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Sammy Hagar suggested he would “never play” with Alex Van Halen again more than 20 years after they finished their last tour together.
“I’m the biggest Pink Floyd fan. I see David Gilmour say: ‘I will never play with Roger Waters again,’ and I know what he means,” the 78-year-old told Classic Rock in a recent interview. “I feel that way about Alex Van Halen. They’re negative people.”
Hagar told Rolling Stone last year that he and his former Van Halen bandmate hadn’t spoken in 21 years.
“I hate to say it, but I dreamt about Alex the other night, man,” he told the magazine last April. “It was crazy. And it was so friggin’ real. I was saying, ‘What are you pissed off at me about, man? What the f—? Now just tell me what your problem is. What did I do? Just tell me.'”
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Van Halen members Michael Anthony, Eddie Van Halen, Sammy Hagar and Alex Van Halen in 1985. (Ann Summa/Getty Images)
Alex Van Halen didn’t even mention Hagar by name in his 2024 memoir “Brothers,” about his relationship with Van Halen co-founder Eddie Van Helen, who died in 2020.
While the interviewer posited that Alex was hurt by Hagar writing about Eddie’s personal struggles in his own memoir, The Red Rocker disagreed.
“And I’ve had this conversation with a few people, including [former VH manager] Irving Azoff,” he said at the time. “I’ve asked him, ‘What’s the problem?’ And some people have said to me, ‘Oh, Cabo Wabo. At one time, Van Halen, when you built it, you guys were all partners in that. And then they didn’t want it anymore when it was losing money, and they gave it to you, and you turned it around and made hundreds of millions of dollars on it. And they’re angry. Alex is angry about that.'”
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He said his response was: “How the f— could they be angry about that? They gave me the damn thing, they walked out on me, left me with it. And they made me indemnify them in case I got sued and lost everything. They made me sign off big time. And I’m going, ‘I hope it’s not that.'”
Sammy Hager hasn’t spoken to Alex Van Halen in more than 20 years. (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic; Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage)
The “I Can’t Drive 55” singer told Rolling Stone he thinks Alex is upset with him “because I’m out doing it, and Mike [Anthony] and I are out doing it, and he can’t. He’s not a singer. He’s not a guitar player. He is not really a band leader. And he seems like he doesn’t want to play drums or can’t play drums anymore, and he can’t go write a new record.”
“Alex wasn’t the songwriter in the band,” he continued. “He was the drummer. Eddie and I wrote the songs. Dave [Lee Roth] and Eddie wrote the songs, and so we can go out and do them. And I think that really bothers him that Mike and I are still out there doing it. I would feel bad. If I put myself in his shoes, I would feel terrible if I couldn’t do it anymore.”
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Hagar, who replaced Roth as lead singer of Van Halen in 1985, told Classic Rock in his interview this week that he’s leaning into his time with the band more.
“Since Eddie died and since Alex sold his drum kit, I feel more comfortable leaning into my era of Van Halen, and even playing a few of the old songs,” he said. “Because frickin’ Mike Anthony’s in the band I feel good about playing a lot of Van Halen stuff, cos no one will ever hear it again. And that was the biggest part of my career, and everybody’s career, for god’s sake. It was the biggest band in the world.”
Hagar previously had a falling out with Eddie too, but the former bandmates made up before the Van Halen co-founder died in 2020 of a stroke following a cancer battle.
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“Eddie was the sweetest person I ever met when I first joined that band,” Hagar remembered to Classic Rock. “He was a superstar, there wasn’t anybody who didn’t look up to him and go: ‘Wow, f—ing Eddie Van Halen’, but it never went to his head. He’d just drink too much – he had an addictive personality. I guess you could say drugs and alcohol and fame and fortune got to him, but that took a long time.”
The Red Rocker told Fox News Digital that he and Eddie reconciled months before his death.
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“To be able to have talked to Eddie and have a wonderful rapport with him on text, it means everything to me,” Hagar shared. “If he would have died and we would have not ever said, ‘I love you’ to each other, I would have felt really bad.”
He continued, “I wouldn’t be able to talk to you about it. So that means a lot to me. And it means a lot, I think, for me to feel good about talking about being in Van Halen now. Because I feel like we buried the hatchet. Otherwise, I’d be saying, ‘Well, those guys.’ Because, you know, I was mad. I was hurt. And it’s very important that we connected.”
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Hagar also told Fox News Digital about his difficulties with Roth.
“David is a strange person for me,” he said. “We’re oil and water. We just don’t gel. I mean, I’ve tried. I thought it would be really cool if him and I were friends. It would be really cool if him and I went out with a great band and did all those great Van Halen songs together, but he’s just not user-friendly.”