Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock by Hagar Sammy

Author:Hagar, Sammy [Hagar, Sammy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

8

MONSTERS OF ROCK

As soon as we finished the first tour, I had to make the solo record for Geffen. That was the deal he’d made with Warner Bros. We were worried about Eddie and his drinking and drug problem, but first we had to deal with his brother. We put Al in rehab as soon as the tour was over. His wife staged an intervention. I didn’t even know what an intervention was.

It was hairy. I cried. It broke me down and I wasn’t even the guy under the gun. They went and got him out of bed, six o’clock in the morning, before he had another drink. He was getting up at four o’clock in the morning, chugging a bottle of vodka, and going back to bed. He wasn’t a sipper. He wasn’t a nurser. He just plowed himself to the point of passing out.

We put him in a hospital. He took the oath and never drank again. I love Al. He is the strongest guy, but weird. He’s a chain-smoker, but he’d quit smoking every Monday, for the one day, just to torture himself. Al’s the kind of guy that I’d call every day, just to bullshit.

Once Al cleaned up, Eddie didn’t have anybody to drink with. Al still smoked. Al would drink coffee and Eddie would drink beer and do a few other things. It was Leffler’s idea to have Eddie coproduce my solo record and play bass. He always played bass with Van Halen, two or three songs on practically every record. He was a great bass player. Eddie’s a great musician, period.

So off we went into the studio, with Jesse Harms on keyboards, David Lauser on drums, and Eddie on bass. I played guitar. That way, we’d keep Eddie busy. We cut that record at these brand-new studios A&M Records built in Hollywood, where Tom Petty, John Cougar Mellencamp, and Stevie Nicks all had been working. Pink Floyd was in the room next door, without Roger Waters, doing “Learning to Fly.” Eddie and I would ride in together from the beach every day in a different car. I had about seven Ferraris down there. The Pink Floyd drummer, Nick Mason, is a big Ferrari collector. The guitarist David Gilmore owns Ferraris, too, but he’s not in Nick Mason’s class as a collector. Mason owns one of the original Ferrari GTOs, a car probably worth 30 million bucks. They didn’t have their cars with them, so they’d be waiting on the sidewalk every day to see what I was going to be driving. David Gilmore is one of my all-time guitar heroes and it was really cool, having those guys admiring my cars every day. I was showing off. After I’d run through all the cars I had down south, I sent Bucky back up to Mill Valley, to swap out a couple more cars.

Pink Floyd was auditioning drummers for a shuffle they couldn’t nail, even with their drummer Nick Mason there. They had Omar Hakim trying out, fresh from Sting’s band, but they didn’t use him on the track.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.