Sammy Hagar: From Broken Childhood to Living Legend | E161

2025/4/29

fame and fortune really didn't bring you anything if you had a miserable marriage you're still going to have that miserable marriage if you were an alcoholic you were still going to be an alcoholic you know if you were a bad guy you were still going to be a bad guy fame and fortune don't change none of that there's people that will do the wrong thing just because of their pride i never knew anybody like that and nobody would do that prep is the most important thing if you're not

You're just not going to succeed. Every second of my waking hours when I wasn't eating, I had that guitar in my hand and I was prepping. What are the three or five most ingredients to our path to excellence? Passion, hard work, and determination. Then eventually you're going to make it happen. It's going to happen. The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is... You never know what's going to happen, good or bad. You never know.

My guest today is Sammy Hagar. For more than four decades, Sammy has been one of the best and most accomplished lead singers and songwriters in the history of rock music. Over his career, Sammy has had 25 platinum albums and sales surpassing 60 million worldwide. Along his journey, he has set the tone for some of the greatest rock anthems ever written with songs like I Can't Drive 55, Right Now, and Why Can't This Be Love? Sammy Hagar is a

Sammy won a Grammy Award in 1991, and in March 2007, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Van Halen. In addition to being a music icon, Sammy is an incredibly successful entrepreneur. He's the owner of Cabo Wabo Cantina, a thriving and iconic lifestyle brand. He's the founder of Cabo Wabo Tequila, which he sold in 2008 for $91 million, and he's

He's the founder of Sammy's Beach Bar Rum and a co-founder of Santo Tequila, as well as several restaurants. Sammy has also had incredible success in the worlds of publishing, TV, and radio, including five seasons of his hit TV show, Rock and Roll Road Trip with Sammy Hagar, and is host of Sammy Hagar's Top Rock Countdown. And if that wasn't enough, he's also a two-time number one New York Times bestselling author for his books, Read My Uncensored Life in Rock and Are We Having Fun Yet?,

Sammy is also an incredibly dedicated and generous philanthropist who, along with his wife, Carrie, have donated many millions of dollars to a wide range of charities. Sammy, welcome to In Search of Excellence.

Wow. Well, that's a lot to live up to. I guess we got a lot of explaining to do. How did that guy do all that? Exactly. Well, let's find out. All right. I always start with our family because from the moment we're born, our family helps shape our personalities, our value and our future.

You grew up in Salinas, California, the youngest of four children. We're going to talk about both of your parents separately, but I want to start with your father, Bobby. He served in World War II, and when he returned, he worked at the Kaiser Steel Mill. Your dad was also a bantamweight boxer who held a record for being knocked down 20 times in a single fight.

He was also a disturbed alcoholic who often spent your family's rent money on booze, which meant you and your family were regularly evicted. You lived in nine different houses before you were 10 years old. And many of those moves were to get away from your dad. In addition to being what you call the town drunk and a complete alcoholic and madman, your dad was also a wife beater and violent towards his kids.

So much so that your mom Gladys would occasionally take you and your siblings to a nearby Orange Grove to sleep in the car. When you were 10 years old, your mom said that's enough and she left your dad for good. It's a lot. Can you share with us what it was like growing up poor, moving around so much and having a dad who was a violent alcoholic? And how did all of this affect you as a child and then later on in life?

Wow, it's such a deep question. You know, I never knew I was poor because I didn't know any better. And we always lived in poor neighborhoods, lived in a small town. And there really weren't rich people in Fontana at that time. And if there were, I wasn't hanging out with them and going to their houses. So in some ways, being poor was kind of a really great adventure that I think really gave me a sense of appreciation. Every time I got somewhere in life,

I would revert back to, wow, you know, this is great. It's so much better than before. I thought before it was okay. But my mother made it good the way my father was because she ran off with us. So we never got abused. My father never touched me. He never, he only praised me. He would say, you're going to be champ of the world. My father wanted me to be a, a

fighter so I grew up thinking yeah I'm gonna be a boxing champion I'll be the world champion I'll be rich and famous and I just had this fantasy going on in my head and my dad encouraged it he'd put on the gloves with me show me how to box and my friends would come over the house and my dad would get a

couple of drinks sending me and say, come on, put on the gloves, son. You know, my buddies would be going, Oh no, not this again. Cause I was pretty good. You know, I had a good jab. I was fast and I knew how to punch it. Even at a young age, my father taught me how to do that kind of stuff. So my dad was cool. I mean, I looked up to him. I thought he could beat anybody up. I was proud of him. And it wasn't until I started dating that,

You know, I started getting involved with girls that I realized my dad was a town drunk and her dad wouldn't let me come over to her house. And I thought, what's going on here? You know, I guess I was naive and my dad helped make me that way. And my mom did, too. She grabbed us and ran us out of the house and went camping. You know, when the weather was good, we went camping. So, you know, we weren't homeless. We would have been homeless. I've been sleeping in a car, you know, which we did many times.

