At my mom"s seventy-fifth birthday party in Cabo. From left to right From left to right: me; my brother, Bobby Jr.; my mom; and my sisters, Velma and Bobbi.
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Aaron"s family (including my two grandchildren) and my family together in 2009.
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The Cabo tattoo.
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Eddie"s samurai hair during the reunion tour with Van Halen. (Photograph courtesy of Getty Images)
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With Joe Satriani from Chickenfoot.
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With Chad Smith at Cabo Wabo.
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Chickenfoot at the Cabo Wabo Cantina in Lake Tahoe, 2009.
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Fun with machetes in Maui, 2010. (Photograph by ShootingStarsPhotography.com)
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At home in Maui, 2010. (Photograph by ShootingStarsPhotography.com)
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Outside Skywalker Sound studios with my custom-made Ferrari Fiorano.
He fired the monitor guy, fired the sound guy, fired the keyboard tech, fired at least five guitar techs, and that was just during rehearsals. Something is wrong when a guy blames everybody else-like the keyboard guy, who"s just hitting a b.u.t.ton that triggers the keyboard part. It was the craziest, most whacked-out stuff. I knew it was a disaster. I told Irving.
Irving is really a professional. He knows how to get things done, but Irving is not a confrontational guy. He preferred to schmooze things, but right after we started rehearsals, Irving agreed to hold an intervention with Eddie. He brought a big, beefy security guard and met Al and me at 5150. Eddie walked in, carrying his wine bottle. Irving did all the talking. He told Eddie the tour was going to be difficult, that he needed to go away for a week or two, that we could postpone some dates if we needed. We all agreed Eddie needed to clean up.
He smashed the bottle. "f.u.c.k you," he said. "I will kill the first motherf.u.c.ker that tries to take this bottle away from me. I left my family for this s.h.i.t. You think I"m going to f.u.c.king do this for you guys?"
That"s how sick the cat was at that moment. It was going to be a long tour.
The opening show in Greensboro, North Carolina, was phenomenal. Eddie wasn"t phenomenal, but he was okay. David Fisher designed a set from an idea by Al and me that used the Van Halen rings as a way to put special seating sections in the middle of the stage. The first time I stepped out on that stage, it blew me away-the band was so powerful, the fans were so great. That carried me a long way.
But from the start of the tour, I couldn"t listen to Eddie. He made some terrible mistakes and it seemed like he couldn"t remember the songs. He would just hit the whammy bar and go wheedle-wheedle-whee wheedle-wheedle-whee. I"d listen to Mikey to find my note.
Whenever he came out with no shirt and his hair tied up samurai-style, he seemed f.u.c.ked up. That was his little signal. I don"t know what it was. He would come out first with his hair down, go back to change guitars, or after Al"s drum solo, and come back with his hair up and shirt off. I"d look at Mike and we"d roll our eyes-here we go. Some nights he"d come out at the beginning of the show with his shirt off and hair up.
He looked like a b.u.m in the street. His hair was matted. One time we got on a plane after a show and he spent practically the whole flight in the bathroom. When he finally came out, he had this hairbrush, the kind with the fur bristles, twisted up in his hair, hanging down. He was soaking wet, covered in water, like he tried to take a bath in the airplane sink. I made Kari look at me. I didn"t want the guy in my face. He flopped down on the floor, fussing with the brush caught in his hair, and never went back to his seat, landed that way. Hospital-crazy.
When we didn"t have our kids out on the road with us, Kari and I shared this big Gulfstream jet with Eddie and his girlfriend, Al and his wife, Mikey, and some management and security people. After one show, Mike and I stayed back, like we normally did, and showered. Ed didn"t shower. He jumped into the limo right off the stage and went straight to the airplane. When Mike and I rolled up, laughing, joking, eating a couple of barbecue sandwiches we had ordered, Eddie was sitting there drinking his wine out of the bottle. He went off on us.
"Don"t ever f.u.c.king make me wait," he said. "Without me, you"re nothing. You need me. You"ll see. At the end of this tour, you guys will have nothing. You"re going to have to call me if you ever want to tour again."
He was facing one direction, I was facing the other. I turned around and said, "Ed, shut the f.u.c.k up, man. Come on. We just did a gig."
