Ultimate Classic Rock has published a story in which Sammy Hagar recalls Van Halen’s unfortunate 2004 tour:
It should have worked. Van Halen, some six years after an ill-fated attempt to carry on without Sammy Hagar, reunited with the “Red Rocker” for a trio of new songs and a huge 80-date tour. Rather than signal a triumphal second act for the most commercially successful Van Halen line up, however, this 2004 tour marked an ugly end — even as it pointed the way for what would come next, both for Van Halen and for Hagar.
“What happened on that reunion tour in ’04,” Hagar told Sally Steele eight years later, “was some of the most miserable, back-stabbing dark crap I’ve ever been involved with my whole life.”
What the public didn’t see, Hagar says, was how badly things had turned for Eddie Van Halen behind the scenes in the interim. Hagar says that Van Halen, then in the throes of addiction, was in such a bedraggled state that it shocked him. The legendary guitarist, Hagar wrote in his memoir ‘Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock,’ was unkempt, hunched over, frighteningly skinny, drinking wine straight out of a bottle, missing part of his tongue (after a cancer scare) and several teeth. As his descent continued, Hagar says their relationship was irretrievably broken.
You’ve probably seen this picture of Eddie taken during that period.
Read the entire saga at ultimateclassicrock.com.