But my dad was, he just really had a drinking problem. Other than that, he had a good heart. He was a really sensitive guy. My dad used to look at this mountain that I used to always say that I could see that mountain in his eyes. And he would look at this mountain and go,

isn't that beautiful? Or he'd look at some tree or, you know, some flowers or something. My dad, he was a badass. I mean, he'd punch anybody in the face for just looking at him wrong. You know, I thought, man, this guy's tough, but he's really sensitive. So I kind of inherited that in a way, you know, I'd look at it and see, I want to see what my dad was seeing. And so I think my dad had a profound influence on me and made me want to be somebody and convinced me I was going to be somebody. So I never had any doubt.

What about being poor? Did you have any exposure in Fontana? We'll talk about some of the odd jobs you had in a minute and one of them, how it had an influence on you. But you said you didn't know that you were poor growing up. There weren't different socioeconomic classes when you were in school?

No, no. I, I, uh, in school, I was really good at math. I was really good at art and I was good in gymnastics. So that's what I concentrated on. You know, um, I didn't pay attention. I didn't do well in English, which it's funny that I'm a writer, my whole profession, but I wasn't really good at English cause I didn't, and I hated history. I didn't want to know about what happened. I want to know what's going to happen right now, you know? So, uh,

I, I, the, the side of being poor, like I said, my friends are all poor. I'd go to their house and they weren't much better off than me, but some of them were a little better off, but it's,

Their dad worked at the same place my dad worked. And the reason we were poor is because my dad would throw drunks for like a month at a time and not go to work. So we had no income and my mom would leave and she'd do ironings or pick fruit or clean houses. We used to go do yard work and stuff like that. You know, we'd pull up to some house that the yard looked trash and they looked like they might have had a little bit of money. My mom would go knock on door and say, hey, we'll clean your yard up and stuff for her.

five bucks and we'd do it, the whole family. We'd jump out and pick berries. We'd go to the, you know, strawberry patches and potato fields in Fontana. It was very agriculture around there, close to the Coachella Valley. So, you know, we could drive 20 minutes and go

work in the fruit or in the vegetable fields. And we did it as a family. It felt like fun. You know, I'd make my own money. I'd have like $4. And I'd go, man, I'm going to go buy a pair of Levi's, a pair of shoes and a t-shirt with this, you know, in the early 50s.

I hope you're enjoying this video so far, but before we jump back in, I want to know if you've ever thought about what you need to do to reach the next level of success in your life. Over the last 25 years, I've been an advisor to more than 50 companies. I've invested nearly 100, including GoogleLift and Seagate. And I also co-founded a company that today is worth more than

$15 billion. I've been incredibly blessed in my journey and at this stage in my life, I want to give back. I want to share the lessons I've learned so you can reach incredible success way faster than I did. In my own journey, I've learned that having the right mentor is a massive advantage to achieving our goals.

I'm hugely passionate about mentoring others. I'm looking for a few hungry entrepreneurs who are excited to take action on their journey to incredible future success. So if that's you, I've got an opportunity. In the description of this video, there's a link where you can apply to work with me. All you need to do is answer a few simple questions. And if you're a good fit, my team will reach out so we can build a game plan together. All right, now let's get back to the video.

Let's talk about your grandfather and the impact he had on your life. Can you tell us about the Actillo Lodge, Lord Fletcher's, Frank Sinatra, and the four presidents of the United States? My grandpa, Bio, my mother's father, came from Italy. He very...

illiterate you know didn't speak english that well i guess when he got here he came it came when he's about eight or nine years old on a boat and he worked in a restaurant industry he was a great chef but he was like a superstar in a family because he was the only guy you know he worked at these great places in palm springs and he served frank sinatra and he would serve a president would come in and have a they'd have a big buffet and he was part of that and uh

So we, you know, grandpa, and he was a good bullshitter. He was number one, he was a thief and a liar, which I hate to call him that because he can't defend himself, but he was, we loved him. And I'm named after him, Sam R's, you know, Sam Roy. And that's Roy's my middle name. So, but I dug him. He was always uptight. He was, you couldn't mess around his car. He always had kind of a nice car and it would be like,

wow, you know, get your feet off, you know, wipe your shoes off before you get in this car. He was like, I go, man, this guy's grumpy, you know, but he taught me how to fish, taught me how to hunt, taught me how to cook. And I just remember pulling up the, he lived in a trailer because he was always on the run. He never lived in a house. He lived from a tent to a trailer, had a new car every three or four years and had a really nice Airstream trailer. And he would pull that trailer all around different parts of the country and go fishing, hunting,

He'd can all of his goods. He, a Renaissance man, he made everything. So I learned how to make food from him, how to cook well and how to eat well. I knew what things tasted like. Like, so if I went to a restaurant, I used to say, man, I really want to go to, you know, this Italian restaurant or whatever. And you go there and go, well, this ain't as good as grandpa's, you know? And my mom was a good cook too. So I learned what smells good and what tastes good and

in food and how to prepare things. He showed me how to do a mirepoix the way he, his version of a mirepoix, he would chop the onion, the carrots and the celery, and he would, he wouldn't put them all in the same pan. He would do the carrots first.

