Attention Deficit Delirium

Hagar gives the crowd at Cabo Wabo what they crave --
mas tequila!

Sammy Hagar has stayed steady in the perpetually unstable world of rock ‘n’ roll. After first making his name fronting the band Montrose in the mid-1970s, the Red Rocker launched a successful solo career, fronted Van Halen for a decade, then went solo again before hooking up with his buddies in the supergroup Chickenfoot, a hard rockin’ band featuring former VH bassist Michael Anthony, guitarist Joe Satriani and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith.

Hagar is like a cat — whenever he falls, he lands on his feet. And with a highly successful tequila business and two small bar/restaurant ventures bringing in extra green (some of it for charity), Hagar seems set for life. Here is Part Two of ADD’s exclusive interview with Sammy Hagar, where he talks more about tequila, music and the best advice he can give to young rockers. Part One can be found here.


I heard that you sold off a majority of your shares in your Cabo Wabo tequila company to Gruppo Campari recently?
I sold 80% of it. They wanted to buy all of it, and I only wanted to sell enough of it to get worldwide distribution. The hardest part about any product is getting it on the shelves. You can buy your own trucks and go to the grocery store, and they’ll go, “We’re sorry, we don’t have any room.” Distribution is tough for a record company or for anybody. It’s a physical product, and it takes up space. I didn’t jump into the distribution game. I always had a distributor, but I never had a worldwide distributor. So Compari came in, and they’re the third biggest distributor in the world. I said I’d sell it to them because I want to see it in the rest of the world. We came to do an 80/20 deal. I didn’t really want to sell that much of it, quite honestly, but that’s the only deal that they would make because it takes millions and millions of dollars in investment to get a worldwide distribution system going. There’s a lot of credit involved, a lot of shipping and handling. It’s a big job. Too big for Sammy. But it’s working fantastically. I’m a pretty happy guy.

A line of Cabo Wabo Tequila, nicely packaged.

I guess you have to find a way to get tequila on tap so you can sell to bars.
If I ever found a way to open another tequila bar, I would probably have some kind of situation where they would have a small distillery at the place. The problem with tequila is that if you put a title on and its tequila, 100% agave, it has to be grown, bottled and produced in a [specific Mexican] region, otherwise you can’t call it tequila. You could call it agave nectar or agave spirit or something, but you can’t call it tequila. You can, but someone’s gonna mess with ya.

Is there a specific area where tequila is made?
Jalisco. It is the domained area where tequila is bottled and produced. If you’re not 100% agave like Cuevo and a few other ones, there are a lot of mixtos that only have to be 51% tequila, and you can get the agave there and bottle it wherever you want. You can mix up a little bit when you’re doing that, but something has to come from the region.





It’s interesting that you also have gone further into the restaurant business with Sammy’s Beach Bar & Grill.
I did this for charity. When you have anything successful, like my Cabo Wabo Cantinas and the tequila, people come to you and ask if you have any more ideas. The first thing you do is go, “No.” Or, “I could get one.” So I did it for charity. For me, I always look for things I can do to give back. I’ve done a lot for charity — not enough, by any means — but I’ve done my fair share, and it always bothers me when I see a little kid that’s poor. It breaks my heart. I’ve got kids, so I’m pretty sensitive to kids. Terminally ill children are the number one priority in my head. If I can do anything about anything I would try to fix that. You can’t really fix it, but you think about how sad [it is] for the parents and how expensive it is. It just breaks a family to pieces. So it became my mission to try to help two families a year in each city where I have a Beach Bar & Grill. I give every penny from it to the community. In Maui, I only deal with Maui. In Las Vegas, it only goes to Las Vegas. St. Louis only goes to St. Louis. So that’s my mission with Sammy’s Beach Bar & Grill — wherever I can open one, that money goes to the community, and one or two families a year can really benefit from it. You can’t fix the whole world, but you just fix one family, you know how good that makes you feel.



