“Poor guy”: The tour Sammy Hagar thought was the end of Eddie Van Halen
The touring lifestyle isn’t something that any novice musician should just jump into. As much fun as it can be putting tracks together in the studio, it’s an endurance test for anyone trying to deliver those same songs flawlessly to an audience every night, especially when they have to worry about their own physical health on the side. So when Van Halen was operating at half capacity during one of their reunions, Sammy Hagar thought that he was watching Eddie slowly disintegrate before his eyes.
If anything, though, fans should have been thankful that the group were able to patch things up with Hagar at all. They had already attempted to bring back David Lee Roth for a collection of studio tracks in the 1990s, but once he refused to have any filter during an awards show appearance, they figured it would be better to go with Gary Cherone from Extreme for Van Halen III.
It may have been Eddie’s vision, but that record was far from listenable, hence why Hagar was brought in to work on songs for a greatest-hits record in the 2000s. There was little chance that Cherone would be coming back, but the biggest crime of Van Halen III was that it severely shook Eddie’s confidence and peace of mind.
Nothing that he had ever done had been rejected so fiercely, and once ‘The Red Rocker’ saw him in action, he saw a shell of what Eddie used to be. Although he could still shred when he wanted, Eddie wasn’t taking care of himself since he had gone through a bit of a wilderness period where he started working on some odd side projects like writing music for an adult film.
He was in no state to tour, but since he insisted, Hagar tried his best to keep the peace amongst the group. While the tour itself was insanely profitable, some of the live footage from that time painted a dark picture of what Eddie was like, including pieces of ‘Eruption’ that sounded so lacklustre because of how chemically impaired he was onstage.
Although Hagar looks back on that tour now with a certain amount of hurt, he was more concerned about whether Eddie was going to survive to see the end of those shows, telling Louder, “Eddie was completely whacked out off the charts on alcohol and drugs. And poor guy, I mean, he was really in bad shape, I thought he was going to die. Eddie’s a sweet human being. He’s talented, and he’s a sweet wonderful guy. He’s got some demons, you know… he’s not the only person I know like that, but when I saw those demons take over him, it was pitiful.”
Once Van Halen took to the road again with Eddie’s son, Wolfgang, playing bass, though, things started to straighten up. Outside of cutting out his vices, Eddie seemed healthy for the first time in years, playing each song with the same kind of fire and energy that he had when he was in his 20s.
It’s just tragic that Hagar never got to close the book on his time in the band correctly, only reconciling with Eddie a few months before his passing and never sharing the stage with him from that tour on. Then again, maybe the ‘Van Hagar’ lineup had to be the sacrificial lamb if Eddie wanted to straighten himself out.
