Everybody Wants Some (33 page)

Meanwhile, Sammy told the
Philadelphia Inquirer
that a Las Vegas businessman had offered him, Van Halen, and David Lee Roth $50 million to play two pay-per-view concerts in Sin City. He claimed everyone but Roth shot down the offer immediately. It was hard to tell whether Van Halen were beginning to cash in their chips—or whether their chips would soon be cashed in for them.

After twenty years, a good-size general audience still wanted to hear Eddie’s guitar playing and Roth’s attitude, preferably in combination. But in the past five years, the public had heard enough Van Halen drama—it was time for new music or nothing.

On the bright blue morning of September 11, 2001, religious fanatics commandeered four commercial airliners and flew two of them into the symbolic heart of America’s financial empire, the World Trade Center in New York City. The director of Van Halen’s celebrated “Right Now” music video, Carolyn Mayer Beug, died aboard American Flight 11 when it collided with the North Tower, 1 World Trade Center.

The next month, while the country still remained in chaos, Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen were amicably separated. “This is something Valerie tried very hard not to have happen,” her mother told
People
, “but it finally came to a breaking point. I believe it will result in a divorce. I think Valerie is going on with her life.”

They had seemed the perfect couple for twenty years and six months, since Valerie was a tender twenty-one years old. During that time she had played virtually every kind of suffering female role imaginable. Eventually, her marriage to a perfectionist alcoholic guitar god became too close to a sad made-for-TV melodrama. She and Eddie began living apart during the summer of 2001, when she moved to Salt Lake City for a role alongside Della Reese on
Touched by an Angel
. She lasted the remaining fifty-nine episodes until the show was canceled in 2003. The marriage did not.

David Lee Roth and the tabloids had claimed that Valerie left Eddie previously in 1992, but nine more years together quieted that gossip. Now there was no denying the marriage was done. Eddie paid Valerie a settlement in one lump payment, and he was a single man for the first time since he was twenty-six. The parents shared joint custody of ten-year-old Wolfgang, though he lived with his mom throughout the separation.

“I can’t say that we’re really great friends,” Valerie had told an interviewer during a rocky period in 1990. “We don’t have a hell of a lot in common, but we’ll always be connected like brother and sister.”

At least Eddie soon had his health. After doctors declared him cancer-free in May 2002, Eddie relayed the news via the band’s Web site. “I’m sorry for the delay but I wanted to let you all know that I’ve just gotten a 100 percent clean bill of health—from head to toe.”

The hardships brought lifelong musical partners Alex and Eddie closer together. The cool, contained older brother stepped out of the shadows. “Eddie always knew he would get better. I didn’t,” Alex told the Dutch publication
Telegraaf
. “All we had in those difficult times was our music. It was therapy. We played for months and months working on new songs.”

Eddie also reached out to Alex, who had protected him since they were fresh off the boat from Holland. “There is a huge misconception about this band and that is without my brother, Alex Van Halen, who is the key, the band would not be. He is and has been there for me since before I was born,” he told
Guitar World
. Eddie promised to get back to making music quickly, but though he and Alex played frequently, Eddie still seemed hampered by his old brainwashing voiced after 1984—that the public might not accept music from him outside certain defined lines.

During this time, Eddie did talk with Indiana country rocker John Mellencamp about an acoustic tour, a quiet change of direction. He also quietly continued to work against cancer. On
The Howard Stern Show
in 2006, Eddie offered a series of bizarre revelations. He proclaimed himself totally cancer-free, not simply in remission, then denied that thirty years of chain-smoking had brought on the disease. “I live in an electromagnetic field about fourteen to eighteen hours a day in my recording studio with a metal pick in my mouth. It’s basically like playing golf in a lightning storm.”

Eddie also claimed to be funding McClain Labs, a pathology lab with twenty-nine employees in Smithtown, New York. As loony as his explanation of how he beat cancer sounded, the technique he described was in fact at the cutting edge of oncology. The experimental lab cut a tiny healthy piece of his tongue, then grew the cells and conducted all the tests outside of Eddie’s body before administering treatment. “I didn’t have to drink the Drano,” he said.

