In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Sammy Hagar spoke about his relationship with his former VAN HALEN bandmate Alex Van Halen, who hasn’t spoken with Hagar in 21 years, and refused to even mention Sammy by name in his recent memoir, “Brothers”. Regarding why there has been no communication between the two in the last couple of decades, Sammy said: “I’ve had this conversation with a few people, including [former VAN HALEN manager] Irving Azoff. I’ve asked him, ‘What’s the problem?’ And some people have said to me, ‘Oh, Cabo Wabo. At one time, VAN HALEN, when you built it, you guys were all partners in that. And then they didn’t want it anymore when it was losing money, and they gave it to you, and you turned it around and made hundreds of millions of dollars on it. And they’re angry. Alex is angry about that.’ To that I said, ‘How the fuck could they be angry about that? They gave me the damn thing, they walked out on me, left me with it. And they made me indemnify them in case I got sued and lost everything. They made me sign off big time.’ And I’m going, ‘I hope it’s not that.'”
Referencing his 2011 autobiography “Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock”, in which Hagar slammed Alex‘s brother Eddie Van Halen, saying the guitarist was unkempt, hunched over, frighteningly skinny, drinking wine straight out of a bottle, missing part of his tongue (after a cancer scare) and several teeth, Sammy continued: “The book has been brought up. The book was honest. It was well documented that Eddie was a mess on that tour. But I don’t want to drag Eddie through no coals now. That’s just water under the bridge.
“I think Al‘s angry because I’m out doing it, and Mike [Anthony, former VAN HALEN bassist] and I are out doing it, and he can’t,” Hagar added. “He’s not a singer. He’s not a guitar player. He is not really a band leader. And he seems like he doesn’t want to play drums or can’t play drums anymore, and he can’t go write a new record. Alex wasn’t the songwriter in the band. He was the drummer. Eddie and I wrote the songs. Dave [Lee Roth] and Eddie wrote the songs, and so we can go out and do them. And I think that really bothers him that Mike and I are still out there doing it. I would feel bad. If I put myself in his shoes, I would feel terrible if I couldn’t do it anymore. But I’m the happiest guy out of all of them. That pisses people off in itself. Being too happy, people don’t like that.”
When interviewer Andy Greene noted that Alex has had real health issues and has reasons to feel bitter, Sammy said: “Yeah, I’d say so. And I’m okay with it. Al, you’re fine. Just leave me alone. I’ll leave you alone. Everything’s good. I’m making you money, by the way, Al. I’m out there selling VAN HALEN records and keeping the name alive, keeping the music alive.”
Last December, Alex Van Halen was asked by Bringing It Back To The Beatles why he made “the conscientious decision” to end his book, “Brothers”, in 1984 and not cover any of the band’s later years. He responded: “Because the original band was the band that was the driving force. That was the connection between the disparate parts of the musical world, if you will. And we were young. The first record going platinum — it’s incredible. That’s something you can really never expect to happen again. Later on, it was different — that’s for another book — but the excitement and the confusion and the groping in the dark, if you will, and all the mistakes that we made, and all the B.S. we had to endure, and then to recognize at the very end, maybe we had one more record in us, it was very… You can’t take it back, but those are the things that are in the back of your head. The old expression of, if you don’t go over the edge, then you can’t come back. You have to go too far to come back in. Does that make sense? Unfortunately, we’re human and we made some bad choices. The US Festival, for instance, was just a clusterfuck. Nobody knew what the hell was going on. All we said was, ‘You make sure you have enough power, and we’ll play.’ That’s it.”
When the interviewer noted that this attitude is “true rock and roll,” Alex concurred. “Bingo. That’s exactly right,” he said. “You just hit the nail on the head. After that, that’s why the book ends in 1984, because that was true rock and roll. After that, it became much more — I don’t know; I can’t explain it. But it’s not to say that it was not any good. We always did our best at whatever we were doing, but it wasn’t the same.”