Then into a pot, a little more olive oil. You do the onions into the pot. And I'd say, why are you doing it like that, Grandpa? He'd say, because it keeps all the flavors separate. You don't want it just to taste like one thing. You want it to taste like carrot, celery, and onion. And I thought, wow, I took that with me my whole life. And it's the same with a song. You know, you're playing instruments. You want the bass to sound like the bass. You want the guitar to sound like the guitar. You want the drums to sound like drums. Yeah.

You don't want him to sound like a big bottle of mush. He really had it together. But I learned a lot from my grandpa. Yeah. I want to go back for a second and talk about your childhood, early childhood specifically. What were you like as a kid? Were you popular? Were you a leader? As a kid, I was really popular. I was very small. I was short.

But I had big sisters that would comb my hair and I had a duck tail when I was five years old, you know, and a big old pompadour. And, you know, I mean, you know, the jelly roll thing, you know, anything that was in fashion way above my era, I was in. They had me wearing Levi's customized down low, put the small belt, you know, and my sisters had me looking like Elvis, you know, at all times.

And so the girls dug me in school and I was a good dancer. I loved to dance and I would be the first guy on the dance floor, a little short guy. So the big guys, I was kind of a little short, tough guy too. You know, I had an attitude. And so the big guys liked me because they'd say, ah, come on, you know, let's take Sammy with us. You know, these older guys, you know, 16, 17 year old and I'm like 10 or 11, they'd take me around and, and it sounds stupid, but yeah,

They would get me to go into a situation where they want to get in a fight, you know, go to the next town over to a football game. They'd bring me and I would go around, you know, act like a tough guy and somebody would push me or something. Hey, man, you're picking on the little guy. I kind of thought I was invincible because I had these big.

tough guys as friends and uh and the girls liked me and i know i i had it going on had everybody fool because i would i would have a paper out i'd get up at four o'clock in the morning and go throw papers i would go to school i would after work i would go wash dishes i'd mow lawns i'd do anything because i wanted to dress nice so my mom didn't have that money and uh

And after my dad, after they split it completely, you know, we were really poor and I didn't have no allowance, no nothing, no way of earning money. So I earned my own money. So I always looked like I was probably doing pretty good. But as I started getting in my early teens and I was getting interested in girls going to dances, I

I wouldn't bring anybody home to my house anymore, man. That was it. You know, I, I didn't want anybody to see how I live. So I had a kind of a, a big front going on in junior high. And, and I just had one, uh, Mexican friend guy who lived down the street from me, who was poorer than me or just as poor. Uh,

Henry Aguilar. And he's the only guy would let come by how we'd walk from school with a bunch of guys. And then him and I would turn off and go down the side street. And then we didn't, we'd go to our neighborhood and we used to build model cars and stuff together. So, you know, he was kind of like my homie to hang around at, at home, uh,

I'm just remembering this stuff. This is crazy. I got to tell you. And then, but at school, I didn't hang around with him. He had a whole different group of friends. I started hanging around with people. I mean, I could have been the, you know, the president of the high school, of junior high and stuff. I could have, you know, city councilman or whatever they used to have, student councilman. But I didn't ever want to do those kinds of things, but I could have, you know, I was always in all the dances. But like I said, I finally went to one of my girlfriend's houses and her dad was not, he

He found out who I was and he said he put me in his car and drove me home. He said, come on, get in the car. And he took me out of there. I was over at the house, you know, hanging out. And I guess my dad had beat him up in a bar, had punched him out. And yeah, pretty embarrassing. That's when I started realizing the way of it. You know, you got a little, you're carrying a little luggage with you. Son, your dad did a rough job around this town for you.

Every successful person I've ever met had a bunch of odd jobs growing up. We've talked about a bunch of yours, talked about, I went door to door in neighborhoods around my house asking a stranger if I could pick their weeds. I bagged groceries at Kroger in high school. I dug ditches one summer while they were building the Weight Watchers World Headquarters in Farmington Hills, Michigan. We've talked about you pick fruit, you deliver newspapers and mow lawns.

And although your family was dirt poor, your aunt lived in Palm Springs and knew some wealthy people. Your cousin clean pools for wealthy families when you were, and when you were nine years old, you clean pools with them. Can you tell us about Danny Thomas, the popsicle and the influence this had on your future?

