The Sammy Hagar piece in the new Rolling Stone on his final VH year (2004) is some SCARY shit.

Amerigo Vespucci

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Sat Mar-05-11 05:53 PM
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The Sammy Hagar piece in the new Rolling Stone on his final VH year (2004) is some SCARY shit.

Exclusive Excerpt: Surviving Eddie In his new memoir 'Red,' Sammy Hagar recalls 20 years of madness and mayhem with Van Halen

When Eddie Van Halen called me in 1985, it didn't come as a complete surprise. David Lee Roth had split a few months earlier, and I'd told my wife at the time, Betsy, "They're going to call me, you watch." Who else were they going to get? There was Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie James Dio and me.

I had been waiting at 5150 studios for more than an hour when Eddie finally showed up. I hadn't seen him in a decade. He looked like he hadn't bathed in a week. He certainly hadn't changed his clothes in at least that long. He wasn't wearing a shirt. He had a giant overcoat and army pants, tattered and ripped at the cuffs, held up with a piece of rope. I'd never seen him so skinny in my life. He was missing a number of teeth and the ones he had left were black. His boots were so worn out he had gaffer's tape wrapped around them, and his big toe stuck out. He walked up to me, hunched over like a little old man, a cigarette in his mouth. He had a third of his tongue removed because of cancer and he spoke with a slight lisp.

He may have lost a chunk of his tongue to cancer, but he was still smoking cigarettes. He claimed the cancer came from putting the guitar pick in his mouth while he used his fingers to play. He walked around all day drinking cheap shiraz straight out of the bottle. That's why his teeth were all black. "Ed, why don't you get a glass for that?" I said. He held up the bottle. "It's in a glass," he said. He was living with a pathologist, who kept taking slices off his tongue, to check for cancer. He beat the cancer. He told me he cured himself by having pieces of his tongue liquefied and injected into his body. He also told me when he had his hip replacement, he stayed awake through the operation and helped the doctors drill the hole. What a fruitcake.

One time, we got on a plane after a show and he spent practically the whole flight in the bathroom. When he finally came out, he had this hairbrush, the kind with the fur bristles, twisted up in his hair, hanging down. He was soaking wet, covered in water, like he tried to take a bath in the airplane sink. He flopped down on the floor, fussing with the brush caught in his hair, and never went back to his seat, landed that way. Hospital-crazy. After one show, Mike and I stayed back, like we normally did, and showered. Ed didn't shower. He jumped into the limo right off the stage and went straight to the airplane. When Mike and I rolled up, laughing, joking, eating a couple of barbecue sandwiches we had ordered, Eddie was sitting there drinking his wine out of the bottle. He went off on us. "Don't ever fucking make me wait," he said. "Without me, you're nothing. You need me. You'll see. At the end of this tour, you guys will have nothing. You're going to have to call me if you ever want to tour again."

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/photos/exclusive-excerpt-surviving-eddie-20110304