Over the past few years, Alex Van Halen has worked hard to avoid speaking about Sammy Hagar, not even mentioning him by name a single time in his 240-page memoir Brothers: An Intimate Account of Brotherhood and Rock Music. But earlier this month, in an interview
with the Brazilian magazine Roadie Crew, he fired back when asked about Hagar’s 2011 book Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock.
“I don’t know what he wrote, and I don’t want to know,” said Van Halen. “In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.”
Unsurprisingly, Hagar had much to say about that characterization of himself in a new interview with Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM. “Guilty as charged, first of all,” he said. “I’m probably the most successful idiot on the planet…I want to call Alex out and say dude, we all know, you act like there was never a Sammy Hagar. You act like there was never a ‘Van Hagar.’ We sold 40 some million records, [had] four Number One albums and you just scratch that off of your brother’s legacy, saying no, that never happened. You don’t even want to acknowledge it. That’s deep. That’s weird. That’s not right, for Eddie, for me, for Mikey [Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony], for anybody.”
“I’m asking Alex, like why?” he continued. “Come clean, what’s your problem? Just come out and say it. Is it the book? Say it. Cabo Wabo? Say it. Maybe if I knew what your problem was, I could fix it. But right now he just acts like there’s not a problem, it just never happened.”
In 2025, Hagar told Rolling Stone that he heard Alex Van Halen’s anger towards him stemmed from his successful Cabo Wabo tequila brand. “I’ve had this conversation with a few people, including [former Van Halen manager] Irving Azoff,” he said. “I’ve asked him, ‘What’s the problem?’ And some people have said to me, ‘Oh, Cabo Wabo. At one time, Van Halen, when you built it, you guys were all partners in that. And then they didn’t want it anymore when it was losing money, and they gave it to you, and you turned it around and made hundreds of millions of dollars on it. And they’re angry. Alex is angry about that.'”
He also felt the drummer was upset that Hagar and Anthony have been touring together for years, playing sets packed with Van Halen classics, while health problems prevented him touring. “He’s not a singer,” said Hagar. “He’s not a guitar player. He is not really a band leader. And he seems like he doesn’t want to play drums or can’t play drums anymore, and he can’t go write a new record. Alex wasn’t the songwriter in the band. He was the drummer. Eddie and I wrote the songs. Dave and Eddie wrote the songs, and so we can go out and do them. And I think that really bothers him that Mike and I are still out there doing it. I would feel bad. If I put myself in his shoes, I would feel terrible if I couldn’t do it anymore.”
The flare-up in the tensions between the former bandmates comes as Hagar is about to resume his Best of All Words residency at the Park MGM in Las Vegas. He’ll once again by joined by Anthony, guitarist Joe Satriani, and drummer Kenny Aronoff. The set is generally heavy on Van Hagar hits like “Poundcake,” “Why Can’t This Be Love,” and “Right Now,” But they sprinkle in a couple of Roth-era songs like “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love” and “Panama” along with Montrose’s “Bad Motor Scooter” and Hagar’s solo hit “I Can’t Drive 55.”
David Lee Roth, meanwhile, went on a solo tour earlier this year, but he called off the final dates, shortly before reuniting with Alex Van Halen at a Ted Talk, marking their first public appearance together since the final Van Halen concert in 2015. It’s hard to imagine anything like that happening with Alex Van Halen and Roth’s replacement in Van Halen, even though he jokingly suggested that Trunk might somehow negogitate a truce between them.
“I want to know how much you charge an hour to see if you can mediate this thing,” he said. “I’m not trying to cause a conflict. I’m trying to fix something, you know. Whether Alex wants to play drums ever again is his business, you know. Whether he wants to, you know, just keep releasing all this old stuff for these photographs and all this stuff, and charging people for old pictures that you can find on the internet and stuff, even if they’re just his, it’s like he should be putting them out there for free. To me, he’s doing a lot of stuff wrong for the legacy of Van Halen. And the one that is my business is I just want to know why. Just come clean. Tell the people, tell me, make a public statement why, and then we can figure out whether you’re right or wrong, and whether we can fix it or not. And if we can’t fix it, then just go about my business. It’s all good.”
Despite everything, Hagar said he’d react warmly if Van Halen were to ever reach out to him. “Oh come in, oh 100%, I’ll grab him, I’ll kiss him right on the lips,” Hagar told Trunk. “I’d treat him like the person that I used to love and I could still love.”
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