"f.u.c.k you," he said, and started bashing his bottle on the plane window. One of the security guys tried to calm him down, but he kept yelling and pounding the bottle. I turned my back on him. My guy from Irving"s office was looking at me, shaking his head and zipping his lips. The stewardess and the pilot started freaking out. They were reluctant to take off with this madman on the plane. Finally Al got him to take it easy and we took off.
When we arrived at the next hotel, Eddie started asking everybody what my room number was. He didn"t know the alias I used when I checked into hotels. The tour manager reached me on the room phone and told me Eddie was looking for me.
"Bring that motherf.u.c.ker over here," I said. "I quit. This is done. I"m going home tomorrow. I"m not going to work with this guy ever again. He"s trying to bust the window out of a f.u.c.king $40 million jet. He"s got no respect for anything or anybody. f.u.c.k him. I"m done with this tour."
I called my attorney. He wasn"t very happy with the contract I had signed, once he read it. Irving and his attorney had drawn it up. Outside of dire medical emergencies, if I canceled any shows, I was liable for all lost income. He thought it could cost $5 million to leave before I finished the shows. I was trapped. Eddie apologized, but I was never flying in a plane with him again.
It was the Sam and Dave tour all over again, only it was Sam and Eddie. They kept us apart as much as they could. Irving knew better. We flew in different jets. We stayed at different hotels. We had our own limos. They had their bodyguards. Mike and I had ours. I stayed in my own dressing room on the other side of the hall. The only time I saw that guy was when we stepped out onstage. Once in a while I"d go over to his dressing room before the show and see how he was and the times I did that it was usually great. He"d start playing, I"d start singing, jamming around, like old times. Other times, he"d start telling me crazy s.h.i.t, like, "I pulled my own tooth-this thing was bugging me so I got a pair of pliers and pulled it out."
I didn"t think he could make it. I kept thinking each week would be the last. He was going to land in the hospital. He collapsed a couple of times. He told us one time that he had been hit by a car. He was lying down, and he was so f.u.c.ked up, he couldn"t get up.
"I got hit by a car," he said. "You guys don"t understand."
He would go until he collapsed. Then he would pa.s.s out for a day or two in a hotel. He would wear the same clothes for a week. He would run offstage and not change, go straight up to his room. The next morning, he would be wearing the same clothes. That night onstage-same clothes. He wore those boots with the tape around them the whole tour.
His solo turned into a disaster. It used to be the highlight of every show. Now he would play nothing, just garbage. He would try to play "Eruption," one of his greatest pieces, and screw it up. He would just grab the whammy bar, hit the sustainer, and start making all this noise. The audience wasn"t buying it, either. I saw his solo many nights. He would say unbelievable things to the audience. "I"m just f.u.c.king around," he would say. "I love you people. You pay my rent."
This got so bad Al threw drumsticks at him once. Another time he couldn"t even stand up-he sat on the drum riser. Al had dropped a stick. He picked up the drumstick and started using that on his guitar solo. It was like a little kid banging on things.
I didn"t go near him onstage. No more Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. If he"s over there, I"m over here. When he comes over here, I"m going over there. No bad vibes, just no vibes.
It seemed to me that Ed was going through the motions, like he didn"t care about his playing. He didn"t care about the way he looked. He just went out there and took the money. He was embarra.s.sing. Al, Mike, and I did it from the heart. We played our a.s.ses off every night. Ed went out there and jerked off.
We went through three sound guys. He would take a board mix after shows and listen to it. The sound guy would bury his guitar because he was playing so bad. He was playing so loud onstage anyway, he probably didn"t need to have his guitar pumped through the main house speakers, but he would crucify the sound-man and fire him the next day. Al and I would argue to get the guy back, but that never worked.
Those two often shared a high school mentality. They hated every other band. It was always compet.i.tive with them. Everybody else sucked. I don"t like everything, but I like music, and when I hear a musician I like, I want to embrace him, bring him backstage, make him welcome. Eddie was usually a rude wise-guy. I brought Kenny Chesney backstage on that tour and took him to meet Eddie. Eddie shook his hand and turned around.
