It should have been one of the biggest tours of the decade but it ended in disaster. Almost a decade after Sammy Hagar left Van Halen in the mid-90s, the singer once again hooked up with the band to mount an eighty-date summer tour in 2004.
“What happened in that reunion tour in ’04 was some of the most miserable, backstabbing, dark crap I’ve ever been involved with my whole life.” – Sammy Hagar
Hagar would be pretty blunt about the tour telling Sally Steel in 2012, “What happened in that reunion tour in ’04 was some of the most miserable, backstabbing, dark crap I’ve ever been involved with my whole life.”
It was pretty obvious to the people who attended the shows, that guitarist Eddie Van Halen wasn’t his usual self. Hagar would claim that the guitarist was struggling with addiction, revealing in his memoir, Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, that the guitarist was unkempt, hunched over, frighteningly skinny, drinking wine straight out of a bottle and missing part of his tongue after a cancer scare.
As the tour wore on, Hagar’s relationship with the guitarist would continue to deteriorate. Prior to the ill-fated reunion, Hagar would appear on Fox Television and revealed how the whole tour began with a phone call to Eddie’s brother, drummer Alex Van Halen. Hagar would say, “I’ve been saying this for a hundred years, I’m going to give Alex a call one of these days now.”
Hagar Reaches Out to Alex Van Halen
Hagar would make the call while he was vacationing in Southern California with his family and he would claim it was like a complete love fest. It was just, ‘Wow, I really missed this friendship’, he’d say. It wasn’t long after that phone call that Hagar stopped by Eddie’s 5150 Studios just to have a short chat.
Hagar was shocked to see the shape Eddie Van Halen was in. Recalling, “He looked like he hadn’t bathed in a week. He was missing a number of teeth and the ones they had left were black. His boots were so worn out, he had gaffers tape wrapped around them and his big toe stuck out. He walked up to me, hunched over like a little old man, a cigarette in his mouth. He had a third of his tongue removed because of cancer and he spoke with a slight lisp.”
Despite the shape that Eddie was in, Hagar would soon find himself jamming with the guitarist and he would help write and record three songs for a 2004 Van Halen Greatest Hits compilation that would hit number three on the Billboard charts.
“I should have walked but Eddie’s got a very charming, cunning side to him where you feel like he’s got a good heart.” – Sammy Hagar
The effort to record new songs was not an easy one and almost fell apart. Hagar would reveal in his book saying, “He had turned into the weirdest eff I’d ever seen. Crude, rude and unkempt. I should have walked but Eddie’s got a very charming, cunning side to him where you feel like he’s got a good heart. He’s going to come through. He’s going to clean up and we’re going to get this thing done.”
Hagar would also claim that Eddie would just keep disappearing at times and he wouldn’t know when the guitarist would show up. In an interview with the Minneapolis Star in 2004, Hagar would be a little more positive on writing new material with his bandmates saying, “Ed and Al started playing me some music that they had been working on and it was just extremely inspiring. We said, ‘Here’s what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna pretend like it never happened. We’re gonna rise above it.”.
A Summer Tour is Announced
Shortly after the trio of songs were recorded, a summer tour was announced. An argument erupted between the newly reformed band over who would play bass. Eddie and Alex didn’t want Michael Anthony to play bass as it appeared the brothers were upset with Anthony over the fact that he still remained friends and performed with Sammy following his initial departure from the band.
Michael Anthony Joins the Tour Despite Ridiculous Demands
Hagar stood his ground and claimed there would be no reunion involving him if Anthony wasn’t brought back into the fold. While Michael Anthony would be part of the reunion tour, he would have to give in to some pretty ridiculous demands from the Van Halen brothers including taking a pay cut and signing away a portion of his rights to the Van Halen name and logo. Not exactly a great way to start off a reunion tour.
Anthony would recall in 2009, “When we did the 2004 reunion, Eddie didn’t even want me to be a part of it because he was so torqued up that I was still buddies with Sammy.” ‘Why can’t I be buddies with Sammy and still play in Van Halen?’, he would ask. “With those guys, it was a cut-and-dried situation. You’re in or you’re out.”
Anthony would reveal in a separate interview, “I didn’t need the money. I decided to suck it up because I thought it was the last time Van Halen was performing. I wanted to be out there with him and with the fans”, he’d say.
Divisions Form Within the Band
As the tour started, two separate camps would form. There was one for the Van Halen brothers and one for Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony.
According to Hagar’s biography, he and Anthony had little contact with Eddie on or offstage as they would fly in different jets, stay in different hotels, be driven in different cars and they didn’t even share the same security detail.
The situation between the band members almost got to the point where there was a full-out brawl backstage with Michael Anthony remembering, “There were nights where it was kind of a rollercoaster, up or down and myself, I would have liked to have seen Eddie totally clean up if we were take this thing further”, he’d say.
With 80 dates scheduled, Hagar wanted to quit the tour halfway through but it was only after he was threatened with a lawsuit that he finally changed his mind. With only 17 shows left on the tour, Hagar would be interviewed in St. Louis on the local radio and admitted that he preferred working with his solo group.
“It was the worst show we’ve ever done in our lives.” – Sammy Hagar
Given the bad set of circumstances the band was dealing with, the tour would conclude without any dates being missed and things would finally come to an end in Tucson Arizona on November 19, 2004, when Hagar would admit in his book, “It was the worst show we’ve ever done in our lives. Eddie played so bad.”
Since the failed tour had ended, Hagar has claimed that he hasn’t been in contact with the Van Halen brothers. David Lee Roth would finally return to front the band in 2007.
Following the 2004 tour, bassist Michael Anthony would be fired from the group after he read online reports stating that Eddie’s son Wolfgang had replaced him.
As recently as last year, Anthony claims that Van Halen’s management had gotten in touch with him to see if he’d be interested in doing some shows for some 2019 dates for Van Halen but ultimately nothing would ever happen with the group. They haven’t actually played live since 2015.
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