Yeah, when I saw real money, you know, when I went and cleaned those pools, I saw Alfred Hitchcock's house and Danny Thomas's house. I never even dreamed of having a swimming pool. So I was happy to go clean them. And Danny Thomas comes out. It was like 124 degrees in the summer in Palm Springs. And I'm out there scrubbing on my hands and knees, scrubbing the tile, you know, from the top. And he's going, hey, hey.

jump in there, you know? And I went, really, man? All right. You know, and I took off my shirt and my jeans, probably. I can't remember what I was dressed like, but I didn't have a bathing suit on, I don't think. And I dove in the pool and I thought, man, I swam at Danny Thompson's pool. And I used to tell my friends that, you know, and they would think, whoa. And I said, yeah,

You know, I told him I saw Alfred Hitchcock in the window, like in his movies where he'd always be looking out a window or something in that scene. And I don't believe I really saw Alfred Hitchcock, but I cleaned his pool with my cousin Chuck and my uncle. But wow. Seeing the rich, the person that in Fontana, when I lived there, my dad finally cleaned up.

for 11 months and we actually rented a nice house never owned a house my mother didn't own a house or my parents didn't own a house till i bought her one and so i never owned a house we always rented but we were written dumps most of the time because my mom would think well we have to leave we're gonna lose this house anyway you know so um

So my dad was cleaned up for a long time, went to AA meetings and he got a real support system from his workers, his Kaiser Steel workers. And we moved to a nice house and across the street was a guy that owned a sporting goods store and he owned all kinds of real estate. He had a real estate company, the Petersons, and they had a young boy that was about a year younger than me and single kid.

He didn't have any brothers and sisters. And they had a three-car garage. They had a Lincoln, a Cadillac, and a Chrysler Imperial. And I was a car guy in 1956.

Um, we had a 49 Ford and, but we lived in the same neighborhood, but they had this really nice house in that neighborhood. It wasn't really a neighborhood. It was kind of very rural. We had a lot of property and it was just kind of fields, you know, but he had a nice piece of property with the in-law quarters and they had a live-in maid and all these things.

And this guy took a liking to me and my brother because we'd play with his kid. Bobby would come over to the house. Hey, Sammy, can you come over? Oh, can I come over and play? I'd say, no, let's go to your house. Cause man, he had every toy in the world. His mom would make his grilled cheese sandwiches and give us ice cream and all this stuff. You know, they, I'm one man. I, I really saw how rich people live for 11 months. They took me to Disneyland with him. I saw Disneyland for the first time. They took me to a country club and,

And, you know, the golf country club, they're working for lunch, you know, with Bobby and I'm sitting there going, man, you know, this is like living. And that's where I really saw how it was so much what it would be like to be wealthy. I mean, you know, it was just, I thought, wow, I had never even dreamed it.

But I think that really elevated my brain to say, well, I want to live like that. You know, I'd rather I'm not going to live like this anymore. I'm a someday I'm going to live like that. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I was I certainly opened my eyes. And I think it's really important for young people to have an experience like that.

And I had it long enough to really say, I know what this is about. Now, this ain't just a one-time fantasy. Oh, they must not live like this every day. No, these people live like this every day, you know? And, uh, I, I really think it's eyeopening and it's enlightening. It, it,

expands your consciousness at least to say there is a better life. Some people that just live in a ghetto their whole life and never get out, they don't know any difference. Like when I was young, I didn't know, like I said, I didn't know I was poor. I had no idea. Somebody asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. Oh, I want to be a boxer. I'm going to be a world champion. Oh, what are you going to do? You know, when are you going to do that? Well, I don't know. You know, it's like, I don't know even know when I'm going to start. You know, I just...

goof off with my dad or my friends with boxing gloves. But the truth of the matter is, is that I thought, well, I'll take a job at Kaiser Steel where my dad's working right now. You know, man, he's making, you know, like 80 bucks a week, you know? I mean, so I wasn't thinking big time at all, but until I, I think the Petersons really put that enlightenment into me. The Palm Springs thing was fantasy. There's a movie stars and stuff, you know, the, those aren't real people. Yeah.

Well, you know now that they are. Well, some of them are. Because you are one. No, some of them are real people.

I know. OK, all right. There you go. OK, there you go. All right. At some point in our lives, there comes a point where we figure out what we want to do. For some, it comes very early in life. For some, it comes later in life. Let's talk about when you discovered music. Tell us about the Sears catalog, the fabulous Castiles and sneaking into swing the auditorium when you were 17 years old.

Wow. I was at 17, I don't think. I think I was younger than that. Because my friend, when I snuck into the Swing Auditorium to see the Rolling Stones, their first American performance, I was 64. What I saw with that was what I really wanted to be. That and seeing Eric Clapton in the first Cream performance at the Whiskey A Go-Go. I'm going to play guitar like him. First, I wanted to be Mick Jagger. Well, I wanted to be Elvis Presley. And then I wanted to be Mick. And then I said, no, I'm going to be Eric Clapton.

Eric Clapton, he plays and sings. So I'm going to be like Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck at the same time. I'm going to be Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at the same time. That, that, how I got that influence was, you know, I decided it was going to be both, but I didn't even play guitar yet. You know, it was just barely starting. But I think is what really changed me up was I had a really crazy experience with my dad. He was really in bad shape.

And he was going to take me into I got my car permit. I had a permit and he had a car and he was I was able to drive with him, even though he didn't have a driver's license. We drove into L.A. to the Main Street Gymnasium and he said, I want you to train with John Velaflor, who had Jerry Corey back in those days and Mondo Rama. Some of those kind of people came out of the Main Street Gymnasium.

