At the end of the evening, they built a jam around Patti Smith and her song "Power to the People." She is not my kind of gal (and I"m not her kind of guy), but I did record her song "Free Money" early in my career. Stephen Stills was up there, a little bit gone and stepping on everybody, rolling across them. Eddie Vedder was there, in great form. The R.E.M. guys were there. At the end of the jam, I was standing next to Keith Richards. He looked at me and winked.
"Good job, Sammy," he said. "Good job, mate. Congratulations." Pretty cool.
Still the Van Halens wouldn"t leave me alone. That fall of 2006, I decided to go out with the Wabos and book small theaters, underplay all my best markets, no more than two shows in each city, a special treat for my hard-core fans. Irving and I discussed the strategy. He agreed that it would help stir up excitement, and the music business desperately needed some excitement. Irving thought it would help business the next time through the markets. We booked the whole tour.
It was around then we started to hear about another Van Halen reunion with Roth. We didn"t believe it would happen. Mikey didn"t think so, but he was out, replaced by Eddie"s sixteen-year-old son, Wolfie, and, out of nowhere, the reunion was on. The label threw together another greatest-hits package, all Roth-era tracks. Irving wound up acting as the band"s manager for the tour and he put Van Halen right on top of me.
They played the same cities the same week. Either they had just left town or I had just left. It was as if we were on tour together. We did great anyway, sold out all our dates, but it was such a chicken-s.h.i.t move. Obviously, Eddie and Dave made him do it. The fans had waited a hundred years for the reunion with Roth and all the radio stations were talking about it. When I asked him about it, Irving acted like it was no big deal. He told me the same thing he said about the Sam and Dave tour-let them see how much better you are. When I asked him if he would send the Eagles out on top of Don Henley, he said that would be fine-it would make people talk about Henley.
As much as I respect him and as smart as he is, Irving couldn"t help himself. He was making a lot more money on that big Van Halen reunion tour than off me playing those theaters. I needed a new manager. I went back with Carter, the guy who"d signed me to my first record deal. We"d never lost touch and he had been very successful in the management field since his years at Capitol-most recently, at that point, with Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Paula Cole.
WHILE ALL THESE tours were happening, the tequila business had been mostly running itself, but it had grown to the point where I could see it needed some proper management. My accountant took over the business, and he fielded an offer from this big-shot investor Gary Shansby, who had billions of dollars to spread around and already owned companies like Johnson"s Wax, La Victoria Salsa, and Famous Amos Cookies. Shansby wanted to buy the tequila company for $38 million, but it was a complicated deal. He was only going to pay me half. I would maintain a 50 percent interest in the business and, after he spent three years building up the company, we would split everything after he sold out for $160 million. When I asked him what he would do differently with the company, he said, "Put some feet on the street." tours were happening, the tequila business had been mostly running itself, but it had grown to the point where I could see it needed some proper management. My accountant took over the business, and he fielded an offer from this big-shot investor Gary Shansby, who had billions of dollars to spread around and already owned companies like Johnson"s Wax, La Victoria Salsa, and Famous Amos Cookies. Shansby wanted to buy the tequila company for $38 million, but it was a complicated deal. He was only going to pay me half. I would maintain a 50 percent interest in the business and, after he spent three years building up the company, we would split everything after he sold out for $160 million. When I asked him what he would do differently with the company, he said, "Put some feet on the street."
My accountant wanted to sell. I didn"t. It was one of the worst deals I"d ever seen. If his plan didn"t work and I wanted to buy back the company, he would make me pay some heavy-duty interest on the money he advanced me for the sale. Nothing doing. Shansby hated me for not selling and started his own tequila brand. I turned around to my accountant, now running the company, and told him to do what Shansby said he was going to do. The accountant hired a marketing person. He hired six regional sales guys in the field. He hired a manager to run the salesmen. He opened an office. He spent 4 million bucks on overhead that year. Nothing really happened.
In the meantime, as my accountant, he got me into a restaurant deal in San Francisco. He found these other two investors, and the three of them went to Mexico and met everyone at my plant, making plans to start their own brand. I began to see there might be a problem. He sat down with me and told me that he and his investors wanted to buy the company from me and they would pay $22 million. I already turned down Gary Shansby"s offer of $38 million. What was this guy thinking? I fired my accountant.
