Everybody Wants Some (34 page)

Sammy Hagar and the Waboritas’s 2002 album
Not 4 Sale
kicked off with “Stand Up,” which he’d written for the fictional heavy metal band Steel Dragon in
Rock Star
. Though the movie story was based on Judas Priest, who had replaced their singer with someone from a Priest cover band, the comparison was funny—the movie told the story of a replacement singer going through the ropes with a brand-name hard rock band.

Sammy claimed Van Halen’s inactivity was not his fault. “I think if they could do anything right now they would have done it,” he said in early 2002, after they had ignored calls to join him or Dave for any kind of Van Halen tour. “No one has heard anything, they don’t have a record deal. They’ve just fallen completely apart. I think it’s the worst thing that could have ever happened to one of the greatest rock bands in the world.”

Heralding a strange new century, in 2002 the former Van Halen singers Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth teamed for a rivalry-packed summer tour dubbed “Song for Song: The Undisputed Heavyweight Champs of Rock and Roll.” The Sam & Dave package was announced on April 15, the dreaded deadline for income taxes. When the pair finally met for the first time, they seemed to regard each other with the affection usually reserved for IRS agents.

In the years since he commanded center stage, Roth’s quirky personality had accelerated to the hilt. Flaunting his bare chest and wearing low-cut flare pants as he approached fifty, he immediately jump-kicked into grizzled warrior mode, reportedly dismissing Hagar as “a mediocre talent.” He had begun 2002 on the wrong end of a lawsuit from a booking agent who accused him of nonpayment of tens of thousands of dollars in fees.

“I never knew Dave,” Hagar said. “I suspected from what everyone’s always told me that he’s not an easy guy to get along with. He’s like an egomaniac—in a positive sense, that he really, really thinks he’s the greatest thing that ever walked the planet.”

As details of the forty-plus concert dates solidified, the appeal of seeing two eras of Van Halen merge onstage became clear—the pair possibly trading verses of “Jump,” or the off-the-wall possibility that Roth might take a stab at a latter-day hit like “Runaround.” Sammy held even higher hopes—to reconcile with the Van Halen brothers after seven years and possibly instigate a full-fledged Van Halen tour. "My idea was that that maybe this Sam and Dave tour would motivate a Van Halen reunion,” he said, “which would still be one of the greatest things ever for the fans.”

With the two foils alternating headlining slots in each city, the bout was Diamond Dave, with highly processed and aged blond mane, dressed in blue-sequined suits, against the Red Rocker, who dressed like a beach bum or a hockey fan, draped in Mardi Gras beads and fronting an energetic band that included an ex-machinist girl bass player and a black shredder guitarist. In his corner, Roth had plucked guitarist Brian Young from Atomic Punks, a Van Halen tribute act that was doing very well at giving the public the classic Van Halen it wanted.

The two came out from their corners fighting. “Sammy Hagar is upset with me because he knows I’m better than he is,” Roth told a TV interviewer.

Tempers flared backstage at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, where Hagar and his band were relegated to a small backstage dressing room while Roth scored a sumptuous receiving area with colorful furniture and wardrobe. Roth delayed his arrival until Hagar was nearly ready to perform, then attempted to steal the show with an entourage of a half dozen security guards and a trio of masked blonde Playboy models wearing silver bodysuits and cat ears. “This is the parade down Main Street—this is P. T. Barnum,” Roth told VH1 while Hagar simmered.

Crowds appeared at the “sans Halen” shows waving anti-Eddie signs and mutilated cardboard Eddie cutouts. The spats in the audience were minimal—fans from the Roth and Hagar camps tolerated each other like teenagers told to share a backyard party with younger siblings. Hagar and Roth split a basic crew, though they hired separate sound and lighting specialists to hedge against sabotage. Beneath the enmity, the two did seem to share a psychic survivors’ bond—it just happened to be a very bad one, joined in a very harmonious understanding about not liking each other.

In Detroit, Kid Rock tried to broker an onstage collaboration between the pair, which Hagar had wanted since before the tour began. Though Roth agreed, the powwow never materialized. Kid Rock learned it was easier to marry bombshell Pamela Anderson and lure her to Michigan than to unify the oppositely charged particles of David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar. Hagar put on a futile show of banging on Roth’s backstage door every night, making a game of his rejected overtures. Roth stopped answering the door.

