Sammy Hagar memoir: "Red" - some nasty stuff about Van Halen

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

Touring with Roth, yes- alien, no. He makes Roth look like a huge asshole, by the way.

[Omar_Little]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

alien, no.

That’s not actually in the book? It’s been widely reported that he claims to have been abducted by aliens, twice.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

I remember a part where he said he thought he’d seen a space ship, but I was skimming a lot of the early chapters and I might have missed an abduction story. I know he’s talked a lot about it promoting the book.

[Shakester]

Yeah, he does mention the alien encounter crap in the book, but like Dio I just skipped it.

My take on the book is the same as others in this thread: Sammy isn’t humble, and doesn’t seem all that reliable as an information source, either. Well, anyone who starts talking about encounters with aliens is automatically an unreliable source, but even without that he seems pretty unreliable.

I’m sure Eddie is a complete mess, but I’m also sure that pretty much everything Sammy says in the book is an exaggeration. And not even a particularly entertaining exaggeration, just a whole lot of Sammy being great at everything and only being held back by the spite and jealousy of some of the people he worked with.

[Hail_Ants]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

Touring with Roth, yes- alien, no. He makes Roth look like a huge asshole, by the way.

He always seemed like he was. He essentially quit VH for completely selfish reasons, i.e. he was gonna be a movie star and that was way more important than the little dog & pony show he was fronting! Then his movie deal fell through so he put together his solo band and album which made a lot of noise and produced some funny videos, but in the end it was all so soulless.

I seem to remember reading that Roth came from a somewhat rich (or at least very upper middle-class) family. He has certainly always acted like a spoiled rich kid.

[blondebear]

Haven’t read the book, but I was a huge Hagar fan from his Montrose days and his (early) solo albums. I think that’s when he did his best work. There is some really tasty stuff there (Space Station #5, Bad Motor Scooter, China, Young Girl Blues, etc). If only he Ronnie had stuck together…but no, that was never gonna happen. Sammy never really got along with guys who have similar-sized (ahem) egos.

[WordMan]

@blondebear

If only he Ronnie had stuck together…

Observation:

• Montrose was a hard rock commercial band named after the flashy guitarist, with a strong frontman, on a project produced by Ted Templeman and engineered by Donn Landee.

• Van Halen was a hard rock commercial band named after the flashy guitarist, with a strong frontman, on a project produced by Ted Templeman and engineered by Donn Landee.

I don’t think that Templeman was a Svengali who “built” either band, but the comparison is interesting. I’ve never looked into it, but always assumed that Landee, whom I believe Eddie really got along with, had something to do with getting Hagar over to VH.

[cgg419]

@WordMan

Observation:

• Montrose was a hard rock commercial band named after the flashy guitarist, with a strong frontman, on a project produced by Ted Templeman and engineered by Donn Landee.

• Van Halen was a hard rock commercial band named after the flashy guitarist, with a strong frontman, on a project produced by Ted Templeman and engineered by Donn Landee.

I don’t think that Templeman was a Svengali who “built” either band, but the comparison is interesting. I’ve never looked into it, but always assumed that Landee, whom I believe Eddie really got along with, had something to do with getting Hagar over to VH.

Take it with a grain of salt of course, but when he was on Adam Corrolla’s radio show, Hagar said that in '76(I think, it’s been a couple days) after he had left Montrose, Templeman wanted him as Van Halen’s frontman.

[blondebear]

Cool video from Wolfgang’s vault:Bad Motor Scooter, Winterland 1978. I was there!

[phungi]

I am neither a big Van Halen nor a big Sammy Hagar fan, but love a god rock bio… I thought the book read very well, and quite fair… it didn’t seem like he went out of his way to slam Eddie, and one of the themes of the book was “Sammy Hagar is a guy who tells it like it is”… the description of EVH’s house was pretty incredible…

[Docta_G]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

I just got done reading Sammy Hagar’s tell-all memoir, Red. I’m not particularly fascinated by Hagar himself, but I admit I read it for the Van Halen material. The book is largely what you would expect. Hagar being Hagar, it goes through his Montrose days, solo days and Van Halen days. It contains some sophomoric sexual braggadicio about how many groupies he could shag under the stage, and stuff like that, but it comes off as basically honest.

The stuff on Van Halen was brutal. He talks about being invited into the band, and everything seeming great at first, then actually going into the 5150 studio behind Eddie’s house and seeing what a sty it was, covered with cigarette butts and beer cans. it stunk it had never been cleaned. You had to blow cigarette ashes off the slides on the mixing boards to use them. Eddie’s guitars were randmly thrown or piled all over the floor with nothing on stands. There were cobwebs on the floor. The place was disgusting.

Basically, Hagar describes Eddie and Alex as raging, barely functional alcoholics with little to no work ethic. They basically couldn’t stay sober enough to work on anything, and Eddie declined more and more. Even after an attempt at rehab, Eddie still had whiskey bottles and bags of coke hidden in holes of the studio walls, and eventually, Hagar says, Eddie got to the point where he could barely play anymore. He couldn’t remember how to play his own songs, stumbled through solos on stage, etc.

The whole thing came off as really sad. It ended up costing Eddie his family, and though (last I heard) Eddie is supposedly currently sober, Hagar says that Eddie is “not a driven musician” and basically says he doubts he and Alex have the work ethic to finish another album.

There’s more, but that’s the crux of it. It was a very demystifyng and sad thing to read about. Has anybody elseread this book?

And on top of that, the music sucks.