SAMMY HAGAR Reflects On Working With EDDIE VAN HALEN - "We Wrote Those Songs, He Coached Me Through Things He Might Hear; I Miss That" (Video)
August 4, 2021, 2 years ago
Washington Post National Arts reporter Geoff Edgers spoke with Sammy Hagar as part of the publication's IG Live series. They talked about his time in Van Halen, Montrose, tequila and more. Check out the interview below.
On reconnecting with Eddie Van Halen before his death in October 2020
Hagar: "When I reconnected with Eddie four or five months before he died, we got together and we kind of made amends. It wasn't like, 'Oh, you've gotta apologize for this.' When I talked to him the first time after all of 'em years, I said, 'Hey, Eddie, I've been trying to get a hold of you. I called your brother.' He goes, 'Why didn't you call me?' I'm going, 'Well, it's a good point.' And I said, 'I wanted to make sure you were cool with me getting in contact. I didn't want you to call me some names and hang up the phone and stir the whole thing back up.' And he said, 'No, no, no.' He said, 'I love you, man.' And I realized at that point that he had elevated his whole thing. He had come to peace with everything. He knew he was sick, and it was so great to contact the guy when he was in that state of mind. If I had got him six months earlier, it probably would have been, 'You said this, you said that....' He was totally above it all and elevated. And, man, I'm so glad that that happened at that time because if it wouldn't have... if we had never made peace and he would have passed the way he did, I would feel terrible. I wouldn't be able to talk to you about it. I wouldn't know what to say. So, I'm so grateful that we connected.
I miss the guy. We wrote all those songs together. It ain't like, 'Oh, we wrote a couple of songs together.' We wrote every Van Halen song from my era, from '85 to '95, and then three more on the reunion thing. We wrote all them songs together. You don't write songs like that with a real musician and real musicians getting together; you don't phone that in. We sat in rooms together, him and I, and wrote those songs and went and sang them, and he coached me through things he might hear... I miss that. There's nobody like that."
