Sammy Hagar on the beautiful highs and disastrous lows of Van Halen: ‘Man, I miss Ed’
Sammy Hagar checked in from the road to talk about his 2024 tour, making peace with Eddie Van Halen and more in this exclusive interview with The Arizona Republic.
Sammy Hagar isn’t getting any younger.
Those are his words.
The singer turns 77 in October, a day after he’s scheduled to auction off his rare 2015 LaFerrari at Barrett-Jackson’s new fall auction in Scottsdale.
And although he has no interest in retiring, much less staging a farewell tour, Hagar started thinking it was time to put a special tour together as a thank-you to fans while also honoring the legacy of what he managed to accomplish with Van Halen.
Hagar took over from David Lee Roth as Van Halen’s lead singer in 1985, a risky move — or so it seemed — that ushered in the legendary rockers’ most commercially successful era.
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Hagar left the group in 1996, returning in 2004 for a disastrous reunion tour that ended with Eddie Van Halen smashing his guitar onstage in Tucson, Arizona, bringing the Van Hagar years to a demoralizing finish that still haunts the singer to this day.
It was the last time Hagar ever shared a stage with the Van Halen brothers, Eddie and Alex, though bassist Michael Anthony remains a frequent fixture of the singer’s touring bands, including the band on the 2024 Best of All Words Tour, with guitar hero Joe Satriani and drummer Jason Bonham.
The tour takes its name from “Best of Both Worlds,” a single off “5150,” the first of four chart-topping albums Van Halen released with Hagar at the helm.
The setlist is the deepest dive the star has ever taken into the Van Halen catalog while touching on highlights of his solo years and reaching back to the album that launched his career as the voice of Montrose.
Hagar checked in from the road to talk about the tour, how music helped him heal after the hurt and disappointment of that ill-fated reunion tour and making peace with the man he calls Ed before Van Halen’s death in 2020, in this exclusive interview with The Arizona Republic.
Pretty good considering (laughs). There’s a lot to consider here. My age. I’m on tour. I’m doing the hardest show I’ve ever done in my life, more songs than I’ve ever sang in one night in my life. So under the circumstances? I’m doing damn good.
In Van Halen, we played the same length of time. But the truth of the matter is we would play a two-hour, 20-minute show, but Eddie did a 15-, 20-minute guitar solo. Alex did a 15-, 20-minute drum solo. Mikey did a five-, 10-minute bass solo. I sang an acoustic song for five to seven minutes.
We’re not doing any of that. There’s no solos. I mean, there’s solos within the songs. But we’re packing the show with material because it’s really a Sammy Hagar legacy tour, a thank-you to the fans that’s honoring the music of Van Halen at the same time. We do about an hour-and-a-half of Van Halen, about 35, 40 minutes of Sammy solo, one Montrose tune, one Chickenfoot tune.
We’re not going out there saying we’re Van Halen. We’re just doing a lot of Van Halen songs. There’s songs we haven’t played since 1986 — “5150,” “Summer Nights.” Those songs got dropped early on because they were so difficult to play. Van Halen, whenever we did a new record, we would go out and play damn near the whole new record and we’d sprinkle in some old songs. So a lot of songs got left behind, and I’m just cherry-picking my favorite ones.
“The Seventh Seal.” What a deep track. One of my favorite songs of all time. It’s a serious message, one of my best lyrics, some of the heaviest music anyone’s ever written. That riff Eddie’s playing and Alex’s drum part. It’s just badass. And we’re showing “The Seventh Seal,” one of my favorite Ingmar Bergman movies, on the screen behind us.
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Did something in particular inspire you to put this kind of tour together?
You know, Mike and I kind of got left out of the whole Van Halen thing when Wolfie (Eddie’s son, Wolfgang Van Halen) came in. They replaced Mike with Wolfie, which, you know, God bless Ed for wanting to play with his son. Who doesn’t want to do that? So we’re not out here complaining about that at all.
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