Sammy Hagar sat down with Rolling Stone for a new interview and answered some questions about the late Eddie Van Halen.
When asked if he could understand why David Lee Roth didn’t want to do a tribute to Eddie in the middle of his set, Hagar responded to Roth saying it was “Pure f*ckin’ ego.”
“‘This show’s about me. What are you talking about?’ That’s so wrong,” he argued. “I shied away from doing too much about Eddie on the Best of All Worlds Tour. It was an agreement between all of us, that we don’t want to look like we’re trying to suck vibes off of Eddie Van Halen’s death. I’m so careful about that. There’s haters out there that would misinterpret that, saying, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s out there making money off Eddie being dead.’ No.”
The Red Rocker admitted that he and his band made a few things to keep his legacy while on stage but made it clear that it wasn’t a tribute: “We showed Eddie’s picture on the screen a couple times and I said a couple nice things, always, but it wasn’t a tribute to Eddie himself. If it would’ve been, it would’ve been a whole different kind of vibe. I would’ve gotten every great guitar player in the business today, Steve Vai and all of them, and brought them all out, and everybody would’ve taken a turn at a different Eddie song, and made it all about Eddie. No, this was about the music of Van Halen and my legacy too.”
Similar to his rejection to honor EVH, Roth didn’t want to join Hagar’s Best Of All Worlds Tour either. “He went AWOL. After [clarifying the offer], he just kind of went to sleep on it, which is fine. I don’t need Roth antagonizing me. If he really wanted to come out and play music, sing a song and be real and not try to pull some crazy whacked-out stuff.”
Hagar then shared his wish for Roth to sing a particular Van Halen song instead of him: “You know, the guy’s unpredictable. And God bless him, he’s been an entertainer his whole life and he’s a showman and he likes to upstage people and that’s been his game. And so, we’re just not into that. I would love him to come and sing ‘Jump’ at the end of this show. Just you come out and sing the f*cker instead of me.”
Even if an EVH tribute tour was to happen, Alex Van Halen wouldn’t have been able to join the tribute tour anyway, as he hurt his spine during a trip to a shooting range in 2022. The accident made it hard for him to move, let alone play drums.
