The one band Sammy Hagar called his touring rival: “We killed it”
Sammy Hagar never claimed that any part of his job was going to be easy.
The life of a rock and roll star can be a lot more fun than everyone thinks it is, but when someone/s slaving away trying to get the right sound for their band or drumming up support in their early days, it can be like pulling teeth at every single show. And while ‘The Red Rocker’ was willing to roll with the punches on every one of his tours, he felt that there were some bands that gave him more than his fair share of headaches every now and again.
If you were putting together any support act in the 1970s, though, it was already a dog-eat-dog world. No one in their right mind would have put together a band that they thought could blow them offstage at the time, and even some of the biggest bands of all time, like Rush, have had horror stories about what happened when some of their headliners started to get a little too passive-aggressive with them behind the scenes.
But Hagar wasn’t going to take any shit lying down, either. He knew that he had everything to prove when he went out on those first solo tours after Montrose, and even if not every song went off without a hitch, he was going to go down swinging. That might have meant getting a little too nasty when opening for a band like Kiss, but that was a lot better than what happened when touring with Thin Lizzy.
Granted, the Irish legends weren’t exactly the biggest band in the world just yet. Hagar and his touring mates were still crisscrossing their way across the globe, and even though Hagar was able to play some of his first solo headlining shows at the time after Queen dropped out of one of their tour stops, he knew that he had his work cut out for him when Lizzy decided to throw a wrench into the situation onstage.
Hagar’s voice was in rare form at the time, but after a few minutes onstage, he remembered hearing about Lizzy constantly trying to sabotage his set by turning him down at every single opportunity, saying, “In my hometown, where I had sold out the same building, we killed it. The next night in Fresno, Queen canceled again. So I was asked to play Fresno as well which I did. Thin Lizzy tried to turn my monitors off and tried to get us to shorten our set. Those were the good days of rock ‘n’ roll rivalries, ha ha pretty awesome. The only bummer is I never got to play with Queen.”
Granted, it’s not like Hagar even needed that much volume to be heard over the masses most of the time. His voice was one of his greatest assets, and even if he was playing with hardly any amplification, there’s a good chance that any audience would be pounding their fists to the sky the minute that they heard a second of ‘I Can’t Drive 55’ and ‘There’s Only One Way to Rock’. But when you look at the way that Thin Lizzy wrote their songs, it wasn’t like they were going to have the same effect.
Phil Lynott was one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, but a lot of his best tunes work best as standalone stories rather than anything too simple. ‘The Boys are Back In Town’ is one of the few exceptions, but if you look at the way that all of their records played out, it’s not like every single song was going to register with the average rock fan that wanted to sing about girls and partying all night.
Lynott had a much more nuanced edge to what he brought to rock and roll, and even if Hagar resonated with people a lot more, that didn’t mean that they couldn’t get down and dirty on the road. Anything goes in the touring world, and even if the show must go on at all costs, there are always going to be people who are looking to take a few cheeky swipes at you when you’re going over a little too well.
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