Red Read online

  Red

  My Uncensored Life in Rock

  Sammy Hagar with Joel Selvin

  Foreword by Michael Anthony

  TO GLADYS

  Contents

  Foreword by Michael Anthony

  1

  Hard Luck Son of a Bitch

  2

  Mobile Home Blues

  3

  Going to San Francisco

  4

  Montrose

  5

  The Red Rocker

  6

  I Can’t Drive Fifty-five

  Photographic Insert I

  7

  5150

  8

  Monsters of Rock

  9

  Right Here, Right Now

  10

  Cabo Wabo

  11

  Father’s Day

  12

  Mas Tequila

  13

  Enter Irving

  14

  Samurai Hair

  Photographic Insert II

  15

  Going Home

  16

  Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?

  Note from the Coauthor

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  BY MICHAEL ANTHONY

  I first saw the Van Halen brothers play when I was going to Arcadia High School, on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. It was during a student fair held on the football field, and the band was called Mammoth. It was just Eddie Van Halen on guitar, his brother Alex Van Halen on drums, and a guy named Mark Stone playing bass. Eddie did all the vocals. They played Cream, Grand Funk railroad, and the Who. Eddie nailed every single note of every song, exactly like the records.

  After high school, I belonged to a band called Snake. Pretty original name, I know. We opened a show for Van Halen at Pasadena High School. Now they had a vocalist. I remember sitting around the parking lot after the gig, talking with Eddie.

  Fast forward to my second year at Pasadena City College, and through a mutual friend I got hooked up again with the Van Halen brothers. They wanted to get rid of their bass player and asked me to come and jam with the two of them. That’s when they asked me to join the band.

  We played everywhere that we could. These guys were serious about working hard and taking the band somewhere. We did parties, clubs, you name it, anywhere that the gas money would take us. After playing all night, I’d basically sleep in my car when I was supposed to be in class. I was getting ready to make the choice—school or the band—when my dad kicked me out of the house.

  The Van Halens were just normal guys. We all partied a lot and, being brothers, they fought a lot. They would always hug and make up later, but they would get into these disagreements and we’d have to pull them apart. Didn’t matter where—they’d start pounding on each other, but before long they’d be crying and hugging, saying, “I love you, man.” Those two had a connection, not just brotherly but musically, too. Ed wanted to hear Al in his monitor. Al wanted to hear Ed in his monitor. They played off each other.

  Before Sammy showed up, we were all pretty devastated. It looked like the band had possibly come to the end after Roth left. When we’d first signed with Warner Bros., friends in the business told us that five years was a good life span for a rock group. We figured we may have had our run. The label wasn’t very enthusiastic, either. They didn’t even want us to continue to call the band Van Halen. Eddie and Al didn’t know what to do. They tossed around names of singers and we did have a couple of unknown guys come in and sing with us because we thought that bringing in somebody already known would change the dynamic of the band. That didn’t work, and nobody knew what to do until Claudio Zampoli, Eddie’s car mechanic, suggested that he call Sammy.

  From the first moment I shook his hand on the day he came to Van Halen’s 5150 Studios, I knew this guy had a vibe. We had never met before, but I was a big fan: When we’d worked with producer Ted Templeman recording the first Van Halen album, we told him to make us sound like Montrose—we wanted that big “Rock Candy” sound.

  Sammy was a breath of fresh air. We went out to the studio to play him some music. We played and he started singing along. Whatever Eddie could play, he could sing. We all looked at the engineer, Donn Landee, and just went, “Oh, fuck.” It was like the clouds cleared, the skies opened up, the sun came out, the birds were singing, the animals were dancing. It was like, “Amen! We’ve got ourselves a band.” He was the perfect missing piece of the puzzle.

  We were blown away. We made cassettes and sat there with the engineer. I just remember saying, “We’ve got ourselves a band.” We’d been all down and out and hadn’t known what we were going to do. This was the answer to our prayers. This was the kick in the ass we needed. This was…fuck, this is it.

  I played the cassette for my wife, Sue. It was just the lyric Sammy came up with off the top of his head, which later became “Summer Nights.” She went nuts over what she heard. She could tell. You can get together with guys and jam, and I’ve done that many times in bands, and some of them are great, some of them you just go through the motions. But magic like that is once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky.

  All of a sudden we’re taking it to a new level. Not only do we have this guy who can really sing, but now we’ve got another guitar player, too. It was something new, something different, and Eddie was really into it. Sammy was the key. He was the guy who took us to a new, higher plateau with Van Halen.

  Sam and I hit it off like a steam locomotive. We became friends in a way I had never been with anyone else in the band. The whole band caught the spirit. Nothing was going to get in our way. It was nothing less than a rebirth of Van Halen. There was a lot of energy flowing through that studio when we were working on the 5150 album, ideas coming left and right, all fresh and exciting.

  With Sammy, we had real melody. He was just a great all-around musician. Eddie could say, “Hey, Sam, I got this idea,” and Sammy could pick up a guitar and go, “Yes, but what about this?” That was all new with us. We started to become a much more musical band.

