Everything Sammy Hagar touches turn to gold. From the explosive impact of his early 70s band Montrose to fronting Van Halen during their post-Dave Lee Roth second act, via his own successful solo career, the Red Rocker seemingly has the Midas Touch. The guy even managed to pocket $80 million after selling the Tequila company he’d built from scratch.
But not everything he’s tried has gone to plan. There was HSAS, the damp-squib early 80s supergroup Hagar formed with Journey’s Neal Schon, Rick Derringer bassist Kenny Aaronson and former Santana drummer Michael Shrieve, who released one lone album then vanished.
And then there’s the abandoned sci-fi-inspired prog rock album he wanted to make under the name Sammy Wilde And Dustcloud. If that sounds weird on paper, the truth is only slightly less strange, as Hagar reveals to Classic Rock in a brand new interview.
“Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon is probably my favourite album ever,” Hagar tells us. “When I heard [Floyd’s 1973 single] Money, I went out and bought the album. When I left Montrose, I wanted to be in a band like that.”
Getting kicked out of Montrose by guitarist Ronnie Montrose in 1975 gave him the perfect opportunity. “I was gonna do a concept record about outer space and aliens and all that,” he explains.
“Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon is probably my favourite album ever. When I left Montrose, I wanted to be in a band like that.”
Sammy Hagar
That’s not as surprising as it might sound. Hagar has had a lifelong fascination with extra-terrestrial life and the esoteric. In his 2011 book, Red: My Uncensored Life, Hagar recounted an alleged encounter with aliens when he was younger, claiming that two ETs hovering above his hometown of Fontana, California in a spaceship “tapped into my mind through some mysterious wireless connection”.
“I’m a straight up honest guy.,” he confirms to Classic Rock. “I had an alien experience. And I’ve had more than one. Anyone that doesn’t believe that there’s other life in this universe, those are the crazy people.”
Hagar began leaning into his obsession with all things galactic before he even left Montrose. Their self-titled 1974 debut album featured a song titled Space Station #5, while its 1975 follow-up included Spaceage Sacrifice. “They were part of this concept,” he says.
Post-Montrose, he began to build on his idea. He named his publishing company Big Bang Music and began writing sci-fi themed songs for his new project. One of them, Hot Rocks, was “about the beginning of our planetary system, the explosion that caused it”. Another was Silver Lights. “That was about the second coming of Jesus, except he’s in a spaceship,” says Sammy.
He adds that another song, Crack In The World, found him predicting the future 50 years early.
“I’m talking about the great divide, the division between the people on the planet, between the left and the right, the good and the band,” claims “I say, ‘So let‘s have a good time before the great divide/Cos things will start separating come 2025.’ I was talking about exactly what’s going on right now. There’s a war going on right now everywhere on this planet, and I predicted it in that song.”
Leaning even further into it all, he came up with the idea of a Ziggy Stardust-style character named Sammy Wilde, the leader of a band called Dustcloud. “A dust cloud is the beginning of a star,” says Hagar. “I was saying that a star is being formed. from a dust cloud.”
He was so serious about the idea that he played his first ever solo gig under the name Sammy Wilde And Dustcloud. “I started a band and played in San Bernardino at the old Swing,” he told Inland Empire in 2019. “And there was only about 500 people there, and the place held about 5,000 or 6,000, I think.”
“I believe we are part of an organic consciousness that goes on for dimension after dimension.”
Sammy Hagar
That wasn’t his sole reason for abandoning the Sammy Wilde persona. His label MCA, who had picked him up as a solo artist after leaving Montrose, definitely weren’t into the idea. “My record company and my producer, they wouldn’t let me do it,” says Hagar.
Still, the songs didn’t go to waste. Silver Lights, the number about the second coming of Jesus, appeared on Hagar’s 1976 debut solo album Nine On A Ten Scale, as did Hot Rocks, though the latter was renamed Urban Guerrilla, with altered lyrics courtesy of producer John S Carter.
Another song, Someone Out There, made it onto 1977’s Musical Chairs, as did the clairvoyant Crack In The World. We could probably add Little Star/Eclipse, from 1977’s Sammy Hagar, aka The Red Album, to the pile of Sammy Wilde rejects based on its song title alone.
“You listen to them, they’re kind of progressive rock,” he says. “I wanted to be Pink Floyd so bad.”
He was still on his sci-fi trip when he joined Van Halen. The band’s 1985 power ballad was an unlikely nod to his belief in extra-terrestrial life and his own experiences with it. “Contact is all that it takes/To change your life, to lose your place in time,” sings Hagar, later adding: “Some kind of alien/Waits for the opening.”
“It’s about aliens and ‘walk-ins’,” he tells Classic Rock, referring to a term coined by new age writer Ruth Montgomery for when aliens ‘walk in’ to a human body and take control of their consciousness. “It’s all in there, man.”
While the Sammy Wilde concept album may never have materialised, Hagar has held onto his esoteric beliefs.
“I believe we are part of an organic consciousness that goes on for dimension after dimension,” he tells Classic Rock. “We live in a third dimension with a fourth dimension consciousness. Someone like Jesus is in the fifth dimension. And our God – the thing we want to believe created us – is in the ninth dimension. And the ninth dimension is almost like a computer, and everything is created from that point down. This universe is full of life.”
Read the full interview with Sammy Hagar in an upcoming issue of Classic Rock. Hagar will play two UK arena dates in July 2026.
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