Credit: Far Out / Sammy Hagar / Carl Lender
A good relationship between band members can feel like a marriage. Even though someone can try their best to do what’s best for the group, that sometimes involves sacrificing their needs for the good of the song or to make sure that a tour goes off without a hitch.
Sammy Hagar did manage to have almost a decade of good times with Van Halen, but he felt that his tenth year in the band marked the moment when everything went sideways between him and Eddie Van Halen.
Make no mistake, Van Halen was Eddie’s band, all things considered. Both Hagar and David Lee Roth brought their fair share of highlights to each part of the group, but the lion’s share of the great moments came when Eddie came up with a great riff or was playing off what his brother Alex was doing behind the drumkit.
For a while after Roth left, though, Hagar seemed like the perfect choice to replace him. Aside from having a much broader vocal range, ‘The Red Rocker’ was a far personable guy. No one would have wanted to hang out with Roth, giving 110% energy at all times, so having a guy out front who was much more relatable and had the potential to write ballads like ‘Love Walks In’ and ‘Dreams’ was all they could have asked for.
Once the group’s manager passed away in the 1990s, signing with Rush manager Ray Danniels marked the moment where everything went south for Hagar, telling Howard Stern, “He started poisoning Ed now, saying, ‘Sammy thinks it’s his band.’ Mike [Anthony] will tell you. I was innocent. They all turned on me because I didn’t like this manager.”
“I said I can’t do this anymore – the guy’s going to die. It was horrible. He did horrible things to people. He treated people so badly… he was a complete raving maniac.”
Sammy Hagar
Then again, Eddie was bound to follow his muse whether or not Hagar was in the band. He had replaced a singer before, and if the new one was complaining, he didn’t think twice about calling it off, initially calling Hagar to say that they wouldn’t be working together anymore.
Part of the tension between Hagar and Eddie also came from how differently the two approached creativity and stability. Hagar was famously organised and business-minded, building successful ventures outside of music while trying to maintain some balance in his personal life. Eddie, meanwhile, often operated entirely through instinct and impulse, driven by inspiration in the moment regardless of the consequences around him. As the years went on, those contrasting personalities became increasingly difficult to reconcile within the pressure cooker of Van Halen.
Further reading: From The Vault
By the time the band reunited in the 2000s, much of the optimism that had defined their earlier era had disappeared. What had once felt like a revitalised second chapter for Van Halen instead became overshadowed by exhaustion, addiction and fractured relationships behind the scenes. Hagar’s recollections of that period reveal not only the breakdown of a band but also the painful reality of watching a close collaborator spiral in a way nobody around him seemed fully capable of stopping.
While the singer managed to take things in stride and move onto his solo career for a few years, his decision to reunite with the group in the 2000s led to him seeing Eddie in his worst state, saying, “[He tried] to bust windows out of a G5 aeroplane at 4,000 feet with a wine bottle. I said I can’t do this anymore – the guy’s going to die. It was horrible. He did horrible things to people. He treated people so badly… he was a complete raving maniac.”
Though Hagar left with Anthony in tow this time, Eddie did manage to clean up his act when reuniting with Roth for a tour and their final album, A Different Kind of Truth. That would end up being the final lineup of the group Eddie played with during his lifetime, but the signs were good that he and Hagar had buried the hatchet, with both of them being cordial towards each other when Hagar reached out to Eddie on his birthday in 2016.
Regardless of the bad blood dissipating, Hagar would never share a stage with Eddie again following his passing in 2020 after a long battle with cancer. But for Hagar, it wasn’t only about losing a bandmate that he had spent years with. It was seeing one of his musical soulmates move on to the other side of reality.
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