He acknowledged mysteriously on
The Howard Stern Show
that the technique was not yet legal in the United States, and suggested that the billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry was more interested in selling people chemo drugs and radiation therapy. “Cancer is a multidimensional disease,” he explained. “It’s spiritual, it’s how you think, and it’s emotional.” For someone best known for playing guitar really fast, Eddie sounded a lot like a would-be prophet.

In January 2002, Van Halen drifted further off course, splitting with Warner Bros. after more than twenty-three years in business together. Their contract wasn’t up, according to
Billboard
, and the label described the break as simply a business decision, “not a function of where the band is at musically.” It was the culmination of a clean sweep that began in 2000, when most of the band’s long-term employees were shown the door. Along with the label, Van Halen also replaced the lawyer who had been with them practically since Sammy joined. For the first time in nearly twenty-five years, Van Halen was an unsigned band—and they would remain untethered, floating loose for years.

Warner Bros. still possessed the master tapes to most of the early albums and more or less had legal rights to release outtakes and compilations. The original tapes to later albums, beginning with
1984
, mostly still resided at Eddie Van Halen’s house—the label had never thought during the band’s fiscal heyday to send over a courier in a silver limo to demand the originals back. Warner representatives began compiling a box set including rarities, demo tapes, and alternate takes, but when they contacted acting manager Alex Van Halen, they were initially told to forget the idea.

Even the most dedicated fans began to fade during this period. After six years, Van Halen’s fan quarterly,
The Inside
, ceased publication. The glossy magazine had begun in 1995 and for a while became the semiofficial mouthpiece of the band, offering editors tours of 5150 and access to tour rehearsals. The last two Van Halen studio albums published the magazine’s address. But now publisher Jeff Hausman stopped the presses, citing “a big lack of news.” For all his trouble, David Lee Roth sued Hausman afterward over licensing issues but dropped the claim in May 2002 after agreeing
The Inside
had done nothing illegal.

It took him a while, but Roth eventually accepted that reunion negotiations had collapsed, and his three or four new songs with Van Halen had no future. Afterward, he was brutal—yet behind his well-crafted words was genuine sorrow. “I’m about right here, right now. What the Van Halens are about is wasted time. If you think one second isn’t valuable, then ask the little girl who just missed getting a gold medal at the Olympics by one second. If you think one month is not valuable to somebody, then ask the lady who just had a premature kid how valuable that month is. Eddie Van Halen and his sister have wasted years.”

Meanwhile, Sammy Hagar ventured forth successfully as a solo artist reborn, often with Michael Anthony in tow. With his new wife, Kari, and a growing young family started during his last months with Van Halen, Hagar was buoyant. After turning fifty, he had become an all-around lifestyle impresario on the back of his music and the Cabo Wabo Cantina. “It’s almost like Cabo Wabo in some ways broke the band up the first time,” Sammy told KSHE. The band had bailed on the club after discovering a whopping bill for back taxes. “Van Halen didn’t want to do it, and they were part of it, and they wanted to give it to the government. I said no way, you’re not gonna take my place from me, that’s crazy. So I bought them out. And ever since then, they hated it, because it’s been successful.”

Twenty years after he began drinking at age thirty, Sammy the son of a terminal alcoholic had become a tequila magnate and self-promotion machine. The success of Cabo Wabo Cantina made it possible in 1996 for Sammy to partner with the small Miravalle tequila factory from Jalisco, Mexico, supplier of his house tequila. Rebranded as Cabo Wabo after a successful trial run in Hawaii, the elixir made its way to upscale liquor stores nationally with the help of distributor Wilson Daniels. In 2000 and 2001, all three varieties of Cabo Wabo tequila won Taste Award Gold Medals and Best of Show medals from the American Tasting Institute, a trade group of thirty thousand restaurant workers.

Fortune
profiled Sammy in 2000 and estimated Cabo Wabo’s catch that year at $19 million. Hagar figured that he made more money from tequila than record sales but claimed his partner Shep Gordon was the bean counter. As far as the public was concerned, Hagar’s role was fun-loving tequila promoter and taster-in-chief supervising the product down to its hand-blown glass packaging. “When a fan of mine pays this much for a bottle of tequila, and he probably doesn’t even like tequila, I want him at least to have a nice vase to put on the table.”