  With Sammy in the band, Van Halen went through the roof. The band scored a string of number one multiplatinum albums. We ruled the arena rock world and played before capacity crowds night after night for more than ten years. We were the world champion hard-rock band and Sammy took us there.

  As everything started to fizzle with Sam, I stood by and watched it all happen. I had that comfort zone in Van Halen and I wasn’t about to give it up. They were my band.

  When Sammy was forced out of the band, and they were working on whatever the deal was for Sammy to leave, I wasn’t really a part of those discussions. I just did what was politically correct. I’m sure there were a lot of things that the Van Halen brothers were keeping from me at that point, things that they just went ahead and did.

  Eddie Van Halen wanted to be in total control. Al was going along with everything Ed did. Ed took the reins and was just looking for a pawn or a puppet. After Sammy left the band, we didn’t really do anything again for years until Gary Cherone joined in 1998.

  When Sammy went out on the road with Roth, they thought it was a carnival. Eddie made it clear that he didn’t want me to go out with them. I had jammed on some shows before with Sammy and he wasn’t pleased about that. But I was just the bass player. My last name’s not Van Halen. I didn’t feel I was doing anything wrong. I thought I was flying the Van Halen flag. Ed called me when he heard I might appear as a guest on some of the shows. I wasn’t going to do the full tour, but Sammy asked me if I’d come out and play a few dates. I was totally into it. I remember Ed saying, “You’re not going to be part of that circus, are you?”

  When the
idea of a Van Halen reunion tour came up, I wasn’t in any of those discussions, either. I do know that Eddie didn’t want me to be a part of it. I was the traitor because I went over to Sam’s camp. He couldn’t understand why I couldn’t sit home and do nothing until he decided that we were going to do something.

  He wanted to put me on salary, and eventually Sammy, Alex, and even our manager gave up some of their percentage to get me something like 13 percent. It wasn’t like I needed the money. The only reason I did that tour was because Sammy was doing it. To do that tour, I signed away pretty much any future rights I might have had to anything Van Halen. If Sammy wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have even considered it because, by then, I felt like an outsider to the brothers. Somehow I played the shows.

  Some nights Eddie would hug me and go, “Mike’s back. You’re playing so good, man.” Other nights onstage, he’d look at me like he was looking right through me, like I wasn’t even there. I spent a lot of time keeping my eyes on Alex during those shows, just trying to keep it together. Eddie would say to me, “Look at me all the time.”

  During rehearsals, Ed would question me about changes in some of the songs. I’d have to change what I played, knowing that was the way it went. The first few rehearsals, Eddie didn’t even show up. Alex and I were jamming to all the keyboard songs because we had that on tape. Sam would come in and sing. Everything was sounding good. Then Ed would come in and change it all around. I saw Eddie doing an interview and he actually showed the guy where he marked the neck of his guitar so that he would know where to come in. How we held that together for as many shows as we did, I’ll never know.

  We’d meet up for sound check midafternoon on our way downstairs at the hotel. Eddie would get in the elevator, ripped-up jeans, no shirt, bottle of wine in his hand. That’s where it would start, and he’d take it right through the evening.

  At the last show on that tour, Eddie came walking in backstage and he had drawn all over his face and chest with a Sharpie pen. Alex made him wash his face before he went onstage, but the guy was a total fucking wreck. After what happened during the show, I did not even want to fly on the same plane with him. I didn’t say good-bye after the show. I never spoke to Eddie Van Halen again. I found out he replaced me in the band with his son, Wolfie, the same time everybody else did—when he gave his big press conference.

  After they fired Sammy, I didn’t talk with Sam for a long time. Van Halen was my band and I stayed with them. I might have made a couple of comments about Sammy in the press, about his work, but for the most part, I was going along with the brothers. I never slammed Sammy. We had been friends. We were friends right up until when he was fired. After that, if those guys found out that I even spoke to Sammy, that would have been it for me.

  It was my wife who encouraged me to go out and play with Sam again. She saw how miserable I was sitting around the house. It was the best therapy I could have had, because I was paranoid about my playing. I might have quit playing bass altogether. After what I went through with those brothers, hell, I was paranoid about everything.

  When Sammy and I started talking again, we reconnected on a human level, not really anything that had to do with music. We became even better friends. He helped me out through a couple of rough times. It wasn’t just about the music anymore between me and Sammy. We became good friends just for the sake of being friends.

  He is the most upbeat, positive guy in the world. He loves life. He only happens to be a singer and play music, too. And another thing—he’s no bullshitter. If Sammy says it happened, it did. There’s nobody else anywhere like him. I don’t know how to put it. Sam is one crazy motherfucker. But I mean that in only the best possible way.