He did have a piece of the company. When he sued to get back my shares in his San Francisco restaurant, I made a deal for his end of Cabo Wabo and he went away. I brought in a liquor business old-timer named Steve Kauffman to run the company. He was somebody I knew, who came from Seagram and had done some work for me as a consultant. He was going through his fourth divorce, the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He needed a job. Once he took over, the business exploded overnight.
A little more than a year after Kauffman came to work for me, Skyy Vodka approached him to buy the company. He took a lunch with an old friend from Skyy and showed him the numbers. The guy called me up from the lunch and offered me $70 million for the company. I almost fainted.
In the liquor business, we were quiet underachievers. We had four employees. I didn"t spend any money marketing because we were doing fine, growing at a nice, beautiful, slow pace. The three-year average net profit was almost $7 million a year. I was happy making that much money. I didn"t need any more money. I liked keeping it guerrilla, maintaining control.
I went to the Skyy offices in San Francisco, very hip company, staffed by lots of young people. I felt at home and wanted to be involved with these guys. I told them maybe I would sell them 50 percent of the company. I went back and forth for about ten days, waking up in the middle of the night thinking, "Oh, no, I can"t sell this company." I finally told them I couldn"t sell. By the time I paid the lawyers, taxes, bought off my partners, I told them, all I"d have left is a chunk of money that doesn"t really change my life. "What amount would change your life?" they asked.
"At least $100 million," I said.
They called back the next day and said okay.
I couldn"t even calculate it. What do you do with $100 million? You can"t put it in the bank. It was making me more nervous than being broke did. I changed my mind and told them, once again, I couldn"t sell the company. That"s when Luca Garavoglia, the young, dashing chairman of Campari Group, and his side-kick with the food stains on his shirt, Stefano Saccardi, a man so relaxed and agreeable I never realized he was Luca"s attorney, showed up in Cabo for my birthday bash.
Luca could be the most impressive person I"ve ever met in my life. He is a brilliant, subtle, and cla.s.sy human being, elegant and elevated with an extraordinary command of a wide array of details. He serves on the board of directors for Ferrari. His father died suddenly when Luca was fresh out of university, and he took over the old Italian aperitif makers. He blasted the company into the modern world. He started buying brands like Skyy Vodka, and took the company public on the Italian stock market. The Campari Group became one of the top liquor companies in the world.
Luca and Stefano told me that because they ran a public company, it would be difficult for them to acquire only part-interest in the tequila, but they could figure out a way so that I could keep 20 percent of the company. I was fine. With somebody like Luca Garavoglia owning the company, my 20 percent was going to be worth more than the 100 percent had been. Luca was the clincher. In May 2007, I made the sale.
I took my whole family on vacation to Italy for six weeks, even my brother and his family. We stayed for a week at this winery the Campari people owned in Sardinia, one of the coolest places on the planet. We went from Sardinia to southern Italy, up the Amalfi coast and through Tuscany and Chianti, all the way to Lake Maggiore in northern Italy. After a week by the lake, we went to Milan to visit Luca.
He showed me the new $100 million Campari factory. Only about five people were running the whole place with these efficient new machines that wrap and seal twenty-five hundred cases of Campari in, like, two minutes. He gave me some amazing numbers-$15,000 a second or something like that-but he wasn"t bragging. He was just showing me. Twenty years ago, they probably had six thousand employees. Now they have a dozen, most in the office.
"You ride with me," he said, as we left the factory. "Let"s keep talking."
We got into his Maserati Quattroporte, which is not that great a car. There were two guys with him. We got in the back. The other two guys sat in the front. They looked around, started it up, and punched it. In no time, they were hauling a.s.s 140 miles an hour down the freeway. I felt every b.u.mp and I couldn"t roll down the window. We were hot. The air-conditioning was not working too well.
"I don"t like this car very much," Luca said. "I like a Mercedes, but I"m on the board of directors for Ferrari and they wanted me to drive one of their cars. The Maserati is the only four-seater. The Ferrari, it"s not right for me-no four doors."
We got back to the office and went through a metal detector. The two other guys pulled out the guns they were wearing in shoulder holsters. n.o.body blinked an eye. Luca"s car rode so badly because it was carrying sixteen hundred kilos of bulletproofing.