After all of these years you and Mike Anthony still have a really strong friendship. There’s a lot of loyalty there. Now you two are in Chickenfoot together. Why do those ties remain so strong?
We’re just kind of the same kind of guys. It’s so weird… you can relate to this. You can meet someone and say, “I really like that person.” Or someone will make you say, “The fucking guy drives me nuts.” In Van Halen, Eddie always used to go, “Man, I’m so jealous of you and Mike. You guys always seem to get along and are laughing about everything and having so much fun.” I’m going, “It’s just the way it is.” From the day I met him, we had on shorts and flip-flops and T-shirts and were talking about going out and having a couple shots of tequila, eating some Mexican food with hot peppers and then hitting the beach. We both have the same kind of vibe. We [like to be on the] beach all day and play music at night. Anytime I would call Mike and say, “I’m going down to Cabo, you want to go and jam?” He was there. We just have the same kind of lifestyle. It’s pretty cool.

Chickenfoot rehearsing.
(Photo credit: Christie Goodwin.)

So what’s coming up for Chickenfoot then?
I’m pretty much going to wait for Chickenfoot now. I was asked if I wanted to go out and do some [solo] shows this summer and was offered a great package with somebody that I thought would be really great. I thought I’d put Mike in the band and we’d go out and do it for fun, then just this morning I woke up and said, “I’m not going to do that. I’m going to wait for Chickenfoot.” It’s something special. I might go out and play 25 or 30 concerts this summer, and if something were to happen with Chickenfoot in the fall, I might not feel like touring because I just toured. I want to save it for my passion right now, just like I said when we first started talking. I’ve got a passion for Chickenfoot. I woke up one morning and said, “I want to play with Joe Satriani, Chad Smith” — who I had been jamming with a lot at the Cabo — “and Mikey.” I wanted to put together this band, and I was so overwhelmed with it. It’s all I wanted to do. I did it, it worked and I want to do it some more now. I want to keep that passion and not burn myself out on something else. Right now that’s my band.

Do you think you guys are going to record anymore stuff?
Oh yeah. In April we’re supposed to go in the studio. Chad has a little window from the Chili Peppers, and we’re going to go in and start recording a second album. We’re not going to rush it, we’re going to start. Joe and I are always writing. We’re definitely going to try to do it again.





Do you ever see yourself mentoring younger rock stars?
If they want it, man, I’ll tell anybody anything I know.

What’s the best piece of advice you can give to an up-and-coming musician?
Figure out what you want to be or even who you want to be like. A good example is Davey Knowles, a 22-year-old British guy who opened for Chickenfoot on the whole tour. To me, he’s the next Eric Clapton. He’s a hard blues guy, great guitar player, great singer. He kept saying, “Give me advice. Give me advice.” Well, what do you want to be? I can’t give you advice unless you tell me what you want to be because whatever you want to be is what you need to be. And if you don’t know what you want to be, keep doing what you’re doing until you figure out who you want to be. I said, “Would you be happy if you were B.B. King and were 80?” He said, “Fuck, mate, hell yeah! I don’t even dream that big.” I said, “Then stay true to the blues. Then you can be B.B. King. Because you’re good.” That’s the only advice I can give to anybody. Just stay true to your heart and soul and what you want to be, and make sure that you’re as good as you can always be and just don’t bullshit. Bullshitting ain’t going to get you nowhere, man. The only thing you can be is an individual, and how you be an individual is to go with your own taste. Just like my tequila thing. This is the way I like it. If someone next to me says they like Patrón better, fine. I don’t. Otherwise I would’ve made tequila that tastes like that. If you want to be the Beatles, then you’ve got to be the Beatles, but there’s already the Beatles. You can try to be like them, but you’ll always be something less, so the only way to go about being the Beatles is inventing it and becoming it with your own personal tastes and who and what you are. So find what you want, who you want to be and what you want to be and go for it, man.

Ah, the Eighties...

So after all of these years, what do you think your fans would be surprised to learn about you?
[laughs] I think they know it all. I know they know I’m for real. I think they might be surprised to know that I’m kind of a lazy bastard. It seems like I’m always doing something, and I’m the hardest working guy in the world, but I’m not. I think I’m lazy. I like to lay in bed as long as I can. I never get up before 9:30 or 10, and that’s early sometimes. I really just like to lay around and think and daydream. I think they probably don’t know that, and maybe that might be the only thing. In every other respect, they know what kind of soul I am. But they don’t know that inside I think I’m lazy.



