I had been waiting at Eddie’s 5150 Studios for more than an hour when he finally showed up. 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 a giant overcoat and army pants, tattered and ripped at the cuffs, held up by 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.
He walked up to me, hunched over like a little old man, a cigarette in his mouth. He had a third of tongue removed because of his cancer and he spoke with a slight lisp.
He may have lost a chunk of his tongue to cancer, but he was still smoking cigarettes. He claimed the cancer came from putting the guitar pick in his mouth while he used his fingers to play. He walked around all day drinking cheap shiraz straight out of the bottle. That’s why his teeth were all black. “Ed, why don’t you get a glass for that?” I said.
He held up the bottle. “It’s in a glass,” he said.
He was living with a pathologist, who kept taking slices off his tongue, to check for cancer. He beat the cancer. He told me he cured himself by having pieces of his tongue liquefied and injected into his body. He also told me when he had his hip replacement, he stayed awake through the operation and helped the doctors drill the hole. What a fruitcake.
His marriage was over. Valerie [Bertinelli, his actress wife] was gone. He finally invited me over this giant, extravagant, 16,000-square-foot house that he and Valerie had built before she split. It looked like a vampire lived there. There were bottles and cans all over the floor. The handle was broken off the refrigerator door. It was like a bum shack. There were spider webs everywhere. He had big blankets thrown over the windows. The mattresses were stripped off the beds and leaned against the wall for soundproofing.
He was sleeping on the floor with a blanket and pillow. There was no food in the cupboards. I had never seen a dirtier place in my life. It was like the house out of the movie “Grey Gardens.”
This was Eddie Van Halen, one of the sweetest guys I ever met. He had turned into the weirdest f–k I’d ever seen, crude, rude and unkempt.
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. I’d listen to Mikey [Anthony, our bass player] to find my note.
It became the Sam and Dave tour all over again, only it was Sam and Eddie. They kept us apart as much as they could. We flew in different jets. We stayed at different hotels. We had our own limos.
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 and rolled up my sleeves [to expose my Cabo Wabo tattoo].
“Don’t be f–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.
It was the worst show we’d ever done in our lives. 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.”
I never spoke to him again after telling him to keep his hand off my shirt.
Adapted from the book “RED: My Uncensored Life in Rock” by Sammy Hagar. Copyright C 2011 by Sammy Hagar. Reprinted by permission of It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.