A couple of years later, I started reading about the new Ferrari 599 Fiorano. Ferrari enthusiasts were comparing this to the greatest of the Ferraris-the 275GTB, the first Testarossas. I hadn"t bought a new Ferrari in a long time. I decided to buy one. I went to the Ferrari dealer and the salesman took my order. When we were finished, he tells me it will be a two-and-a-half-year wait and a $300,000 premium above the sticker price. I called Luca.
"It"s so funny you called me," he said. "There"s a board meeting on Monday. I"ll see what I can do. What exactly do you want?"
That Monday night, I received an e-mail from Luca with a letter from the CEO of Ferrari attached, for the dealership. I got my car in two and a half months and I paid sticker price. Ferrari even gave me a custom paint job, black with a red stripe. They reversed the color on the interior-red interior with black st.i.tching. They put in a plaque that said THIS FIORANO MADE FOR SAMMY HAGAR THIS FIORANO MADE FOR SAMMY HAGAR, and delivered it on my birthday. On every other Ferrari, the symbol is always a black horse on a yellow background. They made mine red.
Life was good for a kid from the orange groves. I had wealth and fame. I was in the f.u.c.king Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I am blessed with a wonderful wife, great children, and a loving family. I had experienced success in every realm of my life. It had been a long road to Cabo.
I went back to Fontana in February 2007 to play "I Can"t Drive 55" at the NASCAR track they built on the site of the old Kaiser Steel plant. The stage stood where my father used to work at the open hearth. Family was everywhere. I got a huge ovation, bigger than the Hollywood celebrities there, whose names I couldn"t remember the next day. I took Kari and the girls and we spent three days with my mother at her place in Palm Desert.
After Mike died, she sold the farm I bought them and moved to a condo in Palm Desert near my sister Velma. My mom would have rather found a five-dollar bill walking down the street, or pick up tin cans and cash them in for twenty bucks, than have me give her a million. She wanted to win the lottery or a jackpot. She didn"t want anybody to give her anything.
I finally talked her into letting me buy her a house. She loved her condo. We furnished it and remodeled it, but this really nice house came up across the street from Velma. It belonged to one of the executives for Outback Steakhouse, who had been transferred to Florida. She loved it. We held big events there every year. She would cook giant dinners for Easter or Thanksgiving and we would surround her with family.
There was an extra bedroom for me and Kari. We kept some of our stuff there. I had a guitar there. She came to stay with us, too. She had her first heart attack at four in the morning while she was visiting. She finally confessed that she couldn"t breathe, and we took her to the hospital. They put two stents in her, but she had another heart attack a year later. She went under the knife for quadruple bypa.s.s surgery at age eighty. I was scared. I thought she would die. But she volunteered for the operation and she came out of it great.
When we stayed with her before the NASCAR event, she seemed tired. My mom was always a ball of energy, but she was sitting a lot. She stayed up late the night before we left, talking with me. My mom always kept a garden. She saved seeds and was careful to rotate her crops in their little plots. She knew all this stuff. "You can"t just take carrot seeds and plant them the next year," she said. "It has to be the third year." She talked about how peach seeds had to be wrapped with cotton and left in a jar with water all winter before they would sprout. She told me you have to plant carrots in a spot one year, and the next year put lettuce in that spot, and then the next year you leave it alone, and then you come back with tomatoes. She told me all these wonderful things about canning. I got up the next morning, went and did the NASCAR gig for my father, and went home. Two days later, she died.
My sister called at about six in the morning. She was putting Mom in an ambulance. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang again. She was dead. She didn"t have a heart attack. Her heart simply stopped beating. She was done and she just slipped away quietly. "A beautiful finish," my sister Bobbi wrote. I miss her every day.
16.
WHO WANTS TO BE A BILLIONAIRE?.
