Alex Van Halen has described Sammy Hagar, who fronted Van Halen for a decade, as “a complete idiot”.
The drummer, 73, made the remark to Brazilian journalist Marcelo Vieira, who translated his memoir Brothers into Portuguese. The interview was published in issue 293 of the Brazilian magazine Roadie Crew.
Vieira asked him about other books written by people connected to the band, among them David Lee Roth‘s 1997 autobiography “Crazy From The Heat” and Hagar‘s “Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock“, published in 2011.
He was warm about Roth‘s. “It’s quite fun and accurately reflects [David‘s] sense of humor,” Alex said (as translated from Portuguese). “Although the text is somewhat abstract and loses its train of thought at times, it’s still a very interesting perspective on that era.”
He had not read Hagar‘s, and said he had no intention of doing so.
“I don’t know what he wrote, and I don’t wanna know,” Alex added. “In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.”
“Red” deals at length with the band’s 2004 reunion tour, and describes Eddie Van Halen‘s physical condition and drinking during it in unsparing terms. Hagar also told an interviewer in 2012 that “what happened on that reunion tour in ’04 was some of the most miserable, back-stabbing dark crap I’ve ever been involved with my whole life.”
Eddie Van Halen disputed parts of it. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2015, he called a section of the book embellished, rejecting the portrayal of him as an angry drunk on that tour.
Hagar has since said he would write it differently. Asked in June 2021 on Brazil’s “Inside With Paulo Baron” whether there was anything he wished he had left out, he pointed to the same passages.
“More than anything, because of the untimely and tragic death of Eddie Van Halen, I apologize from the bottom of my heart for exposing his dark side to where I don’t think anyone wants to hear that now, and, unfortunately, it’s in the book. And it’s true — it’s all true. It’s not like I have to say, ‘Oh, I was lying’ — no, no, no. If I wrote the book today, I would only put the good of Eddie Van Halen, because he was such a brilliant, genius guitar player and such a great friend and a great partner — until everything went wrong, like everything else. Anybody’s that’s been divorced or broke up with your girlfriend or your boyfriend, you know how it goes. Happy endings aren’t always the case in a relationship. [Eddie and I] had a happy ending — thank God — but before that, it wasn’t a happy ending of the band. But thank God we got it back together,” he said at the time.
When journalist Regis Tadeu suggested there was value in documenting the difficult parts, Hagar said the audience had only seen half of it.
He continued: “No one knew a lot of that about Eddie, but they’d see him on stage and they would think, ‘Why is he acting like that?’ And I would say, ‘Well, you should have seen what happened backstage. Holy f**k!’ If we’d have known he was sick then, then I would have understood and I would have been a little more, ‘Hey, Ed, come on,’ try to reel him in. But he was impossible. He was on a track of just wild. It was tough.”
He also described meeting him for the first time.
Hagar added: “He was the sweetest guy in the world when I met him. When Eddie Van Halen walked into my dressing room in that show in Anaheim Stadium with Boston and Black Sabbath, that was one of the sweetest people, most humble human beings I’ve ever met in my life. I thought, ‘How can this guy play so badass and be that humble?’ I thought, ‘It’s impossible. He must have a fire inside of him that he’s not showing.’ And when that fire came out, it was quite the fire — a freakin’ volcano.”
The two men have not spoken in around 25 years. Asked about it by Andy Greene of Rolling Stone in April 2025, Hagar ran through the explanations he has been given.
“I’ve had this conversation with a few people, including Irving Azoff. 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.’ To that I said, ‘How the f**k 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,'” he said at the time.
He raised the book himself as another possibility, and said he was done with the subject.
“The book has been brought up. The book was honest. It was well documented that Eddie was a mess on that tour. But I don’t want to drag Eddie through no coals now. That’s just water under the bridge,” he added.
Hagar then offered his own theory, which is that the difference between them is that he is still working.
“I think Al‘s angry because I’m out doing it, and Mike [Anthony] and I are out doing it, and he can’t,” Hagar added. “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 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. But I’m the happiest guy out of all of them. That pisses people off in itself. Being too happy, people don’t like that.”
When Greene noted that Alex Van Halen has had genuine health problems, Hagar did not push it further.
He said: “Yeah, I’d say so. And I’m okay with it. Al, you’re fine. Just leave me alone. I’ll leave you alone. Everything’s good. I’m making you money, by the way, Al. I’m out there selling Van Halen records and keeping the name alive, keeping the music alive.”
Brothers, published by HarperCollins in October 2024, does not cover Hagar‘s time in the band. It also leaves out Gary Cherone of Extreme, who sang on Van Halen III in 1998, and the reunion with Roth that began in 2007. Hagar is not named in it.
Alex has explained the cut-off in terms of what the band was rather than who was in it.
“For me, the spirit of the band ended in 1984,” he told USA Today almost two years ago. “We did good work after that, but the primary spiritual aspect, the magic, the potential, the looking to the future together, all of that stuff, our mutually strange backgrounds — that’s what made Van Halen. Ed and I were outsiders. Dave was an outsider. Those kinds of intangible things make the fabric of how we were tied together.”
That is also his stated reason for having nothing to do with “The Best Of All Worlds“, the tour built largely around Van Halen material that Hagar has been running with Michael Anthony, Joe Satriani and Kenny Aronoff. It followed an earlier attempt at a Van Halen tribute show involving Satriani, Alex Van Halen and Roth, which never happened, reportedly because approvals stalled.
Hagar replaced Roth in 1985 and made four albums with the band, 5150, OU812, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge and Balance, every one of which went to No. 1 in the United States. He, Eddie, Alex and Michael Anthony last worked together on the 2004 American tour, which Anthony reportedly joined only after accepting a pay cut and signing away his rights to the band’s name and logo.
Hagar repaired his relationship with Eddie Van Halen in the months before the guitarist died in October 2020.
