“It was horrendous”: The shows that left Sammy Hagar in agony
Every working musician will have to get used to the touring lifestyle. No one can sit behind the studio glass all the time without going a little crazy, and giving the music to the fans every time they put on a show is a good way of releasing all of that pent-up creative energy. Although Van Halen had been known as one of the ultimate road dog bands throughout their tenure, Sammy Hagar remembered being in absolute misery going through this tour with the group.
At the same time, it’s hard to look at Hagar’s time in the band without comparing notes with what David Lee Roth brought. Compared to Hagar’s everyman approach to the stage, Roth was the kind of artist who felt at home whenever the stage lights hit him, whether he was soaking in applause, drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle onstage, or spinning his sword around for all to see.
Despite Roth being far more natural onstage, the raw musicianship is what won a lot of people over listening to Hagar. Since ‘The Red Rocker’ was already a star in his own right, hearing him belt out the tunes while Eddie stretched his muscles behind the keyboard and guitar was enough to get people invested. The theatrics had gone down, but the reason why people were having fun was because they could hear them having fun.
That is, until the group crashlanded at the Monsters of Rock Festival in 1988. Since 5150 already gave them a better outlet for their softer side, OU812 was bound to be a victory lap for them until Hagar decided to take one wrong move and bust his ass on a platform midway through the show’s intro.
While Hagar shrugged it off at first, he realised he was in for some serious trouble when he got offstage, saying, “I ran over to my side of the stage, and I said to my guy, ‘What’s going on?’ He’s like, ‘Dude, you don’t wanna know!’ … I can’t see it [but] I’m gonna faint…I had a fractured tailbone, vertebrae completely knocked out of whack. I had to have stitches across it, actually. It was brutal.”
But is Hagar ever known for cancelling on fans because he’s hurt? Hell no. The show must go on, after all, and while Hagar was in excruciating pain and doped up on painkillers to get himself through, he managed to finish out the rest of the tour.
Looking back on it, though, Hagar said that he would gladly never go through that kind of tour ever again, saying, “It was horrendous until the last show. … In Denver, Colorado, I couldn’t hit the high note in ‘Eagles Fly’ because I got a sinus infection [and] an ear infection from flying. I got run down; I was on antibiotics. Every day, I had to have a doctor show up in my room and give me a steroid shot.”
While it should be a thankless job to have a singer perform for their adoring fans, it’s incidents like this that remind everyone what artists are dealing with when they’re on the road. It’s a nice gig to get if you can, but the mark of any professional is learning how to muscle their way through the pain.