The brilliance of Hagar’s burgeoning empire was how the music sold the tequila and vice versa. His friendly, outgoing personality already endeared him to casino and club owners. Now bars that stocked his booze promoted his music around the year—while, in turn, gigs once or twice yearly in casinos in Atlantic City or Foxwoods in Connecticut jacked up awareness of Cabo Wabo. “The way I live my life is the Cabo Wabo lifestyle,” he told
Tequila Aficionado
. “Everything I do, it promotes itself because I don’t have to go out and say I am selling this, I am Mr. Cabo Wabo! Between the club, my stage show, which is built around the Cabo Wabo, and the tequila—it’s like a snow ball thing, it all promotes itself.”

The annual Branded Entertainment Summit conference was impressed enough to invite Sammy to host a luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hilton. “While known for his rock n’ roll exploits,” the press release read, “Sammy is also an extremely successful entrepreneur and someone who naturally recognizes the value in a brand.”

Sammy seemed to be beachcombing for the blown-out flip-flops of Jimmy Buffett, the musical entrepreneur whose midlife-crisis anthems spawned a multimillion-dollar empire of T-shirts, paperbacks, clothing, and music celebrating the vacation mind-set of Key West, Florida. As Buffett’s fans called themselves Parrotheads, the Red Rocker’s followers became Redheads and put on red afro wigs. When a branch of the Cabo Wabo Cantina opened in the basement of Harvey’s Casino in Lake Tahoe, California, in 2004, Jimmy Buffett cover bands became a staple, alongside looping videos of Sammy Hagar with Van Halen.

Sammy had figured out how to sell not just music, but a part-time party lifestyle to middle-aged businessmen who looked at him and saw one of their own. With his sunburned nose, beachcomber shades, and shorts, he looked more like a tourist who had recently lost his inhibitions than the spry rocker of the early 1980s. “I don’t like hats, I don’t like socks, I don’t even like shoes,” he said. “I don’t even like clothes period but you know you gotta wear a T-shirt and some shorts.”

Rock fans of a more selective morality began calling him “$pammy” Hagar. The potshots came all too easily, but the very nature of his goofy enthusiasm deflected criticism. For one thing, Hagar was still genuinely enthusiastic about playing music.

While Eddie made infrequent appearances at celebrity golf tour-naments, Hagar continued to record and perform, pausing only for a guest appearance as a bartender on a 1998 episode of
Nash Bridges
. After leaving Van Halen in 1996, Sammy formed the Waboritas with boyhood pal and drummer David Lauser, who introduced bassist Mona Gnader. The band’s hotshot guitarist, Vic Johnson, came from the Bus-boys, a versatile eighties crossover act that had been featured alongside Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in
48 Hours
. Waboritas keyboardist Jesse Harms was another old friend, a producer of solo Hagar prior to Van Halen, as well as albums for REO Speedwagon and Eddie Money.

At first the band were weekend warriors, but 1999’s
Red Voodoo
album rose to number 22 on the
Billboard
album chart. Returning to the fresh-faced hard rock of his pre–Van Halen solo albums, Hagar showed that he had emerged from years of sensitive balladry and electro-pop unscathed. A reworking of Gary Glitter’s stadium singalong “Rock ’n Roll Part 2,” Sammy’s “Mas Tequila” served as both a commercial for his drink empire and a slap in the ruddy faces of old bandmates who couldn’t hold their liquor.

As he thrived in his new life, his appearance completely changed. Wine and pasta added some pounds to his midsection. He went under the shears in November 1999 on
The Tonight Show
, cropping his trademark curls for the benefit of Locks of Love, a nonprofit organization producing human hair wigs for children with long-term medical hair loss. Afterward, with giant red shorts and shades, he looked like a mascot for a minor-league baseball team, or the footloose descendent of Cyndi Lauper’s former manager, Captain Lou Albano.

By 2002, the Waboritas were upbeat purveyors of party rock par excellence, rampaging through two-hour sets with Hagar solo hits, Wabos originals, and Hagar-era Van Halen songs like “When It’s Love” and “Finish What Ya Started.” He still stayed away from Roth-era songs, claiming he didn’t know the words. As Sammy rifled his Rolodex, his band welcomed guests ranging from Ted Nugent to Metallica, who joined him onstage for renditions of old Montrose songs and hard rock standards, such as a crowd-pleasing Led Zeppelin medley of his own design called “Whole Lotta Zep.”