Hagar couldn’t resist getting in his digs in the press, laced with lots of jokes about Roth’s hair. “Dave comes out with all his glitter and glamour, and we come out with the real deal—it all just folds together into one great rock show.”

Michael Anthony joined Sammy and the Waboritas onstage as a guest for many dates, his first appearances onstage in over three years. He reported that back at home the Van Halen brothers did not have a problem with him joining the tour—at least not with Hagar, though anger at Roth was still a definite possibility. He also let slip that he hadn’t spoken to Eddie or Alex since February.

On August 1, before the tour rolled into the Big Apple, the
New York
Post
broke a sensational headline: VAN HALEN’S GETTING VICIOUS. Given a platform to vent his frustration with Dave, Sammy delighted in comparing Roth to Liberace, criticizing his hair and calling him an “asshole.” Roth retorted two weeks later in a Nashville interview, joking about Sammy’s increasingly portly physique. “I think I saved Sam from having to do celebrity boxing for a living.”

The karate black belt Roth and the ex-boxer Hagar mostly exchanged verbal blows from a distance, but they did appear onstage together once during the tour at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. They traded scripted banter as they presented an MTV Video Music Award to Linkin Park. “Relax, Dave, all these people aren’t here to see you,” Hagar read from the prompter. “It’s really good to see you after fifty-five shows—where have you been all summer?”

“I’ve been on the Celebrity Deathmatch tour,” Roth said, laughing.

While in New York, Hagar arranged a free show at Irving Plaza, giving out five hundred tickets over the radio, and reserving another five hundred for uniformed police and firefighters. One year after the September 11 attacks, Sammy’s gesture was appreciated. A grateful official representative presented Hagar with a 9/11 memorial plaque. A cop in the audience went further and gave Sammy the uniform off his back. As Sam puffed a joint and slapped hands with the crowd, it was hard to tell who needed to blow off steam more: the shell-shocked first responders of the World Trade Center disaster, or the working-class singer who had been forced to battle all summer with sharp-tongued David Lee Roth.

Also at the Irving Plaza show, two former Van Halen frontmen sang together on the same stage for the first time—Sammy Hagar and Gary Cherone. Though Cherone had toured with David Lee Roth while still in Extreme, he had never met Hagar before joining Van Halen. With Michael Anthony pumping away on bass, Hagar and Cherone clasped one another and banged out Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.”

Three years onward, Cherone was starring in a community musical theater production of
The Wall
, and preparing to release the first record by his new band, Tribe of Judah. He showed no signs of bitterness toward Van Halen. “I guess due to some personal, frustrating moments on my part, it just seemed the time and place to move on,” he said. “All I can say is that those guys were absolutely great to me.”

After the show, Hagar beamed to Mike. “It’s the same shit as the old days—only on some other level.” He still wanted to compete with young rock bands, and he still had things left to prove. Ultimately he had to be satisfied climbing back onto the Cabo Wabo jet as an older man, still sweating, still reigning over a joyous room, whether the press or the music insiders understood his success or not.

Business-wise, the tour succeeded beyond expectations. Apparently fans felt two ex-singers doing Van Halen songs was better than no Van Halen at all. The Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth summer dates did $9.6 million worth of business, selling over three hundred thousand tickets. On a personal level, Sammy got to know David Lee Roth. “There’s just so much about Dave I don’t like,” he admitted.

Maybe surprising themselves, most audiences gave the decision to Sammy’s show over Dave’s. Still, Sammy wondered whether it was worth it. “I spent five years of my life with the Waboritas, building my audience, trying to shed myself of Van Halen,” he told
Guitar World
. “Once I got involved with Dave, I realized that I was thrown right back into the Van Halen arena and all I was was an ex–Van Halen singer.”

Whether the tour would rouse Eddie and Alex from their slumber remained to be seen. Hagar still kept a house down the road from Eddie’s vacant Malibu digs. “If Eddie calls me, I’m going to be suspicious and have my restrictions,” Sammy said. “But if we just ran into each other, it could either be a fistfight, or it could be good vibes.”

