Sammy Hagar’s biggest Eddie Van Halen regret: “I apologise from the bottom of my heart”
In hindsight, most bad blood between rock bands always seems to look a little bit childish. As much as they may have wanted to never speak to their bandmates again, hearing jabs in the press about how one person didn’t give their fellow musicians the time of day or how another musician wanted more space on the record makes them look like high school drama for grown adults. Van Halen already needed to deal with the most tension-fuelled breakups in rock history, but Sammy Hagar admitted that releasing his book was a bit too damning on Eddie Van Halen.
If it hadn’t been for Hagar, though, chances are Van Halen would have faded into obscurity a lot quicker than anyone imagined. They helped kick down the door for hard rock on their run of albums with David Lee Roth, but his departure left a huge hole in their lives that no band could have recovered from if not for Hagar.
Compared to Roth’s larger-than-life persona, Hagar was more interested in being the Everyman at the party, usually being one of the most down-to-earth people in the room whenever they played. Although Hagar lasted about as long as Roth did after departing during the late 1990s, he remembered that his reunion with the band was a lot more dire than he had imagined.
After the failed experiment of Van Halen III, the band elected to release various collections of best-of material, one of which included Hagar stepping in to record three new songs with the group. When talking about those sessions in the book Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, Hagar remembered that Eddie had become a shell of who he once was, including empty beer cans all over the floor and his house reduced to a foreboding manner.
At the same time, Eddie wasn’t like Howard Hughes during this period. Sure, he had an equivalent to a “lost weekend” at the time, but he still kept busy when he could, including composing the score for an adult film in his spare time.
While Hagar and Eddie managed to patch up their differences a little bit before the guitar legend’s untimely death, ‘The Red Rocker’ felt guilty he said anything to begin with, telling Paulo Baron, “I apologize from the bottom of my heart for exposing his dark side to where I don’t think anyone wants to hear that now…If I wrote the book today, I would only put the good of Eddie Van Halen, because he was such a brilliant, genius guitar player and such a great friend and a great partner”.
Whereas Roth and Hagar have had their individual spats with Van Halen since their breakup, Hagar seems to view playing the band’s material as more of a celebration than anything else. After all, he has an equally competent guitar hero in Joe Satriani, so why not try to do justice to the man who gave Hagar a new career as well?
No matter who plays the guitar, there’s no chance that they can equal what Eddie managed to do. Say what you want about those wild years when he felt lost, but his talent and what he brought to the guitar come only once every couple of generations.