"I gotta take a s.h.i.t," he said. He walked into the john with the guy standing right there.
"Let"s get out of here," Kenny said.
That was their only meeting. It was the first night I met Kenny. We went back to my dressing room and played acoustic guitars, singing "I"ll Fall in Love Again," "Eagles Fly," and all these songs of mine that he loved. We were drinking tequila and singing until three in the morning. He became one of my dear friends. But Ed? "I gotta take a s.h.i.t." That usually meant he was going to go and tie up his hair.
Another time, Toby Keith came to see us in Oklahoma City, not far from his hometown. I decided to do his "I Love This Bar" during my acoustic segment and worked up this whole deal with Toby. I was going to say that since he was from around these parts, I was going to do one of his songs, even though I knew he was out of town. Then he would walk out midway through the song and sing the rest of it with me. Toby told me later that while he was waiting backstage, Eddie cornered him and tried to keep him from going out. "Why would you want to go on with him?" Toby said Ed asked. "Why didn"t you come out with us?"
"You didn"t invite me," Toby said.
"I"m inviting you now," Eddie said. "Why are you wearing that cowboy hat?"
"I"m a country guy," said Toby.
"No, it"s because you"re bald," said Eddie.
Toby walked out onstage halfway through the song and the place exploded. Eddie went crazy the rest of the night. He destroyed his dressing room after the show. His son, Wolfie, was in my dressing room, scared and crying. I went to see if I could calm him down. We left Ed behind that night in Oklahoma City with his tour manager and a couple of security guys and went to the next city without him. When they took him back to the hotel, he kicked out the limousine window.
"That boy needs help," said Toby, who drove down to the gig with his wife and teenage daughter in his truck.
Irving would come out a lot, but he wouldn"t go near Ed. No one wanted to go near him, because they figured it would blow up the whole tour if Eddie quit. I"m sure the contract was written the same way for him as it was for me, if he quit or went down. If he had missed three consecutive performances, I could have walked. He never missed one. Ed never lost his work ethic. The Van Halens come from good, hardworking Dutch stock. He was there every night, in the worst shape you could imagine, but he did the show.
He was starting to let his anger toward me show. We sold these deluxe thousand-dollar packages that not only included the special seating in the stage, but you could go backstage, watch sound check, and eat at catering. I never do sound checks. I"m a singer. I save my voice for the show. But some of my fans bought these packages and showed up wearing Cabo Wabo T-shirts. Mikey told me that Eddie would pick on them. "Where"d you get that shirt?" he"d say. "What a piece of s.h.i.t."
The last two shows were at a small amphitheater in Tucson. The second night, Eddie unwound completely. He knew it was the end of the tour. He knew he was done. He came up to me before the show, when I was talking to Irving, and rolled my sleeve down over my tattoo. I didn"t even acknowledge him. I just rolled it back up. He rolled it back down. I rolled it back up.
"Don"t be f.u.c.king with my shirt, dude," I said.
"That thing ain"t gonna last," he said, showing me his Van Halen tattoo. "See that? That"s better. That"s going to last longer."
Like I cared. We had a crew on that tour of more than 120. I had a bunch of cases of tequila in my dressing room and I was sitting in my dressing room signing bottles for the crew. Eddie came in and saw what I was doing.
"Can I have a bottle?" he said.
I went over to my refrigerator and pulled one out. "I"ll give you a bottle," I said. "These others are all signed for the crew."
He takes a couple of big slugs and sets it down. "Why can"t I have one of these?" he said. I told him those bottles were for the crew and I had the exact right number. If you take one, I told him, somebody"s not going to get one. He walks away, over to one of my guests in the dressing room, a booking agent Eddie knew but mistook for the son of Warner Bros. Records chairman Mo Ostin. He proceeded to give this guy a ration of s.h.i.t about something that made no sense to anyone but Ed. "And your dad, he was a great man, and you and your brother are nothing."
He was raving crazy. He had already attacked Valerie"s brother, who made the mistake of showing up at the concert to see his ex-brother-in-law. People were screaming and yelling in the dressing room, and he was running wild, beating up people and smashing bottles against the wall. He lost it completely.