He added earlier in the interview: “I think I picked up where Ed [legendary VAN HALEN guitarist and Alex‘s brother Eddie Van Halen] left off in terms of saying… His example was that we were actually happier playing in clubs than we were when we hit the so-called big time, because in the clubs you weren’t quite sure what you were doing, you could, at the drop of a hat, change directions, you can play anything you want and there’s nobody that holds you accountable or they have expectations of any sort. You just go on and you play. And it’s intimate. You’re right there, two feet away. People are right there in front of your face. And that kind of goes away when you get to the place where you have five lines of security people. And we always kept it to a minimum, but nonetheless, that was the soup du jour.”
Two months earlier, Alex gave a slightly different answer to USA Today when asked about his decision to end the book when VAN HALEN‘s original singer David Lee Roth first quit the band 41 years ago.
“For me, the spirit of the band ended in 1984,” Alex said. “We did good work after that, but the primary spiritual aspect, the magic, the potential, the looking to the future together, all of that stuff, our mutually strange backgrounds — that’s what made VAN HALEN. Ed and I were outsiders. Dave was an outsider. Those kinds of intangible things make the fabric of how we were tied together.”
Asked about his current relationship with David, Alex said: “I think Dave is laying low right now. I don’t know his mental state in terms of how he’s dealing with all of this.
“I was taught early on that the music field isn’t about the notes and things, it’s about relationships and what we all had [in VAN HALEN] was deeply entangled.
“I don’t hold [Roth leaving VAN HALEN] against him. We’re not here to hold you prisoner. But it was very telling how the dynamic of certain entities got warped by the people around him.
“Dave was in the middle of [huge success] where he wasn’t thinking clearly, and he would admit that now. That’s the reason I called him first [after Ed died] — only to find out that 23 years changes people.”
Asked if that means that the conversation didn’t go as expected, Alex said: “He’s the not the same guy. But if he called me right now, I would answer the phone. It’s about human dignity and respect.”
“Brothers” ignores Sammy Hagar‘s stint with VAN HALEN, as well as that of EXTREME vocalist Gary Cherone, and even VAN HALEN‘s reunion with Roth that started in 2007.
“What happened after Dave left is not the same band,” Alex told Billboard. “I’m not saying it was better or worse or any of that. The fact is Ed and I did our best work whenever we played. We always gave it our best shot. But the magic was in the first years, when we didn’t know what we were doing, when we were willing to try anything.”
Alex also explained his refusal to participate in this past summer’s “The Best Of All Worlds” that focused largely on the music of VAN HALEN. The trek featured Hagar and former VAN HALEN bassist Michael Anthony, along with guitarist Joe Satriani and drummer Jason Bonham.
The 2024 tour came more than two years after Satriani revealed that he was approached about participating in a VAN HALEN tribute show with Alex and David Lee Roth. That project never got off the ground, reportedly because Roth was “holding up” getting everything approved.
In the Billboard interview, Alex said about why he was not responsive when Hagar and Anthony reached out about him taking part in some way in “The Best Of All Worlds”: “I’m not interested. They’re not doing the band justice. They can do what they want to do. That’s not my business.”
In a separate interview with Rolling Stone, Alex didn’t even utter Hagar‘s name. “The heart and the soul and the creativity and the magic was Dave, Ed, Mike and me,” he said. In the book, his only acknowledgment of the “Van Hagar” era reportedly came in the line, “We had a lot of other singers over the years.”
Hagar mended his relationship with Eddie Van Halen months prior to the legendary VAN HALEN guitarist’s October 2020 passing.
Hagar replaced Roth in VAN HALEN in 1985 and recorded four studio albums with the band — “5150”, “OU812”, “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” and “Balance” — all of which topped the U.S. chart.
Sammy, Eddie, Alex and Mike last teamed up in 2004 for a U.S. summer tour. In exchange for taking part in the tour, Anthony reportedly had to agree to take a pay cut and sign away his rights to the band name and logo.
Sammy Hagar photo credit: Leah Steiger
Source: blabbermouth.net