The Chickenfoot frontman at Cabo Wabo.

For over four decades, Sammy Hagar has carved out a niche for himself in the perpetually unstable world of rock ‘n’ roll. After first making his name fronting the band Montrose in the mid-1970s, the Red Rocker, so named for frequently sporting his favorite color, launched an increasingly successful solo career in 1976, the first phase of which was capped off with the wildly popular single “I Can’t Drive 55″ from the platinum-certified VOA album. After briefly performing with the “supergroup” Hager-Schon-Aaronson-Shrieve (HSAS) around the VOA period, Hagar replaced David Lee Roth in Van Halen, allowing the band to continue their string of multi-platinum releases by suffusing their signature hard rock style with pop sensibilities. After a decade-long tenure with the VH machine, Hagar went solo again in 1996 then joined forces with the Waboritas, toured with Roth in 2002, reunited for a VH tour in 2004 and is now part of supergroup Chickenfoot, a hard rockin’ ensemble featuring former VH bassist Michael Anthony, guitarist Joe Satriani and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith. They play some concerts next month, release a live DVD in the spring and should start recording a new album next month as well.

Beyond music, Hagar has launched a successful tequila business — he’s still on the board of Cabo Wabo Tequila but sold 80% of it in 2007 for a reported $80 million — and runs two small bar/restaurant ventures, the Cabo Wabo Cantina and Sammy’s Beach Bar & Grill, the latter of which donates money to charity. It seems that no matter which way you slice it, Hagar has lead a very satisfying life and has had a rewarding career. He’s like a cat — whenever he falls, he lands on his feet. When he sat down to chat with ADD, he displayed the zeal and passion that keeps him going after all these years. (Read Part Two here.)


So you’re doing well?
I’m doing great, you know. I can’t complain. Life’s been pretty good, and to still be going strong without even trying [makes me] the luckiest guy in the world. With the Chickenfoot thing, we went gold in almost every country. I’m at the stage in my life where people with even big bands — I won’t mention any names — but a lot of big classic rock bands that are still together with the same guys, they make a new record, and it doesn’t sell anything, including me. But I just happened to put together the right group of guys and made the right record, and we’ve had just so much success with that I’m shocked. I’m the happiest guy in the world.

Hagar performing at Moondance Jam 2008 in Walker, Minnesota.
(Photo credit: Matt Becker, matt@melodicrockconcerts.com.)

It’s crazy to me that the stuff I grew up on is already called classic rock. Are you amazed after all these years that you can cycle through these resurgences?
It’s really cool. Honestly, I’m not bragging. I feel extremely lucky. I’m going, “Geez, how can I keep pulling the stuff off?” It’s so effortless. It’s not like I’m busting my ass and trying to be rich and famous and trying to come up with a new scheme. I don’t do that. It’s not the way I live, it’s not the way I think. I feel something, the light goes on inside my head, and I see a real clear vision of something. It’s not like a little idea that keeps growing and growing and growing. The way things work with me, it goes “Bing!” I’m sitting there eating dinner and going, “Wow, I just got a great idea!” It’s that simple. And I get very excited — and anybody that knows me can tell you that I’m a real excitable boy — and once I get excited I just start doing it. It is so effortless then because once you have inspiration, a vision and heart and passion, it’s just effortless. I don’t think there’s anything I’ve done that I could say, “Oh man, I broke my ass. Man, it was rough.”

I’ve noticed that a lot of veteran musicians are now working on outside projects, both as a new creative outlet and as a way to make extra income.  Many rockers are putting out drinks, hot sauces and opening restaurants. Obviously you love tequila and have your own Cabo Wabo Tequila. Why did you decide to put out your own brand?
First of all, it was before anybody else had done it. I’m not trying to take full credit for being the first guy, but quite honestly I wasn’t following any path. I went to Cabo in 1980, and it was three hotels, one plane in a week and one plane out of week. No newspapers, no telephones, no TVs. I was sitting down there and fell in love with the place. I said to myself, “I want to build a little bar down here.” A tequila bar, because I was a tequila fan back then, and I’d already been there on a trip to Mexico and went on a wine tour. At that time there were four or five Château’s besides Cueva and the big boys [in Jalisco]. There were little ones that would let you taste their tequilas. I tasted a fantastic tequila that was the real deal before it was in America. There were no 100% agave premium tequilas back then. I tasted the real deal, thought it was great and wanted to build a little tequila bar with a P.A. and a stage. I loved the place [Cabo] so much that I finally bought a house there in ’81. There was nothing to do there except fish, hang on the beach and lay in the sun. So I decided I was going to build this place.

