With the recent passing of Eddie Van Halen, Sammy Hagar regrets the bitterness with which he wrote of his split from the guitarist and Van Halen in his 2011 memoir, Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock. During an appearance on Rock This With Allison Hagendorf, the “Red Rocker” revealed, “I kind of wish I would have been a little more conservative about the Van Halen years — but I was angry when I wrote the book. They threw me out of the band, and they did it ruthlessly.”
He went on to say, “God rest Eddie's soul; I love him to death. But him and his brother are pretty tough guys to deal with, if they go against you. They really made it harder on me at a weird time in my life.”
Hagar explained why his book took on an almost brutal honesty: “I was angry when I wrote that stuff, but I didn't enhance it. Believe me, if anything, I was kind to those gentlemen at that time in our lives. And I'm so glad we came back together. But if I'd waited a little longer, I wouldn't have been so angry and there wouldn't have been so much angst in it.”
Sammy Hagar told us a while back that his problems with Eddie began as far back as the sessions for Van Halen's 1995 effort Balance, Hagar's last album with the group: “Eddie needs somebody to make decisions and a leader, y'know? He's not a natural born leader kind of guy. And his brother (drummer Alex Van Halen) was always the leader before — or (David Lee) Roth was the leader before — and when Roth left, his brother and him bumped heads so much, when I walked in it was like, 'Well, what does Sam wanna do?' y'know? So it became kind of like, yeah, I was making all the decisions, so then on Balance all of a sudden he didn't like my decisions and it was like really weird.”