Irving took me aside. "When this show"s over," he told me, "I"m getting you in a limo and we"re getting out of here." My plane was waiting to take me home.
It was the worst show we"d ever done in our lives. Eddie played so bad. My nephew was standing on the side of the stage with me, watching Eddie do his solo.
"I"ve never seen anything like this," he said. "What"s wrong with him?"
He smashed his favorite guitar to pieces. Sprayed shrapnel into the crowd. He got on the microphone, crying. "You don"t understand," he said. "You people pay my rent. I love you people."
They tell me he pulled some crazy s.h.i.t on the plane home. He had his girlfriend and her two grown daughters with him. Al was there with his family. Mike and his wife stayed over in Tucson rather than fly with Ed. Some funky s.h.i.t went down on that plane. My man was completely gone and out of it. I went straight to my plane after the show and home to San Francisco. I never spoke to him again after telling him to keep his hand off my shirt.
15.
GOING HOME.
We moved the whole family to Mexico before the 2005 school year started. Our daughters, Kama and Samantha, were each six months apart from the daughters of my Cabo Wabo partner, Marco Monroy. We were neighbors in Cabo and our kids were pals. We wanted to put the girls in school while they were still young enough to learn the language and soak up the culture. Kama was in fourth grade and her younger sister, Samantha, who was four years old, was in preschool. After the last year of Van Halen torture, I was ready for the beach.
We"d wake up in the morning to the waves crashing outside the window. The weather was fantastic. We had the Cabo Wabo and we could go down to the cantina and eat or have food delivered to the house. We had people working all over our home-maids, security, gardeners. Down there, everybody needs a job and they work hard for the money. Life can be very comfortable.
When you go on vacation for ten days, you spend the first seven days just getting relaxed. When you go on vacation to stay, you go through periods of boredom, where you break through to new levels of relaxation. You slide all the way down. When we returned after spending most of the year in Mexico, we"d changed. It wasn"t just our clothes, although Kari and I noticed when we stopped at the store on the way home that the clothes we were wearing looked a little ragged and dirty back in Marin County. We"d reached a place that had a lasting effect. When we returned to the city and got busy again, we now knew where that place was, and it was easier to get back there.
During the reunion, I kept the Wabos on full salary. The only gigs we"d done all year were my birthday bash at Cabo Wabo and the annual weekend at the new Cabo Wabo Cantina that opened in Harrah"s Lake Tahoe in May 2004. Ted Nugent, Toby Keith, and Bob Weir came opening weekend to play with me in the former South Sh.o.r.e Room, the big showcase off the casino where Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra performed.
The Lake Tahoe cantina was part of an expansion plan I had been working on for a while. Several years earlier, Don Marrandino, who worked for the Fert.i.tta brothers and the Station Casinos, approached me about building a Cabo Wabo in Las Vegas. The Fert.i.ttas were great. I got to know them pretty well. The Fert.i.ttas bought the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a kind of extreme boxing that mixed martial arts and no-holds-barred wrestling with boxing. They booked their first big match at the Trump Arena in Atlantic City, and I went with them. They sent a G4 private jet to pick up first me in San Francisco, and then the rest of the party in Vegas. Atlantic City was shut down in a blizzard and we landed instead in Philadelphia. They put us in big suites at the Ritz-Carlton. We went out to dinner at some fancy Italian place and they just ordered the entire menu and cases of fine wine. The next morning, we flew into Atlantic City and went to their first fights. Their father started the Station Casinos. He was the first independent casino operator outside of the Strip. He started small, but he eventually ran eleven casinos, making more money than he would on the Strip. I was thinking these guys were the smartest people in Vegas.
Marrandino came to my house to show me the plans. He wanted to do a Cabo Wabo complex-an eight-thousand-seat arena, a bowling alley, and the cantina. We were scheduled to break ground in October 2001, but after 9/11, they changed their minds. The contract ran out. Don Marrandino went to work first for the Hard Rock Cafe, and then for Steve Wynn to build the Wynn. Marrandino ended up running Harrah"s at Lake Tahoe and immediately started plans to open a Cabo Wabo there. He"s got friends in the music industry, and he hired them to come and play. He knew how to make a place cool and hip. Most of these old casino guys, they don"t know what the h.e.l.l to do. "Where"s Sammy and Frank? The good guys are dead. We"ve got n.o.body to play here." Marrandino knew there was a whole new breed of people out there.
