Sammy Hagar - Red : my uncensored life in rock

A s soon as we finished the first tour, I had to make the solo record for Geffen. That was the deal hed made with Warner Bros. We were worried about Eddie and his drinking and drug problem, but first we had to deal with his brother. We put Al in rehab as soon as the tour was over. His wife staged an intervention. I didnt even know what an intervention was.

It was hairy. I cried. It broke me down and I wasnt even the guy under the gun. They went and got him out of bed, six oclock in the morning, before he had another drink. He was getting up at four oclock in the morning, chugging a bottle of vodka, and going back to bed. He wasnt a sipper. He wasnt a nurser. He just plowed himself to the point of passing out.

We put him in a hospital. He took the oath and never drank again. I love Al. He is the strongest guy, but weird. Hes a chain-smoker, but hed quit smoking every Monday, for the one day, just to torture himself. Als the kind of guy that Id call every day, just to bullshit.

Once Al cleaned up, Eddie didnt have anybody to drink with. Al still smoked. Al would drink coffee and Eddie would drink beer and do a few other things. It was Lefflers idea to have Eddie coproduce my solo record and play bass. He always played bass with Van Halen, two or three songs on practically every record. He was a great bass player. Eddies a great musician, period.

So off we went into the studio, with Jesse Harms on keyboards, David Lauser on drums, and Eddie on bass. I played guitar. That way, wed keep Eddie busy. We cut that record at these brand-new studios A&M Records built in Hollywood, where Tom Petty, John Cougar Mellencamp, and Stevie Nicks all had been working. Pink Floyd was in the room next door, without Roger Waters, doing Learning to Fly. Eddie and I would ride in together from the beach every day in a different car. I had about seven Ferraris down there. The Pink Floyd drummer, Nick Mason, is a big Ferrari collector. The guitarist David Gilmore owns Ferraris, too, but hes not in Nick Masons class as a collector. Mason owns one of the original Ferrari GTOs, a car probably worth 30 million bucks. They didnt have their cars with them, so theyd be waiting on the sidewalk every day to see what I was going to be driving. David Gilmore is one of my all-time guitar heroes and it was really cool, having those guys admiring my cars every day. I was showing off. After Id run through all the cars I had down south, I sent Bucky back up to Mill Valley, to swap out a couple more cars.

Pink Floyd was auditioning drummers for a shuffle they couldnt nail, even with their drummer Nick Mason there. They had Omar Hakim trying out, fresh from Stings band, but they didnt use him on the track. I did. He overdubbed drums on a couple cuts on my album. Pink Floyd was so particular about that shuffle, they were still working on it by the time I finished my entire album.

MTV did a whole Name the Album promotion, because I couldnt go on tour. I was just going to call it Sammy Hagar, but some fan submitted the title I Never Said Goodbye, with a note saying, Sammys left his solo career but he never said goodbye. The record went platinum immediately. Give to Live and Eagles Fly off the album were big hits. I did a three-week promotional tour around the worldSan Francisco to Japan to Germany, came home and went straight into the studio to start the new Van Halen album, OU812 .

As soon as I came back home, I flew down to Los Angeles from San Francisco. Eddie and Al met me at the airport. I hadnt seen them for a couple of weeks. I was really happy to see them. When we got in the car, Eddie and Al lit up cigarettes in the front seat and snapped a cassette in the player.

We want you to hear something, Eddie said. They played me the keyboard part for When Its Love. I was covered in goose bumps. That was almost the inspiration for the whole album. We knocked that song out and knew we had something.

The songs were not my best stuff lyrically. Black and Blue was kind of quirky, cool groove and phrasing, but the lyrics were a little too eighties. Source of Infection, ugh. The last song we wrote was Finish What Ya Started. It was toward the end of the project and we needed another song or two. Ed was the best at taking an idea you gave him and turning it into something special, something unique. I told him we should do something like the Whos Magic Bus, something with a lot of rhythm and acoustic guitars. Van Halen hadnt really done anything with acoustic guitars.

I was in Malibu, lying in bed with my wife, about to get some, when I heard Eddie outside my door. Not even my front door, but the beach entrance directly under my bedroom deck. I could see him out there, cigarette glowing in the dark, no shirt, acoustic guitar around his neck, bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand.

Ed, what? I said.

Come on, man. Ive got this idea, he said.

Ed, its two oclock in the morning, I said. Im tired.

The old lady kicked me out, he said. Come on, man. Let me in.

I went down. Betsy was pissed, but what could I do? He was my best friend and creative partner. She turned out the light. I wouldnt let him in, because hes got his cigarette, so we sat on the porch. He started playing me the riff for Finish What Ya Started and right away, I got excited. I went and got my acoustic and started doing my Tony Joe White thing. I was still thinking about going back upstairs and getting laid and started singing, Come on, baby, finish what you started. It never happened. Eddie and I saw the sun come up and I threw him out, but we had written just about the whole thing. I was imagining what was going to happen to me when I went back upstairs. That song is about unfulfilled sex.

It took a while to do OU812, more than it probably should have. Sober, Al played different. It was really weird. He wasnt as good. When he was drinking, Al was always a radical drummer. Hed hit hard and do crazy fills. Drunk, he was off the hook, but sober, he was a lot more conservative. His timing was better, but he wasnt as radical. In the end, it was easy to put aside things like that, because everybody was still getting along really good. The only problem was that I was starting to burn out, getting a little crispy around the edges.