Sammy Hagar says he doesn’t know exactly why Alex Van Halen hates him

Earlier this month, in an new interview with Brazilian Rock magazine Roadie Crew, Alex Van Halen called Sammy a “complete idiot“. When talking about other biographies, he was asked by the interviewer Marcelo Vieira if he had read David Lee Roth’s 1997 book “Crazy From the Heat”.

He praised the book, but when asked about Sammy’s “Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock”, released in 2011, he said: “I don’t know what he wrote, I don’t wanna know. In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot”, he said. In a new interview with Eddie Trunk, Sammy talked about that and said he doesn’t know exactly why the drummer hates him.

Sammy Hagar says he doesn’t know exactly why Alex Van Halen hates him

“I don’t know what Alex’s problem is. If I wanted to get into a tug-of-war again, but there’s so much clickbait going around now, it turns on you every time. And I’m always honest — I tell the truth. And I’d never lied in my book. None of those were lies. Those are all truth. All those things happened, whether or not anyone’s happy about some of the stuff that they did that, that I’d brought up to the people in the book.”

“I don’t know. This is what I’m saying, this is what I was getting to, is that my only question is… I wanna 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-something million records, four No. 1 albums, and you just scratch that off of your brother’s legacy, saying, ‘No, that never happened.’ You don’t even wanna acknowledge it.”

“That’s deep. That’s weird. That’s not right for Eddie, for me, for Mike, for anybody. All the things he does, it’s, like, why? So I’m asking Alex, like, why? Come clean. What’s your problem? Just come out and say it. Is it the book? Say it. If it’s Cabo Wabo, say it. Maybe if I knew what the problem was, I could fix it. But right now he just acts like there’s not a problem. It just never happened. It’s almost like…”

He continued:

“You remember when Wolfie joined the band, Alex took all the old catalog, all the records, all the photos that were on their web site, and Photoshopped Wolfie in and took Mikey out. He did that for about two weeks, and then the people gave him so much shit, he fixed it. This is as stupid as that, to me. It’s, like, dude, don’t pretend like something never happened.”

“Something’s wrong. Like I said, it’s deeper. It shouldn’t be, that’s all. It just shouldn’t be. Like, just tell me why. So this is my thing… At least we can (try to) dig down and find out the real reason. And Alex needs to say it. Not from the fans. The fans got all kinds of reasons. Every time I get into that… It’s awesome, though. A lot of people say the right thing, a lot of people do know that it’s not right. But I’m not trying to cause a conflict; I’m trying to fix something.”

“Whether Alex wants to play drums ever again is his business, whether he wants to just keep releasing all this old stuff with 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 wanna know why.”

Sammy Hagar continued

“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. It’s not changing my life. And it doesn’t really even bother me anymore, ’cause I think the fans really know it’s wrong. They’re starting to… I see a lot of negative stuff on what he’s doing.”

“Oh, I’ve given up (on making peace with him). I don’t really care anymore. If he doesn’t wanna do it — he’s the one that has a problem. I don’t have a problem with it. I go out. I’m capable of singing all those songs, and I do it, and Mikey’s with me, and we got a great band. I mean, you can’t put a better version of Van Halen together than what we got, other than having Alex play drums, and we know that’s not gonna happen. So when I give up on that, that’s when I just say, ‘No, I’m just gonna go about my business, carry on as long as I can, carry on with the songs I’ve written.’ These are songs I wrote with Eddie. Eddie and I wrote these songs,” Sammy Hagar said (Transcribed by Blabbermouth).