And we went there and they said, I want to get my dad told John Belaflor. I want to get my son a professional life. He's going to go professional. He said, well, has he had any average? He'd been fighting his whole life. So he said, okay, it's going to cost like X amount of money. My dad went down, gave blood.

Right. And got the money to get the forms to, for me to fill out, to become a professional fighter. And I, I sparred with a real fighter. He hit me in the head. I was, my head was ringing for a week. And, uh, I thought, man, I don't know if I really want to do this, but Hey, I got to do this for my dad. Got back home. My mom saw me filling out the paper. She starts crying, says, you're not going to do that. Look what it did to your father and blah, blah, blah. And, um,

I threw the papers in the trash and that was my end of my boxing career. So that was an important moment because I gave up on one dream that, and then I,

I was lost for a while, but then I started getting into music and I can tell you right now, music first, my mom bought me that guitar from Sears and Roback 2995 with a guitar that's in a case. And it's the case has got an amplifier in it. So you set it up, plug it in your one-stop shop, you know, it wasn't loud enough to, it was loud enough to sing to, I got to say, you know, it was kind of perfect. So for that, you could sing without a microphone, but the bottom line is,

I just bought that guitar, not that one, but I bought one on eBay recently. I found one for like...

900 bucks. And I bought it because I thought, that's my first guitar. I need to have that. I need, you know, even if it wasn't mine, that guitar changed my life. My mom made payments. At $29.95, my mom had to make frigging payments. That's how poor we were. But, you know, she told me, if you learn to play Never on Sunday on your friend's guitar, I'll buy you a guitar. So I sat down with him. He taught me how to play Never on Sunday. And I butchered it, but

But I got my guitar and I never played Never on Sunday again. I started playing Dick Dale's Miserlew and, you know, Rolling Stones and Beatles songs. I hope you're enjoying this video so far. But before we jump back in, I want to know if you've ever thought about what you need to do to reach the next level of success in your life. Over the last 25 years, I've been an advisor to more than 50 companies. I've invested nearly 100, including Google Lyft and Seagate. And I also co-founded a company that today is worth more than $1,000.

of Fontana as fast as you could. You moved to nearby Riverside, California, managed a local music store and played in a handful of bands, local bands, including the Johnny Fortune Band, Big Bang, Skinny, Dust Cloud, Cotton, Jimmy, the Justice Brothers, and Manhole.

Then you got married and moved to San Francisco. And at some point after moving there, two of your band members were arrested on drug charges. You were broke without a band. And after that, you spent several months driving a dump truck for your father-in-law in New York as a means of supporting yourself until you could put a new band together. Here you are. You dreamed of becoming a musician your whole life, and now you're driving a dump truck.

On our path to excellence, all of us have to overcome many challenges and obstacles along the way. We're going to talk about some of your other challenges a little later, but now can you take us back to the exact moment where you got that call, your bandmates are in jail, what you were feeling that day and on the flight back to New York, and while you were driving dump trucks, were you depressed? And if so, how did you get over that? And as part of that, tell us about the ship and the two creatures inside of the ship who visited you while you were laying awake one night.

Oh, boy, you just, man, you just dumped a bunch of stuff in one bucket, brother. First of all, just correct you. I never drove the dump truck. I didn't even drive it. I worked on the back of it. I was the guy who was out lifting up the stuff, throwing it in the back. My brother-in-law, who was my...

my wife's brother was driving her dad's truck. I wasn't driving a truck. He had the better job than me, but to start with, and also we didn't fly back to New York is what happened is when that, what happened up in San Francisco, the, my, somebody gave my drummer acid. And of course we're in San Francisco, right? Playing music. What do you expect in the, in these air in this era, 67 around there. And he, he went out,

And the bass player was the leader of the band and the drummer in the bass player room together and I had my little room. And they had community bathrooms. We didn't even have our own bathroom. It was just rooms, you know, like six bucks a night or something. And we were living above the club we were playing at, backing up these oldie but goodie acts of coasters and the drifters and...

the Shirelles and these kind of oldie but goodie acts that were coming in and we would play their songs because my bass player was an older dude. He knew it, but he was selling weed because he was, they, you know, they couldn't live on what they were getting. I couldn't either, but I was making it because I was poor. They, I guess, uh,

they might've had more money than me, but it was a Larry Taylor and Dave Arnold. He, he would, Dave was selling weed. Larry took acid, went out in the street four o'clock in the morning, finds these two cops walking the beat in North beach and in the strip club area where we were playing. And he goes, Hey, you guys need to get high. And they said,

Oh, really? He said, yeah. He said, well, where can we get something? So he says, you guys want to get high? And they said, yeah. He says, come on. So he's stoned on acid. He thinks he's going to turn these cops on to getting high, right? He's like, well, I'm going to change the law. I've changed the world right here. I'm going to turn these cops on to getting high. So of course they go right with him up to the room, walk in the room, arrest the fuck out of him. They take him to jail. And I'm there with my wife, no money. So I went and the manager,

of the club, I said, "Man, he liked me and liked the band, but he took a liking to me, Don Pruitt, wonderful guy." A wonderful man, by the way. A person that helps other people, even if he's not in a great position. "No, these people need help, I'm gonna help them." And he said, "Look, I live in this apartment, they're painting my apartment, can you paint?" And I said, "Hell yeah." So I painted, made some money, enough money to paint,