Originally, I only wanted there to be one Cabo Wabo. I hated Planet Hollywood, and when investors behind Planet Hollywood and the Rainforest Cafe came to me to open dozens of cantinas, I sent them away without even listening to how much money I could make. The original was so special to me. But Marrandino convinced me we didn"t have to cookie-cutter them, so we opened the place in Tahoe (we have since also opened in Las Vegas). The Tahoe cantina comes with this great casino showroom, and my annual Cinco de Mayo run with the Wabos in Tahoe has become a high point on my calendar every year. Tahoe has a new Sammy.
I built a brand-new studio in Marin County for the Wabos. I told them to make sure they got together and rehea.r.s.ed at least once a week, but they were in and out of that studio all the time. They stayed tight. After the Van Halen reunion tour, I was so happy to get back with the Wabos. After refreshing my recollection of the pressure on the big-time rock bands, the high ticket prices, the giant production, the big crews, and all that c.r.a.p, I was glad to go back to a band that can just go play. If I wanted to bring the band down to Cabo to play for free in the cantina for a week, I did. I took off basically that whole year in Cabo. I wrote my next alb.u.m, Living It Up, Living It Up, pretty much about everything I was doing-"Feet in the Sand," "Living on the Coastline," all those songs. pretty much about everything I was doing-"Feet in the Sand," "Living on the Coastline," all those songs.
I was still recovering from the reunion tour when Irving called to talk to me about Van Halen being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At first, he said something about only the original band getting invited. I went nuts on Irving. I was in the band longer than Roth. He was in Van Halen seven years. I was with them eleven years. I sold more records than he did. How could they do this to me?
We didn"t know that the brothers were fooling around with Roth again. Mikey and I were both on the outs. Irving called back and said everything was okay. It probably never was a problem. That"s one of the things he does-makes problems happen so he can make them go away.
It was Van Halen, R.E.M., Patti Smith, Grandmaster Flash, and Ronnie Spector. I told Irving that we should all suck it up and make a united showing at the ceremony. He came back with their word. "If you"re going, they"re not going," he said. I thought they were bluffing. Right up until I was standing there giving my speech, I half-expected Roth to bust in and do something stupid. Mikey and I wanted to play. Ed and Al pulled the plug at the last minute. Velvet Revolver was set to induct Van Halen. Irving managed them, too, which may have something to do with how they landed the a.s.signment. Since Van Halen wasn"t going to perform, Velvet Revolver planned a medley of one Dave song and one Sammy song.
Roth called up Slash, the Velvet Revolver guitarist, and told him if the band played "Jump," Roth would come and sing with them. When Slash said that the band didn"t have a keyboard player, Roth told him to put the part on tape. He and Slash got into it. Slash told him they were a rock-and-roll band and they played their own instruments and weren"t going to pretend like they had a keyboard player just for Roth. Slash offered to play "You Really Got Me," or "Runnin" with the Devil," but for Roth, it was "Jump" or nothing. When the Velvet Revolver vocalist Scott Weiland got wind of Roth"s phone call, he told Slash he would quit the band if they let that motherf.u.c.ker anywhere near the stage. By the time I called Slash to suggest that Mikey and I join them for a couple of numbers, there was no way that was happening. I called Paul Shaffer, bandleader for the event, and he accepted my offer for Mike and me to do "Why Can"t This Be Love" with the house band. No way I was going and not playing.
Kenny Chesney insisted on coming with me. Emeril Laga.s.se flew in. Mike and I were there with our wives and everybody was giving us so much love. Annie Leibovitz, the photographer, came up and hugged me. Keith Richards"s daughter wanted to meet me.
"I"ll take a picture with you if you take me and introduce me to your dad," I said. She dragged me over to his table.
"Hey, mate, Sammy, good job," he said. I can"t tell you how I felt. It was like the first time I felt respected in this business in my life.
I did my speech. "I"m sorry the brothers and everybody"s not here," I said. "G.o.d bless "em, but you couldn"t have kept me from this with a shotgun."