I have a real hard time giving up on the record business. that has nothing to do with my livelihood. It"s just such a shame. People don"t realize how dried up it"s become. the only people that sell records anymore are brand-new little pop bands that kids buy. For me, there is no record business. that breaks my heart. I want to make records. that"s a big part of what I do. But even before Napster ruined everything, I was looking for ways around the major labels. I gave an alb.u.m to the guys at tower records, who were starting a little label. the big companies had screwed me out of money for years. I just had been with MCA and the Bubble Factory with have a real hard time giving up on the record business. that has nothing to do with my livelihood. It"s just such a shame. People don"t realize how dried up it"s become. the only people that sell records anymore are brand-new little pop bands that kids buy. For me, there is no record business. that breaks my heart. I want to make records. that"s a big part of what I do. But even before Napster ruined everything, I was looking for ways around the major labels. I gave an alb.u.m to the guys at tower records, who were starting a little label. the big companies had screwed me out of money for years. I just had been with MCA and the Bubble Factory with Marching to Mars Marching to Mars and and Red Voodoo Red Voodoo, each of which sold nearly a half million. It was not the kind of numbers I was used to selling, but I just wanted to make records. I saw all that going in the tank. I saw record companies changing, not putting any effort into a guy like me.
All you need is one new song. I made a string of recordings, and released them as singles, like "Sam I Am" or "I"ll take You There," the old Staples Singers song. Later I might put them on a record, but they were really little more than tiny treats for radio and my fans. I started spending my own money. I"d write a song, record it in my studio, print it up, hire a promotion man, have him ship it to all the radio stations, pay a little bit of money here and there, and get it played so that I could have a new song. That was fun, not profitable, but I make money other ways. I can have fun with my music now.
That"s been the great gift of Cabo Wabo. The tequila business pays for me to still be in the music business. I could make money on tour, but I wouldn"t be traveling in a private jet and staying in nice hotels when I"m an opening act or playing small venues. I wouldn"t be making any records.
My band gets paid like a big-time band. I don"t take much money from my musical career, which makes me love it more. It takes the business out of it. That"s been the most successful thing I"ve done, take the business out of my music, because now, anything I do comes from my heart, baby. I am also free to do things like the Staples Singers song. I love to not be bound by my image or what people think of me. I loved that song. I was so happy to record it. It was like "Sam I Am." I felt like I could write and record anything I want. There"s no industry out there anyway.
Bottom line is, I want to make records. I want to write songs. I want to go out and play new material for people. That was one of my main reasons for putting together Chickenfoot with Chad Smith on drums, Joe Satriani on guitar, and Michael Anthony on ba.s.s.
It had begun several years earlier, when Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers started coming down to the birthday bash every year. He bought a house down there. We would jam, jam, jam. I told him to never go to Cabo without calling me first. I"d call him and say I was going to Cabo the next day and he would get on a plane and come down. He and Michael Anthony and I would play every night. We called our little trio Chickenfoot. We played cover tunes. We played any d.a.m.n thing we wanted. I"d let Mike sing lead. We used to do a great medley of "Come Together" and "Give It Away" by the Chili Peppers. We did James Brown medleys, "Hot Pants," "Give It Up," "Turn It Loose," "Superbad" into "Cold Sweat." We were rocking, having a really good time. Chad kept telling us. "This is it," he said. "Let"s start a band." It took me about five years before the light went on.
I promised myself I would never play with another genius guitar player, but I realized, for this band to work, it needed some kind of superstar guitarist. I can"t play guitar and sing. That is way too much work. I can jam, but if I had to play everything every night, I"d be struggling a lot of the time. The first person I thought of was Joe Satriani.
I had called Satriani about playing together a number of years before, and he told me, "I don"t play other people"s music." But I"d seen him a few times since and he seemed pretty cool, quiet and aloof, distant, not too outgoing. This time, he was much more interested.
Super Bowl weekend 2008 in Las Vegas, and I had a gig booked at Pearl, the big room at the Palms Hotel. Serious fun. We were sold out. Joe came home from tour. We picked up his amp and went to Vegas. Mike and Chad met us there. We talked it over in the dressing room-just talked though. We didn"t rehea.r.s.e. We decided we all knew "Goin" Down," Traffic"s "Mr. Fantasy," and Led Zeppelin"s "Rock and Roll." We didn"t discuss arrangements or anything. We just went out and did it. I did the show with the Wabos, and for the encore, I announced we were going to have some special guests, while the crew laid out Joe"s gear and adjusted the drum kit for Chad. Mike"s amp was already set up.
From the first thirty seconds of "Goin" Down," that audience went through the roof. I felt it. Everybody onstage felt it. Our wives, the crew, management-they all knew. Everybody in the hall felt it. It was electric. I had just done a great show with my band, played every hit you could possibly play, but this band did something else to that audience that was unique. This was a real band.