Uh, I started, went and worked with these guys and, uh, I made, I made some good friends doing that. There was a couple of guys that were really cool guys and I'm music. One was a musician too. So I, I kind of got myself in the San Francisco scene. I went back home and, uh,

tried to get it together, but my, and I said, I'm moving to San Francisco someday. That's it. I'm going to get my shit together and I'm going to move to San Francisco. There's something up there. And this Don Pruitt guy said, yeah, I'll try to help you out. You know, if you put a band together, bring them here, I'll get you guys some work. I said, cool. So in the meantime, my wife gets pregnant. I, I own a, um, I mean, I, I get drafted. I get my draft notice and her dad says, I'm sending you two bus tickets to

you're my, my daughter's pregnant. You're coming back to New York and you're going to live with us. I'm not going to have this baby out. And you know, the streets were living like, like hippies and like bums, you know, cause yeah, really my, my mom didn't want us living there. She, you know, say, if you're not going to get a job, you can't live here. You know, it was pretty hard times, brother. I got to tell you when I think right now, I'm going, man, I was desperate. I packed up my guitar, amplifier and my amplifier. I put wood on the front of my amp. I,

The amp farm weighed like a hundred pounds. And we, one suitcase between us, we got on a bus that stopped in every frigging town. It took three days to get to Rochester, New York. And I went to work on his garbage truck. He was tough. My father-in-law, who became one of my dearest people I've ever known in my life, later in life, died.

But he was tough on me, man. He wouldn't even look at me. He'd shake my hand like this. He'd turn his head, shake my hands, 4 o'clock in the morning, ready to go to work. Yep. So...

Yeah, that was tough. Rochester, New York. When it starts snowing, my brother-in-law was a good mechanic and he him and I bought this bullshit little van that had a blown up engine. We put a new engine and we rebuilt it. We come home from working on the garbage truck. You go to work at four in the morning. You're done at seven. So we go eat breakfast, come back home, start working on this car. Right. And then I worked in another place at night as making in a print shop.

uh because i was trying to make save some money i was saving every penny i'm living with my father-in-law now they're cooking i'm eating their food not paying any rent and i was saving every penny and i wanted to get back and move to san francisco so there was a lot of stops in between but that that was my goal was to get to san francisco where i thought i could make it and i did that's where it happened but my father-in-law finally

started liking me because I wasn't a bum. I rolled up my sleeves. I could work. I knew how to...

you know, do what had to be done. I wasn't like a lazy guy at all. Never was still ain't, but anyway, so he, he, he helped us with the car. The first day it snowed, we strapped my ex-wife in the back and we strapped this cot we built in the back. And so it wouldn't roll around and tied it to the walls and put her in the back of the car. Cause she was pregnant about four or five months by then. And we drove,

Non-stop taking turns overnight, 56 hours from New York to Southern California. I rented a house with the money I had, went on welfare, had the baby and moved to San Francisco. Long story short. Can you tell us about the ship and the two creatures inside of the ship? That happened during that time before I moved to San Francisco. Yes, sir. I can tell you about that ship. We want to hear about it. Well,

First of all, at that stage in my life, I was like 20 years old. I didn't know anything about astronomy, astrology. I didn't know about I look at the sky, just see stars and never even looked at the sky. I was looking at the ground, looking for money or bottles or something. I could cash in and make money off of trying to make a living. But I had no knowledge.

Just no belief in any UFOs. It didn't, you know, anything like nothing. And all of a sudden I'm laying in bed and I have this dream that I was being manipulated some way. And this is before wireless. This is before remote, you know, even remote control things. And I saw this little ship, like it was a flying saucer, sorry to say,

13 miles away sitting on this little hillside in Lyle Creek, knew right where the area was. And they were tapped into me with a wireless system. But to me, I see a wire. In my brain, it's like a thing goes, they got me plugged in. They're plugged into my brain.

And I don't know if they were uploading or downloading. Now, I believe they were just downloading. They're just trying to see what I had to offer. You know, who's this guy? It was random. I don't believe I'm special from that. I believe I'm special from the experience a little bit, but not, they didn't pick me because I was special and they weren't trying to make me something. I believe this now. So long story short, I'm kind of waking up and I'm seeing what's going on. What the hell is this? Two little guys way up there. How is this working? Couldn't put it together, but yeah,

they didn't yell it out telepathy i could hear them i could feel them we were communicating somehow and they had a numerical system it was like not from our numerical system it was like and i was unplugged and they went black my room turned completely white in the middle of the night

it just turned so white that it was like infinity, you know? And, and then it went pow. And I opened my eyes and I thought my eyes are open and all these weird things that split second, I was shaking like a leaf and it's in the middle of the night. I didn't know what to do. I don't even think I woke up my wife. I've, I didn't want to scare her. And, uh, it was like scary as hell, but my brain said, uh,

What in the hell was that? And I started looking in the sky and I started thinking, wow, I started reading astronomy books. I got when I got first money I ever bought anything with. It was probably my telescope. You know, I wanted to look and I started studying the planets. I started studying the cosmos. I started reading Einstein's book, Theory of Relativity. I started reading Ouspensky. It just set me. I got goosebumps in my arms right now. I'm just telling you this. I got them all over my legs.

