Marin Independent Journal's Paul Liberatore reports:

SAMMY HAGAR's memoir, RED: My Uncensored Life In Rock, doesn't come out until March, but I've just finished reading an advance copy and I can tell you that there's one poor guy who's going to wish it had never seen the light of day: Eddie Van Halen.

Sammy's one of the nicest guys I've met in rock 'n' roll, but Marin's Red Rocker shows his former Van Halen bandmate no mercy, portraying Eddie as more street person than guitar god.

This is Sammy describing him just before their Van Halen reunion tour in 2003: "I hadn't seen him in 10 years. He looked like he hadn't bathed in a week. He certainly hadn't changed his clothes in at least that long. He wasn't wearing a shirt. He had on a giant overcoat and army pants, tattered and ripped at the cuffs, held up with a piece of rope. I'd never seen him so skinny in my life. He was missing a number of teeth and the ones he had left were black. His boots were so worn out he had gaffer's tape wrapped around them and his big toe still stuck out."

In passages like that, Red reads like one of those angry e-mails we write when we're really ticked off at someone and need to vent by trashing him or her. But once we chill out, most of us don't hit the send button. With this book, Sammy hits the send button.

And he hits it over and over. After describing the squalor that he claims Eddie lived in, Sammy lays into him again, writing: "This was Eddie Van Halen, one of the sweetest guys I'd ever met. He had turned into the weirdest (expletive) I'd ever seen, crude, rude and unkempt."

So how do you really feel, Sammy?

After his 'I Can't Drive 55' made him an arena-level headliner, Sammy joined VAN HALEN in the mid-'80s, replacing DAVID LEE ROTH, another guy he has no use for.

"I hated Dave," he writes. "The guy rubbed me wrong. I'm sure I rub all kinds of people wrong, so it's not like I'm putting him down. The guy was a great front man, great attitude in rock, and had an image from hell, but I just couldn't stand the guy. He was the opposite of what I believed in and what I am. First of all, the guy's not a great singer and he acts like he's the coolest, hottest guy in the world when, to me, he looks gay."

Read the full report at this location.

Hagar's autobiography, RED: My Uncensored Life In Rock is set for release Saturday, March 12th through HarperCollins.