Bottoms up on the red carpet!

Then I decided to get my own tequila just for the place, so I went back to Guadalajara, after Cabo Wabo [Cantina] was built, and found some farmers who grew agave for all of the other big brands. They sold them the agaves. They were just farmers with hundreds of acres, but they made their own little batch. They made about 20 cases a year. They just kept it in barrels. They didn’t have bottles or anything. A friend of mine took us over, and we started drinking straight out of the barrels. I told him this was the most amazing tequila I ever had and asked if they would make some for the Cabo Wabo, and they said sure, bring us bottles. So I brought them bottles, filled them up and started selling them at the Cabo Wabo. Somebody tasted it and in a magazine article said it was the greatest tequila they’d ever had, and the next thing I knew people were knocking on my door. I said, “I don’t know anything about this business, but how many cases do you want?” So one thing led to another.



You’ve been doing this a long time then?
In the Cabo Wabo we were making the tequila. Somewhere around ’91. I immediately started trying to put my tequila in bottles. At the time I didn’t have bottles, so we just took these jugs and poured them from their little wooden barrels. They would send them to me in five-gallon gasoline cans. I’m not bullshitting. Not that gasoline had been in them. They were brand-new gasoline jugs, plastic containers that you would use. They would send it to me in the weirdest fucking things, but it was so good. So we would pour them into little barrels and give people shots out of the barrels at the Cabo Wabo. That was how primitive it was when I started.

So you started getting into this in the late ’80s?
It was in the late ’80s when I was really starting to get into the really high-end tequilas. I would go over there four or five times a year and see if there were any new places and hit some new joints. Some places wouldn’t let you come in, they didn’t give a shit about making anything for me. When it became a real business and I had to get down and do it, it wasn’t as easy as it was when I was just walking around and tasting stuff. You get around to doing a real business, they do things very differently in Mexico. [laughs] We finally had to make a deal with the family, and it seemed like the bigger it got the harder it was to get the product from them. And then when I started importing it, I was thinking, “What the fuck am I doing?” It was not hard work, but these people were just so slack. You would order 20,000 cases and get 1,400, and you’d go, “No, dude, you don’t understand.” They were pretty slack and unprofessional, but the tequila was damn good.

Are you using different people now?
Well, no, as we got bigger and started getting into the hundred thousand case category, we had to put our own guy down there. We hired a real manager for the plant, and the plant built up slowly. The tequila was growing really fast, and the plant couldn’t keep up, so we kept having to build up more. Then we needed another distillery. Then another oven. You had to keep adding on like a Lego set. We got it up to speed, then we got so big we really had to put two or three of our own guys down there, and everything changed. It was efficient, and we put the farmers back in the field and got them out of the office.

Rockin' out with Chickenfoot.
(Photo credit: Christie Goodwin.)

Over the last 20 years, how has Sammy Hagar the rock star managed to balance out with being Sammy Hagar the tequila mogul?
I always had other people doing everything. It was my palate and my concept. I would go in taste and say, “Leave this in the barrel a little bit longer.” That was my job. I could do that right before I went on stage. That’s a perfect time to do it, as a matter of fact! They would have five samples and want to know which one I liked. When I first started Cabo Wabo, we were doing it in traditional ways. We were doing it by the seat of our pants. Every time we made a batch it was a little bit different. I started learning more and more about it. At first I liked añejos that had been left in the barrel for a little bit over a year, and I was always going with that. “I love this! Let’s leave it in for two more months and see what happens.” I was experimenting, but then I started pulling back as I became really into tequila and really understanding it. I started moving towards a blanco, and the reason is that if you like tequila you want to drink a blanco. That’s what tequila tastes like. An añejo tastes like scotch and cognac, and if you’re a real tequila drinker you want that blanco chilled down just a little bit with a hint of salt on your tongue the first time. After that you don’t do salt lime. Blanco tequila is a tequila drinker’s drink, so I started moving towards that. Then I started trying to perfect my blanco because if you put your blanco in wood then your reposado is really good.