  —MICHAEL ANTHONY

  DECEMBER 2010

  1

  HARD LUCK SON OF A BITCH

  When I was growing up, Fontana, California, was all orange groves, grape vineyards, and chicken ranches. I could eat oranges, grapefruits, and tangerines all fucking day if I wanted. I had to walk through an orange grove just to go to my next-door neighbor’s house. There really was no neighborhood. It was long before tract homes. At the corner of each of the long country blocks, there were these big, ten-foot-tall cement tanks with open roofs on them, called water weirs, which fed water to the houses from clean, clear Lytle Creek in the foothills. The water weirs had a float on them, and when the water got too low, the float would kick on and they’d fill back up like a toilet. Each one had a ladder going up so guys could service them, and kids would drown in them all the time. We always heard a rumor that some kid got polio from one of them. But it was our drinking water and it was ice-cold. In the summer, we used to jump in and swim. Not swim, but dunk down, get cooled off, and climb out. I don’t want to say we’d piss in them, but we did.

  My dad moved to Fontana because he heard the steel mill was hiring. When I was born in Monterey County Hospital in Salinas, California, Dad and Mom had been picking lettuce in the fields and living in a camp where everyone else was Mexican. The Kaiser Steel Mill—the first steel mill west of the Mississippi—pretty much made Fontana. Growing up, every kid in Fontana was just trying to get through high school to get a job at Kaiser Steel. We thought it paid great. Originally, you didn’t even need a high school diploma, but, as Kaiser Steel built up, and other plants opened up, making pipes or big beams, you needed a high school diploma. Unless, of course, they got a big order and needed the people. Then they’d hire anybody, and lay you off when they got the job done. But everybody was happy to go there and make whatever they were paying.

  It was a brutal job though, working at a steel mill in a 160-degree heat, pieces of hot metal flying out at you. My dad worked in the open hearth, the hottest, hardest work in the plant, where they pour the ingots into big troughs and make steel. Molten fucking steel. He came home with his clothes drenched from sweat, and he used to take salt tablets every day before he went to work. He had probably the lowest job on the totem pole, and they moved his schedule almost every week. He would go from swing shift to graveyard shift to day shift. Sometimes he’d come home at midnight and go to work again at six in the morning. He got burned real bad one time—the side of his face was completely taken off. Just from the heat. It wasn’t steel hitting him. It was that he got too close or there was a flare-up or something and it just fucking ripped the skin off his face.

  My dad’s parents had been migrant farm workers who came out from Kentucky on a covered wagon. They’d picked cotton all the way through Texas, and my dad was born in Texas. Two kids were—that’s how long they were in Texas. They had thirteen kids. He had a younger sister, but he was the youngest boy. My dad was handsome and athletic, but he was a bad little fucker. He would beat the shit out of his big brothers. My uncle told me my dad chased his big brother, my uncle Charlie, up a tree. My dad sat there, smoking a cigarette, waiting for him to come down to beat his butt. Charlie slept in the tree rather than take an ass-kicking from my dad.

  My mom, Gladys, was born in Los Angeles. Her dad came over from Italy when he was eleven years old and never learned to speak, read, or write English. He and my grandma—she was Italian, too—never owned a house. They lived in a trailer and were always on the move. He was a chef and he went where the work was. He cooked in Yosemite and went up to Klamath when the salmon were running. He would hunt and fish and work only when he had to. During the winter season, he would cook in Palm Springs, make these huge buffets at the lodge where President Eisenhower stayed. But when the season was over, he’d pack up, take all his money, steal everything he could out of the restaurant, and take off in the middle of the night. The guy was a complete thief—a real crook, my grandpa. And a prick, too. Once in a while he was nice. I’m named after the fucker, Sam Roy. They raised my mom and her sister that way. She grew up in a tent and didn’t finish seventh grade.

  Mom and Dad got married when she was fifteen. Mom always said all the girls liked him in high school. My dad had dreams. He wanted to be a big-shot kind of guy. He li
ked hanging around big shots. Bob Hope used to let him caddy on weekends, when he was growing up in Palm Springs. She was sixteen years old when she had my oldest sister, Bobbi. Practically the day she had the baby, as soon as she came home from the hospital, she got pregnant again with my other sister. My sisters Velma and Bobbi are nine months apart.

  My father could beat up anybody. I was so proud of that, growing up. He was such a bad-ass. When he was younger, Bobby Hagar fought bantamweight. He won his first eight fights by knockouts. He was a little guy, five foot eight, same size as me, but that son of a bitch could hit—he could have been something. But he got drafted during World War II, shortly after he’d gotten my mother pregnant again with my brother, Robert. My father shipped out as a paratrooper. He’d never even been in an airplane and suddenly he’s jumping out of them. On his first jump, over a battlefield in France, his parachute went way off course. He tangled in trees and smashed his face into a tree trunk. He had a Tommy gun and, as he was coming down, he was scared, so he sprayed the ground with bullets. He banged into the tree and broke his jaw. He cut himself down. He dug a hole, and stayed in a foxhole for a few days. His jaw was killing him. He was disoriented, obviously all banged up from hitting this tree, but he had his gun. Nearby was a German soldier, also separated from his unit, and they played a fox-and-mouse game until my dad killed him in a shootout. I think it really screwed up his head. Killing someone one-on-one isn’t like shooting people you don’t know. My dad lived with this guy for a couple of days, sneaking around, not sleeping at night, really not wanting to mess with each other, but every now and then, taking a potshot.