It set me on a quest. I'm going to find out what in the hell that was. And I started believing in, you know, I started wondering, what's God? I mean, what are we here for? You know, I didn't think about reading the Bible. I just went to church because my parents made me, you know, I was an interest in none of that.

It opened my brain. And when your brain is open, you start absorbing other things. And everything started happening for me from that moment on. Cosmic shit. I decide, oh, I think I'll go back to San Francisco and see if that guy's still there. And, you know, walking up, knocking on the door, and I meet some other guy that says, oh, yeah, you know, you've got...

long hair, bushy hair. It says, you're going to be contacted with, from, from, you know, UFOs. I don't know if they've been calling them from flying saucers or alien beings, you know, you'll be contacted by alien beings. You, you know, guys would look at me and see that I had had that experience that they knew it was, I sound like a crazy person right now, but I would have thought people crazy too, but it freaking happened. So that was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

Otherwise, I'd have just been living in that house probably and playing that nightclub I was trying to get the job at and making a living and having kids and a family. So you moved back to California in the 70s. 1983 rolls around. You're playing in a San Francisco cover band and a well-known session guitarist named Ronnie Montrose learned about you, recruited you to join his new rock band.

You appeared on the first and second albums, which included the first song you ever wrote, Bad Motor Scooter. And a couple of years later, you and Ronnie had some conflicts and you were fired from the band. We're going to talk about your solo career in a minute. But when you were the lead singer and got that job, did you at this point think you had made it? Yeah, I didn't have any money yet, but I knew that was the farthest I could see at what was making it.

had an album out. I'd been on TV and I toured the world, you know, and, uh, hadn't made any money yet. You know, $150 a week is what we made in $10 a day per diem to eat on. And, um, you know, my phone was shut off at home and, you know, and all that kind of stuff. And, uh, I, I, I couldn't have been happier. You couldn't have, uh,

Got me to be bummed out. The only bummed out thing is when I got kicked out of the band and it was because of my ambition. I'm a very ambitious person. If I'm in a room with somebody and somebody says, Hey, um,

How are we going to do this? Or how does that work? Or can we do this? And if nobody jumps up and takes the lead, boom, I'm the first guy to say, here's how we do it. And here's what we're going to do. And I'd start going. I don't even, you know, I started leaving a dust trail. You know, I'm, I'm completely a knee jerk, spontaneous, dominoes.

don't think no downside exists in my world and I go for it. And that's the way I've always been. And it scared the hell out of my, any leaders I was ever around. You know, if I had a boss, he'd say, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, hold on kids. You know? So Ronnie thought I was trying to take over the band because I was always coming up with these ideas and writing all the songs. And, um,

So his insecurity threw me out of the band. But it's really unfortunate that we never could communicate. I was naive. I didn't know what an ego was. He had an ego. I had never seen an ego. No one told me that there's people that will do the wrong thing just because of their pride. I never knew anybody like that. Nobody would do that. What? So

You know, being naive and being poor, going back to catch us up here again, the poor side of it and the naivety of the whole thing, I think was really important to get me through the hard times.

You know, so nothing seemed like a hard time to me. Hell, I'd already slept in a car and I already been hungry. I already had nothing. I had, you know, work in fields at four o'clock in the morning, picking fruit, you know, with my mom and then get up and go to school. I mean, and then, you know, she dropped me off at school and come back. She'd work the rest of the day. I mean,

So anything that happened to me was like, this is no big deal. So Montrose, we were living it up. I was living in a hotel room. You know, my drummer is my bandmate, my roommate. You know, we had to double up. We drove our own car, had a station wagon. We drove ourselves from gig to gig. I remember a time in Montrose getting stuck in a hotel because Ronnie Montrose was using his credit card because he had been in Edgar Winter Band. Well, I thought he was rich, but he really wasn't. But

He had made some money. He had a credit card and his credit card was maxed. They went, let us out of the hotel. What are we going to do? You know, it's like. So after that, you started what would become a very successful solo career. You had your first platinum record, Standing Hampton, which had some great songs on it, including There's Only One Way to Rock.

Then 1983 rolls around. Your next album, Three Lock Box, generated your first top 40 single, Your Love Is Driving Me Crazy, which hit number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100. And at this point, you're on a roll. Your next album, V.O., comes out, and along with it came your best-known song, I Can't Drive 55, which is one of the greatest rock anthems of all time and which pumps me up every time I listen to it. Yeah.