From that first time we played, I knew we had stumbled on an impossible combination of musicianship and chemistry. The cool thing about Chickenfoot was not just that the chemistry was instantly right, but also that we were all grown-ups, with our own careers, our own money. No one needed it. We played music that we liked. We weren"t trying to be like this or be like that. We were exactly who and what we were, and we let whatever that was happen. That made it like jazz, in its own way. It wasn"t jazz, but it was like jazz, in the sense that we were four guys playing exactly the music we wanted to play, the way we wanted to play it. For us, it worked.
I knew a so-called super-group would get more attention. Record companies could get behind it, and we could go out and play all new stuff, give me a break from "I Can"t Drive 55." I love those songs, but I don"t enjoy beating them to death. The first Chickenfoot record did well. It went gold. We made a profit. I have a hard time spending a few hundred thousand dollars on a record and only make a hundred back, but that"s the way it is. The record industry has really died off.
I go solo backward. People like Phil Collins or Peter Gabriel leave a band to go solo. I"ve always gone solo first and then joined a band. They go solo because they are tired of being in a band. For me, I join bands because I need the inspiration. I learned so much in Montrose-how to play guitar like Ronnie, how to lead a band, how bands work-and I used it all in my solo career after Montrose. Ten years later, I was selling out multiple arenas, had five platinum alb.u.ms in a row on Geffen, and I was ripe to join Van Halen when they asked. I was tired of doing my own thing, thinking of taking a year off, and didn"t know what to do anyway. I needed to be around other musicians to make me grow again. Ten years with Van Halen, and I was ready to go solo again. Too bad I stayed that eleventh year. I"d already learned everything I could from that band.
I wanted one last hurrah. I have been threatening to retire since 1984. Something always comes along that keeps me from quitting. Chickenfoot is the only new cla.s.sic rock band in a long time. We fortunately avoided being called a super-group. That"s always impossible to live up to. We certainly were super players, everyone in the group. When we got together, Joe would start playing a song idea. Chad would chime in. Mikey learns faster than anyone-he"d act like he knew the song already. I would scat along, make up lyrics on the spot or write words later. That"s how we wrote every song. Joe would bring a new idea. By the end of the day, I had my part. Everybody knew what he was going to play. Magical performance. No teeth pulling. No having to extract anything out of anyone. With Chickenfoot, we simply went in and ripped it up.
We decided we wanted our record to sound cla.s.sic. We thought about working with Brendan O"Brien or one of the other hot young producers, but we hired Andy Johns, even though I"d refused to work with him on For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. As much as I wanted to kill him, and eventually fired him from the Van Halen record, he made the greatest cla.s.sic rock records ever, Led Zeppelin III, Exile on Main St Led Zeppelin III, Exile on Main St. Joe had worked with him, too. We both knew he came with a lot of personal problems, but when Andy Johns sets microphones up around a drum set, it f.u.c.king starts rocking. The Chickenfoot alb.u.m was one of only twelve alb.u.ms to go gold in 2009.
With Chad"s whacked-out energy, I became the straight man. Anyone else would lose the groove twenty times by turning the beat around as often as he does, but he keeps the groove and plays everything you can possibly play in every song. He"s one fierce drummer. He brings Joe out, makes Joe not be so conservative. And Joe can be a technician"s technician. But not with Chickenfoot. There is nothing like the "Foot. Chickenfoot is never going to make me a billionaire. Why am I doing this? Working so hard?
If I wanted to be a billionaire, I probably could. I could take all I have right now and leverage it like Donald Trump. That"s what he did. I could work for it, too. Another couple good ideas and who knows? I could invent so many different places that are fun, which would be successful, that I"m sure I could do it, if I wanted. It"s probably not that hard. But I"m not interested. I don"t want to be a billionaire. That would be the biggest f.u.c.king waste of time on the planet.
When I came up with Sammy"s Beach Bar & Grill, I knew it was a great idea, but I had to wonder why I would do it. I didn"t need the money. I learned I can do it and how to do it, and it seemed like the easiest thing in the world for me to do. I just couldn"t think of a single reason to do it. Then I thought I could do it for charity. Kari and I like to support charities that help children.