The faithful neutral party Michael Anthony also mused publicly about Van Halen teaming again with Dave, Sammy, or both, if only for the sake of putting a lid on the past. “Roth would kind of pull his hat down and just walk by me,” Mike told
Burrn!
“One of the first shows that I did with those guys I had a few drinks and I went into Dave’s dressing room after the show and I just unloaded on him, on what was his problem that we could not make this reunion work.”

Soon, however, Michael was again fending off rumors that he had been kicked out of the band, forcing a public statement in November 2002. “I haven’t met with any lawyers, and I haven’t quit Van Halen. I’m still the bass player for the baddest rock ’n’ roll band on the planet and always have been!”

After the summer sunshine, the days seemed darker for David Lee Roth. His demeanor had changed—he now seemed frustrated by the role of sex god. He routinely vented some fucked-up male sexuality, inviting pretty soccer moms in the front row for a drink from his trademark Jack Daniel’s bottle, and then shaking the stage prop at groin level while ejaculating about a quart of whiskey on the heads of his bewil-dered conquests. Who knows how many times he had enacted the same scene backstage with willing participants during his halcyon days, but now his soaking of his loyal admirers revealed the impotent anger of an aging Adonis.

As the holiday season commenced in 2002, Roth filed suit against Van Halen and their record label for unpaid royalties. According to
Billboard
, Roth still received a 25 percent share for his records as per the contract he signed when he left the band. Now he claimed that Eddie, Alex, and Michael had renegotiated their album royalties with Warner Bros. in 1996, and that he was due $200,000 extra for album sales through the end of 2001. He was still being paid according to the skimpy deal they had struck back in 1976. “When you buy
Van Halen I
now, if I make 10 cents the bass player makes 30 cents,” Roth argued. “I’ve always maintained that I should make 25 percent.” Lawyers filed dozens of motions and complaints as the suit propelled through September 2003, when all parties involved reached a settlement and Roth dismissed the lawsuit “without prejudice.”

Released in April 2003, Roth’s next album,
Diamond Dave
, was mostly covers of Jimi Hendrix, the Steve Miller Band, Savoy Brown, and the Beatles. The young production team was wet behind the ears, but the methods were vintage and the musicians mostly recorded live. Roth called the album “post-modern,” though the concept was much less complicated. “Classic rock in the USA is a fixed playlist, they set them in stone maybe seven years ago,” he told
Classic Rock
. “So I consciously did an album that was classic, otherwise how would I get airplay?”

While swinging with old chestnuts, Roth also reprised “Ice Cream Man” yet again, this time with Edgar Winter on sax and Nile Rodgers on guitar. That and the easy-listening “Bad Habits” were the highlights of a mostly routine-sounding album. Like
DLR Band
, this was an album named after himself—but more than ever the muscle needed to come before the marketing if he wanted to jump-start his career. Roth’s ego needed huge ambition to be justified, but
Diamond Dave
fizzled out after selling fewer than thirty thousand copies.

The signature line in “Just a Gigolo,” when Roth wondered if life would go on without him, was starting to chime louder. At the House of Blues in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, his equilibrium was rattled by a spinning mic stand during his encore, “Jump,” which gashed open his forehead and required twenty-one stitches. He finished the show but canceled a slew of upcoming tour dates while he recovered at one of his tricoastal crash pads in California, New York City, and Miami.

Roth could still kick some kind of ass, however, as a Pasadena neighbor of his soon learned. The man tried crossing Roth’s property in the middle of the night to break into his own house. Neighbors called the police when they heard breaking glass. The cops arrived to find Roth pointing at a man lying facedown in the grass, a knife lying a few feet away. They arrested the intruder for methamphetamine possession, and Roth issued a press release stating he had used a twenty-gauge shotgun to detain a knife-wielding intruder. “What are you doing in my backyard at 3:15 in the morning without a backstage pass?” Roth challenged. “Anyone found bearing arms here at night will be found here in the morning.”

Meanwhile, the hermitlike guitar god Eddie Van Halen made his annual appearance before mere mortals at the 2003 NAMM convention. Time had ravaged him. While a throng of hundreds waited, he sat in a private section wearing a floppy brown hat, conducting business and chatting with his peers. Much later than planned, he sat down to show off some new guitar work. He promised new music and new gear from Peavey in the following year, and then security dispersed the waiting crowd. The reaction to Eddie’s appearance and behavior was an unusual mix of pity and anger.