Sammy Hagar is a one-man institution. He’s fronted two of America’s greatest bands, worked with an array of musicians that reads like a Who’s Who? of rock and, in his eighth decade, can still show rock stars half his age how it’s done onstage.
He’s set up his own night club, launched his own brand of tequila and entertainingly bad-mouthed everyone and anyone whose crossed swords with him during a career that stretches back to the late 60s. Yet his name doesn’t carry quite the same clout as, say, Steven Tyler or David Lee Roth.
This curious state of affairs could be partly down to the fact that Hagar has never been one to bask in his own glory. After paying his dues in such long-forgotten late 60s/early 70s Californian bands as The Fabulous Castilles, Manhole, the Justice Brothers and Samson & Hagar, he got his big break when he joined Montrose. The combination of Hagar’s powerhouse vocals and Ronnie Montrose’s incendiary guitar attack put both the band and the singer on the rock’n’roll map.
But in a taste of what was to come later in his career, Hagar butted heads with the guitarist and walked out halfway through the tour for their second album, Paper Money.
Embarking on a successful solo career, Hagar released a string of albums that chimed with the feelgood, party-hard times of the late 70s and early 80s, setting him up as a solo star on both sides of the Atlantic.
All that was rudely interrupted in 1985 when he got a call from Eddie Van Halen asking him to replace the ousted Dave Lee Roth in Van Halen. Lesser personalities might have been overwhelmed at the prospect of replacing such a larger-than-life character, but Hagar took to the task like a duck to water, and Van Halen’s biggest commercial success came while he was with them.
Inevitably, one band was too small to contain so many egos, and in 1996 Hagar either quit or was fired, depending on who you believe. While Van Halen embarked an ill-advised revolving- door policy when it came to singers [including a brief return for Hagar in the mid-00s], Sammy effortlessly slipped back into a solo career that has carried on successfully, regardless of shifting tastes and new trends.
In 2008 he put together Chickenfoot, and three years laster published a hugely entertaining autobiography, Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock, a gloriously salacious account of a hugely enjoyable career. His most recent album was 2019's Space Between, recorded with his latest band The Circle.