I"m involved in this charity with the Beach Bar & Grill in Maui, helping desperately ill kids on the island. All our Beach Bar & Grills support charities in the cities where they"re based. We helped pay for a kidney transplant for this girl. We didn"t pay for the surgery, but we paid for her family to come with her to San Francisco, where she was having the operation. We built a number of these airport restaurants-Las Vegas, St. Louis, JFK Airport in New York-and they kick down a steady stream of income to local charities working with children. This guy I work with on the Maui charity asked me if I would talk to these teenagers that had been in orphanages. They get released and they don"t have anybody. They don"t have a brother or a sister. They don"t know where their mom and dad are. He said these kids get in trouble. They don"t have any other choice. He runs a shelter for them. They don"t have any self-esteem, he says. They don"t believe in themselves one bit. I can fix that. I can help these kids, because I can say to them, first of all, no matter who your parents are, no matter where you"re born, everyone is born with the same gifts. You"ve got the same ability as I have, as anybody has. Just because you don"t know who your parents are, don"t think that you don"t have the ability to get whatever you want.
You are just as powerful as me or anybody else. You"re born with that. I know it"s different for you in your heart, but I"m telling you, you were born with the same gift I was, the same gifts as the Kennedys or anybody else. You can get a cold, like everybody else. You can get a job, like anyone else. You can have a family. You can fall in love. You can fall off a cliff. You can be like everyone else. Nothing"s different for you. You can be as much a success as anybody. And I know there is no end to success.
I definitely believe in G.o.d and, even if I didn"t, I believe that you should. People have to believe in something. Without belief in something, you"re just going in circles. I do believe in spiritual things. I believe in the unknown. I believe in G.o.d and I believe in UFOs and aliens and all that mystery. I"m a big sucker for all of that. One of my main issues is kindness and being a good person in life. I don"t believe in killing people, inflicting your will on another person and trying to hurt them in any way. I don"t care how bad they are-it"s not your business and you f.u.c.k around with that, you"re f.u.c.king around with evil. If people knew how sacred life is and wouldn"t take another person"s life, we"d be a much f.u.c.king better-off race. This planet would be in better shape.
I won"t do certain things. I know my fans see something in me that makes them respect me. I feel like I"m not worthy sometimes. I know I"m a good guy, that I mean well and give a lot of myself, but they see something in there, I guess, that"s deeper than what I think of myself. I think of myself as a good guy, but I don"t see myself as special. Unique, maybe, but I don"t see some big star when I look in the mirror in the morning. I see my mom. She was the salt of the earth. She"d dig through Dumpsters. When my mom used to take us out on weekends, her idea of going and doing something as a family was to take us four kids to the city dump and rummage. And we loved it. It was a blast, finding stuff. It was like a treasure hunt to us kids. My mom would find food, like rotting fruit and vegetables that grocery stores were dumping. She would find two or three good oranges and be so happy. "Oh, look at these!" she would say.
I bought her houses and cars. There was nothing I wouldn"t do for her, but she wouldn"t have it. I had to practically force her to let me buy her anything. "Mom," I"d say, "just tell me-what do you want? What"s something you always wanted to do?"
"Well, I don"t know," she"d say. "I have pretty much everything I could want."
She was so solid. I"m like that. I really don"t feel like somebody. I don"t feel like some big star and I don"t want to be some billionaire. I have all these crazy ambitions, but there"s something inside of me that is my mom, and I really like that.
NOTE FROM THE COAUTHOR.
I feel lucky and privileged to help Sammy tell his remarkable story. Sam and I go way back-I saw the Justice Brothers at the Wharf rat-and he once gave out my home phone number to a sold-out Cow Palace audience, taking exception with one of my reviews. As a lifelong card-carrying member of rock music"s critical elite, with its carefully proscribed doctrinaire orthodoxy, I am fully aware of the regard in which such circles hold Sam. To them, I say, f.u.c.k you, the guy had "rock Candy" on his first alb.u.m. There are entire highly regarded careers that have never reached such a peak, and that was just Sammy"s opening salvo. Those who have known Sammy all these years will further testify that he has unwaveringly been the same guy all along. He is as authentic as the Grateful Dead, maybe more. Sammy Hagar is a genuine working-cla.s.s hero. I am as proud of this book as anything I have ever done. feel lucky and privileged to help Sammy tell his remarkable story. Sam and I go way back-I saw the Justice Brothers at the Wharf rat-and he once gave out my home phone number to a sold-out Cow Palace audience, taking exception with one of my reviews. As a lifelong card-carrying member of rock music"s critical elite, with its carefully proscribed doctrinaire orthodoxy, I am fully aware of the regard in which such circles hold Sam. To them, I say, f.u.c.k you, the guy had "rock Candy" on his first alb.u.m. There are entire highly regarded careers that have never reached such a peak, and that was just Sammy"s opening salvo. Those who have known Sammy all these years will further testify that he has unwaveringly been the same guy all along. He is as authentic as the Grateful Dead, maybe more. Sammy Hagar is a genuine working-cla.s.s hero. I am as proud of this book as anything I have ever done.
