The musician Sammy Hagar called “the sweetest person” ever: “He was a superstar”
It didn’t take much for Sammy Hagar to click with the right musicians behind him.
‘The Red Rocker’ only wanted to keep playing rock and roll for as long as he could, and while there are more than a few times when he wanted to throw in the towel, the musicians he had in his band were normally what kept him coming back all the time. He wanted the chance to work with everyone that he could whenever he performed, but there were also more than a few times when he felt that some of his former bandmates could be a nightmare to deal with at every single turn.
There has been no shortage of quotes between Hagar and Alex Van Halen as of late when referring to his time in Van Halen, but it’s not like either of them is wrong. Both of them had a similar outlook while the band was still together, and while Alex would do anything that he could to defend his brother’s honour in any situation, Hagar was never going to try and stir up controversy just for the hell of it.
He was more than willing to let bygones be bygones and have some fun jamming with all of his friends, but that was a lot easier said than done. It takes a lot to look like one of the most unassuming men in the music industry, but even when tracing his roots back, Hagar remembered having some trouble when working with someone like Ronnie Montrose throughout the years.
While Montrose passed away far too young, the fact that he resented Hagar for so long never seemed to make any sense. It was smart for him to have his guard up in the industry in case someone was trying to take advantage of him, but when talking about their relationship today, Hagar seems to just be sad that they were never able to bury the hatchet before the guitarist passed away.
If anything, though, Hagar could at least rest easy knowing that he was able to make amends with Eddie Van Halen during his time on this Earth. Eddie was already going through one of the worst chapters of his life when Hagar rejoined the band for a reunion tour in the 2000s, and while he did reconnect with the guitarist after he was battling cancer, all of that icy tension between the pair of them seemed to be thawing when they would talk to each other on the socials.
Because aside from the creative differences and more than a few chemically-fuelled situations, Hagar felt that there was no one nicer than Eddie when he started working with him, saying, “Eddie was the sweetest person I ever met when I first joined that band. He was a super star, there wasn’t anybody who didn’t look up to him and go, ‘Wow, fucking Eddie Van Halen,’ but it never went to his head. He’d just drink too much – he had an addictive personality.”
And everyone else in the industry would have probably said the same thing about Eddie’s personality. There are so many times when he came off as just a guy who loved playing guitar, and for all of the people who were calling him a guitar god, Eddie was just happy to be the same kid from California who had a dream of being a rock and roll star and actually managed to make it happen.
The days of Hagar trading ideas with Eddie are long gone, but that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t still remember those times when it was they against the world. No one thought that the band could move on past David Lee Roth, but beyond proving the naysayers wrong, Hagar got a friendship out of the deal that no one else could have imagined.
