The one artist Sammy Hagar never wanted to tour with again: “I would never bother”
Sammy Hagar has always been the kind of artist who lived to tour.
Even though he may be backing away from the massive tours that have kept him away for years, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for him to get up onstage with whoever he could think of and give the audience a good time wherever he went. But there were always bound to be a few times when he would have rather been anywhere else than on the road.
Even if he didn’t love every show he played, though, ‘The Red Rocker’ never did so because he wasn’t feeling up to it. He always approached rock and roll like any other job, and that always meant giving 110% to every crowd, even if you weren’t feeling up to it the day leading up to it. It all depends on those few hours onstage, and whether on his solo tours or with Van Halen, he was a fireball of energy every single time he played.
And you have to remember how hard of a job he must have had having to fill the shoes of David Lee Roth back in the day. ‘Diamond Dave’ was the kind of electric frontman that seemed irreplaceable, but given Hagar’s range and the way that he related to the audience, he transformed Van Halen into a completely different band half the time. They may have gravitated more towards dad rock half the time, but it didn’t matter so long as the tunes still sounded good.
Once Eddie figured that he could make things work without Hagar, though, the next best thing was for Hagar to strike out on his own again. He already had a firm foundation as a solo artist, but if he wanted to really rub salt into the wound, he was going to leave Van Halen in the dust by going out on tour with his predecessor.
While the ‘Sam and Dave’ tour seemed like a great idea on paper, the idea of either of them managing to match the energy of a Van Halen was going to be impossible. Not only were they going to need to find someone that could play with the same kind of fury as Eddie, but the idea of having them flipflop back and forth when headlining was going to do them no favours, especially since some of the bad blood from the 1980s had never fully healed.
Hagar had already seen Roth as a Vegas act in many respects, but it was a different story when he saw it up close, saying, “Dave always wants too much. He always tries to upstage. He tried to pull stuff on the Sam and Dave tour. The nights when he was opening, when we flip-flopped…which I would never do again. I would never bother. But look, I’m not an opening act for anybody.”
It’s not exactly hard to see why, either. Even though Van Halen never changed their name throughout their tenure, there’s hardly any way of looking at them as the same band, so when you have both frontmen on tour together, it’s like watching a hair metal band getting paired with a classic rock act. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s definitely different than what everyone was expecting.
Which probably explains why the past few years for Hagar have been focused on doing the tours that suit him best. Life’s too short to worry about the little things on tour, and even if Hagar had been on speaking terms with Eddie during the final years of his life, his final tours have been more concerned on giving the audience one last good time than letting anyone’s ego get too out of hand.