-J.S.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
This book is for my mom.
Thanks to my wife and children-Kari, Aaron, Andrew, Kama, and Samantha; my brother, Bob Jr. (Ponchito); my two sisters, Bobbi and Velma; Betsy and Bucky; all my aunts and uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and in-laws who help make my life so colorful; my band the Wabos-Vic, David (Bro), Mona, and Mikey; Renata and Bill Ravina; Carter; Joel Selvin for talking me into doing this book and finally coming over to my side; Ronnie Montrose; Ed and Al; Joe and Chad; my crew-Paul, Rosie, Ace, Jim, Three, Big Kenny, Chris, Rick, Gage, Duggie, Manning, Rich, and Austin; all the employees from the Cabo Wabo Cantinas and Sammy"s Beach Bar & Grills; Marco and Jorge; d.i.c.k Richmond for helping write this book; Don Marrandino; Stan Novak; Frank Sickelsmith; Don Pruitt; John Koladner; Gary Arnold; Ed Leffler, my second father; Shep Gordon; Steve Kauffman; the Skyy and Campari team; Wilson Daniels. All my chef buddies, all the musicians that have played the Cabo Wabo, and the musicians I"ve had the pleasure of playing with. Ma, Lu, and Chick; all of my old buddies I grew up with; stepfather Mike for buying me my first car; and a special thanks to the fans, all the Red Heads, for being the best travel companions any artist can have. And my father, who believed in me more than himself.
-SAMMY I NEED TO thank Lisa Sharkey, Matt Harper, and all the HarperCollins/It Books team; Frank Weimann of the Literary Group (and Elyse Tanzillo); Carol Mastick for the transcriptions; Peter Riegert and the entire staff of the Pierre for the hospitality; Carter for saying no; David Ritz for showing me how; and, always, Carla for being herself. And, of course, my biggest thanks to Sammy. thank Lisa Sharkey, Matt Harper, and all the HarperCollins/It Books team; Frank Weimann of the Literary Group (and Elyse Tanzillo); Carol Mastick for the transcriptions; Peter Riegert and the entire staff of the Pierre for the hospitality; Carter for saying no; David Ritz for showing me how; and, always, Carla for being herself. And, of course, my biggest thanks to Sammy.
-J.S.
About the Authors SAMMY HAGAR was a founding member of the rock band Montrose before becoming a hugely successful solo artist. In 1985, he joined Van Halen, which led to a string of consecutive number one alb.u.ms and hit singles that stretched over ten years. After the Van Halen brothers unceremoniously fired him, he went on to establish himself as a solo artist all over again, while also founding Cabo Wabo tequila. He splits his time between California, Hawaii, and Mexico. was a founding member of the rock band Montrose before becoming a hugely successful solo artist. In 1985, he joined Van Halen, which led to a string of consecutive number one alb.u.ms and hit singles that stretched over ten years. After the Van Halen brothers unceremoniously fired him, he went on to establish himself as a solo artist all over again, while also founding Cabo Wabo tequila. He splits his time between California, Hawaii, and Mexico.
JOEL SELVIN is an award-winning journalist who has covered pop music for the is an award-winning journalist who has covered pop music for the San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco Chronicle since 1970. A longtime firsthand observer of the Sammy Hagar phenomenon, Selvin is also the author of the bestselling since 1970. A longtime firsthand observer of the Sammy Hagar phenomenon, Selvin is also the author of the bestselling Summer of Love Summer of Love and has written nine other books about pop music. and has written nine other books about pop music.
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