For a 36th year, Sammy Hagar is gearing up for this week’s Birthday Bash at the Cabo Wabo Cantina in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
But while Hagar is celebrating 79 in style over three nights — Oct. 9, 11 and 13 — of guest-filled rock n’ roll festivities, he already has his eye on turning 80 with a different kind of party next year.
“My dream would be to play somewhere where I can accommodate every ticket request, and everybody who never got to be at the Bash could come to this final bash,” Hagar tells Billboard via Zoom from Southern California ahead of his birthday on Tuesday (Oct. 13). Hagar says that this year he received 100,000 requests for about 1,600 tickets over the three nights, a number that continues to grow every year. “I would love to be able to say to everyone, ‘Guess what? You’re all gonna be able to get a show.’ If I have to play four or five nights somewhere, maybe I play a big stadium, maybe we block off the whole town of Cabo and do it for free. I don’t know what we’re gonna do yet, but I do know for my 80th birthday, that would be the dream.”
For Those About to Bash…
As he ponders that, Hagar has plans in motion for the upcoming birthday bash — as much as one can plan for an event that routinely brings surprise performances from some of music’s biggest names — including, in the past, Kenny Chesney, the late Toby Keith, Alice Cooper, members of the Grateful Dead, Metallica, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Alice in Chains. Their appearances are often spontaneous; “Belinda Carlisle comes last year,” Hagar remembers, “and, ‘Well, shoot, I’ve got to get her on stage, so what are we gonna do?’ So, boom, we just learned ‘We Got the Beat’ and ‘Heaven Is a Place On Earth’ backstage, finishing our cocktails, and then just ran out there and did it.
“That’s part of the charm of the Birthday Bash. It’s not rehearsed, and we never know really what we’re gonna do. I don’t invite people; I just invite kind of a house band, you might say. I’ve got a repertoire of about 400 songs, and if somebody says they know one of them we throw it together real quick and go out and do it.”
For this year’s Birthday Bash, Hagar has assembled a house band reuniting him with members of his Waboritas — guitarist Vic Johnson and bassist Mona Gnader — joined by drummer Kenny Aronoff from Chickenfoot and Hagar’s recent Van Halen-oriented Best of All Worlds band, and guitarist Stevie Salas. (Van Halen and Best of All Worlds bassist Michael Anthony, Hagar’s regular sidekick, is on a family cruise to celebrate his wife’s birthday.) “I’m really gonna focus on the Red Rocker years this year, and the Montrose stuff,” Hagar reports — which, he adds, will include the entire Montrose debut album from 1973.
Opening night, in fact, featured a half-dozen songs from the Montrose album – including its cover of Roy Brown’s “Good Rocking Tonight” – as well as three Van Halen favorites and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man,” in addition to Hagar solo hits such as “I’ll Fall in Love Again,” “There’s Only One Way to Rock” and “Heavy Metal.” Sunday’s show opened with “I Can’t Drive 55” and included covers Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie,” Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)”. Alice in Chain’s Jerry Cantrell, meanwhile, was the special guest on Sunday, playing his band’s “Man in the Box” and Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,”
“The musicians wanted to do that stuff,” Hagar explains. “I’m really looking forward to doing the full Montrose record…. That’s gonna be pushing my ass, lemme tell ya. I was 24 years old!”
Everything But the (Kitchen) Sync
Hagar has filmed and recorded the Birthday Bashes and even incorporated some of the footage into his residency concerts at Dolby Live at Park MGM in Las Vegas. He also commissioned a documentary called Long Road to Cabo, but none of the material has seen commercial release due to the sync right realities.
“I can’t get the rights to 90% of the music — well you can get it, but it costs so much money,” he explains. “We’ve just got so many songs we’d have to license. I can do my own (songs), of course, but that wouldn’t be enough. It’s not really what the whole thing is about, y’know?”
Open-Ended Future
Hagar has one more show on the books after the Birthday Bash — the Stage Red Youth Music Foundation Gala on Oct. 23 in Fontana, Calif. Plans for next year are up in the air, meanwhile, after having put the Best of All World concept to bed after two years of successful touring as well as the Las Vegas residencies.
“The Van Halen stuff…is a great torch to carry, but I don’t want to be just that,” says Hagar, quickly assuring that, “I’m never done with Van Halen. I’ll always play five or six Van Halen songs. Van Halen was the pinnacle of my long f–kin’ five-decade career. But that Montrose material’s as important to my heart as anything, my fans who have followed me since then deserve to hear a couple more Montrose songs and stuff from the Red (Rocker) years — a song like ‘Red’ or ‘Marching to Mars’ and stuff like that. They’re important to those fans who have followed me, and I can’t do that if I’m playing 14 Van Halen songs. So a little more Montrose, a little more Chickenfoot, (solo) stuff from the post-Van Halen years. People have let me know they want to hear it.”
That said, Hagar acknowledges that “I don’t know where or when I plan on doing that.” As he enters his 79th year on the planet he says he’s “kind of in a limbo, confusion state” about what he wants to do, admittedly planning “a long break…to see what I want to do, and then go do it.” He says he’s turned down “all these wonderful opportunities” for next year in order to “just chill and see what happens.”
“I could do anything I want,” Hagar says. “I’m one of the luckiest guys in the world. My career has been phenomenal. I’ve had such a fantastic run. I think what I’m looking for now is something I can do to help people and make some sort of statement or impact like that. It may not be musical, or maybe it’s something I can do with me and an acoustic guitar. I do things like that quietly and on the side now, but I’d like to make that front line. That would be a wonderful thing if that light went on and, ‘Wow, I have an opportunity to help people that need help.’ That’s my goal. I’m being transparent right now because I don’t know what I want to do yet. I need some time off to figure it out, but I’ll do something.”
‘Unification Over Separation’
Hagar does have one musical project in mind: a science-fiction/space concept that he’s had on his mind for decades incorporating songs such as Montrose’s “Space Station #5” and “Spaceage Sacrifice” and his own “Silver Lights” and “Crack in the World.” The latter, which concludes 1977’s Musical Chairs, is a prescient track that Hagar says “predicted this whole thing about people being on one side or the other and fighting about it. I used to say there’s gonna come a time when people are gonna look at another person and know they’re on the (other) side and they’re gonna hate and they’re gonna fight and it’s gonna be a violent time on this planet — and it’s happening. It’s the worst thing to ever happen, but it’s happening so blatantly right in front of us. And I hate that.”
One schism Hagar would like to repair, of course, is with former bandmate Alex Van Halen. The rancor between the two is well documented; most recently Van Halen declared Hagar “a complete idiot” to Roadie Crew magazine, while Hagar, speaking to Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM, responded, “I’m probably the most successful idiot on the planet.” He accused Van Halen of disrespecting his era fronting Van Halen and challenged him to explain why he harbors such ill feelings toward Hagar.
Mostly, Hagar tells us, he’d just like peace, if not reconciliation.
“I’ll put out an olive branch right now, and say it again a million times — I would love to bury the hatchet with Alex,” he says. “I would love to be friends again. If we played music, mo’ better. That would be awesome…. But I’m willing to forget anything and everything and be friends and bring the two (Van Halen) eras together like they should be.
“It’s the crack in the world I wrote about 50 years ago. He’s sticking with it, and why? I’m trying to get rid of that. Unification over separation. Let’s unify this world. That’s my dream and wish; if I could find a way to do that, there you go. That might be my future.”