And at this point, you're headlining in the U.S. and Europe. Three years later, you have your first number one hit with your song Give to Live, which came out after you joined Van Halen. Can you walk us through all of that? You get fired from Montrose. You're starting your own solo career. You have your first platinum album. You reach the Billboard Hot 100. You've got...

massive hit, I Can't Drive, 55. And then you have the number one song in the United States. Is this the dream? And was each of these accomplishments on your bucket list? Did you have a bucket list? And at this point, did you really think you had really, really made it and you weren't going to go any further than this?

Well, once I got one little taste of fame and fortune, it was the fortune that drove, drove me on then after, because once you're on TV, you see yourself, you know, once you have a, you know, hit record and all that, it's like, you think, well, I can do this as long as I want. I mean, when you're in the middle of a success and you're hot, you know, when I was hot in the eighties, um,

I thought, well, this will never end, number one. And number two, I can do whatever I want because my ego started thinking, yeah, I did all this. I worked hard and got everything I wanted, and I know how to do it, and I can keep doing it. But money is what woke me up to the fact that you can have more. You know what I mean? It's like I was living a pretty good life, but I thought, man, if I retire,

I ain't going to be able to live like this. You know, I got to keep working. So I thought I had to keep working. So then I started thinking about, well, maybe if I do the right thing with my money and all that, it could change things. But

you know, to where I wouldn't have to work if I didn't want to. That was the only insecurity I had was being broke again in my life. So I started becoming driven by money, not where I would do anything for money, not like that, but driven, hey, if I can make that kind of money, go out and do that, I'll go do it. I'll work my ass off. I'll work 365 days a year. But it wasn't like, oh, you want to go hit baby seals over the head with a hammer for a million dollars? No, no, thanks. I don't need that kind of money. You know, I wasn't like that. But I would start becoming driven

uh, really driven, but you know, the hits and all those things, uh, it was strange because my manager at that time said to me, you're the only artist. He, this guy was the Beatles tour manager, the Rolling Stones agent, Petula Clark's manager and agent, the Osmond brothers, early manager and agent, and, uh, had a band called sweet, uh,

And he took me on as my manager. And he said, you're the only artist I've ever known in my life that success drives you. You get better and you work harder with success. Most artists, when they have enough success where they feel, hey, I got a million dollars or I've got plenty of money, they start losing their drive and they start getting distracted. And you've seen it again and again, how many people have hit the top and then just

or, you know, ruin their life some way. I...

I start working out more. I start running every day. I start practicing more. I sat in my room and wrote songs. I'd come after a show, I'd go to my room with a guitar and I'd write another song. I was driven, driven, driven. And he really expressed that. He said, you know, I've never met anybody like you. This is great. You are really, success makes you better. You get smarter. You know, you tighten up your act and all this. And I think he was right because I wanted more, you know, so I didn't, I didn't.

Think I had enough. I know I had enough. I knew I had made it, but I didn't. The dream from then, after 1982, the dream was over. I accomplished much more than I ever thought I would ever accomplish. And I really...

I start dreaming a different dream. I can't explain it, but you know, I just start thinking, no, there's, there's something else that this can bring me, you know, being a rock star is cool, but man, I'm 40 years old, man. How long can I do this? You know, here I'm 74 now going, I'm still doing it, but it's,

It does give me pleasure now again. But there was a time where I was just doing it and not for money, but I was saying, no, I got it. I got to keep doing this kind of for money. But, you know, until I find out what else I can do.

Uh, everything goes around, comes around, but the dream was over in the eighties, not over like, Oh my God, I still had heart and passion, but I mean, I dreamt so much more than I ever thought I would have. This was beyond the dream. And if the dream wasn't what I thought it was, so fame and fortune really didn't bring you anything. If you were still miserable, had a miserable marriage, you were still going to have that miserable marriage. If you were an alcoholic, you were still going to be an alcoholic. You know, if you were a, a,

a bad guy, you're still going to be a bad guy. Fame and fortune don't change none of that. All it does is keep you from having to, you know,

work at something you might not want to do. You know, so I really got enlightened to fame and fortune. And I thought, I'm no longer about fame and fortune. I'm about doing what I want to do. And this is going to lead me into something. I started thinking I might want to be into politics. I thought, you know, I could be president if I wanted, or maybe I want to run a big corporation. I would think like that because I had no education. I never finished high school. So I didn't have a, you know, a,

from a college with a degree and all this stuff. So I started wanting to do things to show that I could do anything. I was starting to flex my muscles, say, I'm smart as that guy. I know how to run that company. I could do this. I could do that. And so I got really, really ambitious and creative in the sense where I would try anything. I was fearless.

Sammy Hagar: From Broken Childhood to Living Legend | E161

In Search Of Excellence

Shownotes Transcript

Sammy Hagar: From Broken Childhood to Living Legend | E161 47:33 Share

In Search Of Excellence

Shownotes Transcript

Sammy Hagar: From Broken Childhood to Living Legend | E161