newton
On March 15 Sammy Hagar’s autobiography, Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, will hit bookshelves, but you can bet his old bandmate Eddie Van Halen won’t be racing out to score a copy.
According to excerpts published recently in the Marin Independent Journal, the 63-year-old “Red Rocker” holds nothing back about the guitar hero—like how he looked before their Van Halen reunion tour in 2003.
“I hadn’t seen him in 10 years,” writes Hagar. “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 on 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.”
Neither is Hagar complimentary toward David Lee Roth, the original (and now current) Van Halen vocalist, whose position he took over in 1985.
“I hated Dave,” he writes. “The guy rubbed me wrong. I’m sure I rub all kinds of people wrong, so it’s not like I’m putting him down. The guy was a great front man, great attitude in rock, and had an image from hell, but I just couldn’t stand the guy. He was the opposite of what I believed in and what I am. First of all, the guy’s not a great singer and he acts like he’s the coolest, hottest guy in the world when, to me, he looks gay.”
During the initial Hagar era Van Halen released four multiplatinum studio albums, all of which hit #1 on Billboard, but many longtime fans decried the poppier direction the band took in comparison to its raunchy early style. After he was “unceremoniously fired” (Hagar’s words) in 1996, he went on to form his own band, the Waboritas, who he still plays with.
More recently he formed a “supergroup” called Chickenfoot that features guitar wizard Joe Satriani, but the less said about them the better. He’s also known as a successful businessman, owner of the Cabo Wabo Cantina in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and founder of the Cabo Wabo tequila company, which he’s made millions from.
Hagar first tasted fame on a major scale with the anti-speed-limit single “I Can’t Drive 55”, which was released the year before he was recruited by Van Halen. But I always thought his best work had been accomplished more than 10 years earlier, when he sang on the first two Montrose albums, the self-titled 1973 debut and 1974’s Paper Money.
Back in the day I was also mightily impressed with his debut solo album, 1976’s Nine On a Ten Scale, and its two followups, both from ’77, Sammy Hagar (better known as “The Red Album”) and Musical Chairs. All three of those albums were produced by a guy known only as Carter.
I never got to see Montrose, sadly, although I remember friends saying they played at Vancouver’s Empire Stadium one summer, opening for Heart or something. But I did get to see Hagar play at the Commodore Ballroom around ’77, and he was a crimson dynamo back then, trading flashy guitar solos with lead player Gary Pihl. He’d also taken the Montrose rhythm section of bassist Bill Church and drummer Denny Carmassi with him, which was killer.
I really loved Sammy Hagar back then. Now, not so much.
That tequila of his sure hits the spot, though.
To hear the full audio of my 1995 interview with Alex Van Halen–in which he actually has nice things to say about Sammy Hagar–subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can also eavesdrop on over 400 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with the legends of rock since 1982.