While the guys in Chickenfoot love the sun, they're finding that indoor group tanning is not such a hot idea.
(Photo credit: LeAnn Mueller.)

We started becoming a little bit more consistent with the formula — distill it twice, pick the agaves by hand, get the biggest, fattest, ripest ones, cook them for 42 hours, then grind them up. We had the system down. Then here is your blanco, and this is the shit. Once we had the shit, then we put it into barrels for four to six months because I like a reposado that’s not too añejo. I was leaving my reposados in there longer as well. So we started pulling them back to about four months. Then I started liking it at four months. It was lightly wooded and just took the edge off a little bit. It was nice. I started getting into super añejos after and started aging them for three years. It’s a process of how your palette changes. That’s all I did. I just made all those decisions. “Let’s try this, let’s try that.” I would taste it and go, “This is killer. Now let’s do this…” And someone else did it. Like I said, there was no work involved, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. [laughs]


Read Part Two of “The Red Rocker and Tequila King” here.





Could you imagine this band without this frontman?

In the late Robert Altman’s satirical film The Player, Hollywood executive Larry Levy proposes that his studio can save money on hiring writers by developing scripts themselves, tearing ideas right from front page newspaper headlines. To which the film’s anti-hero, fellow executive and competitor Griffin Mill, retorts: “I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we’ve got something here.”

That same wisecrack can now be applied to lead singers — after all, who needs someone with a famous face to deliver the words? With the near departure of vocalist Steven Tyler from Aerosmith on the eve of their 40th anniversary, his bandmates immediately began contemplating who might take his place. That seemed like a rather hasty move, but then again this is a group that is in middle age and would not have years to wait for their frontman to decide to return. And these days famed rock gods, particularly vocalists, are becoming more replaceable than ever, something rarely heard of twenty or more years ago.

Replacing famous singers is not without precedent. When Bon Scott died, AC/DC brought in an equally distinct but different screecher in Brian Johnson, and they became huge. That’s a rare exception, but there are others. After Peter Gabriel departed Genesis, the British art-rockers soldiered on with drummer Phil Collins as frontman (so to speak), but he did make them more commercially viable and generated bigger hits. (For true progressive music fans, though, that was heresy.) Sammy Hagar’s turn in Van Halen allowed them to go more pop as well (not that everyone liked that). Hagar was also a star in his right when he joined VH, but lightning did not strike twice for them after he left their ranks. Remember the Gary Cherone era? Further, Ronnie James Dio kept Black Sabbath successful for two albums (and subsequent reunions) after they fired Ozzy Osbourne in 1979, and their music remained as hard and heavy as ever, even today under their new moniker Heaven & Hell. Dio also gained fame previously fronting Rainbow.

Van Halen reunited with Sammy Hagar in 2004.

My friend Eric Vitoulis went to see Journey three years ago at Jones Beach Theater on Long Island. Prior to the show it was announced that former Yngwie Malmsteen vocalist Jeff Scott Soto would be filling in for Steve Augieri, who was having vocal problems that soon lead to his departure after eight years with the group. A woman in front of Eric turned to her friend and said, “Steve Perry’s not here?” (Not since 1996, my dear.) That ironic statement is proof that many fairweather fans — i.e. the casual listeners who turn musicians  into platinum hit machines — do not really pay all that much attention to the lives of the artists they listen to. It’s what I call the “Rock Of Ages syndrome”. The opening night crowd for that Broadway hit were true ’80s fanatics, right down to their attire, while a subsequent audience months later was mainly comprised of suburbanites, many of whom clearly do not often listen to the songs that were performed nor always remember who performed what. But they love the nostalgia and kitsch factors that Rock Of Ages represents.

Alice In Chains with new frontman William DuVall (at right).

There are many Journey fans who would vehemently argue that no one could fill Steve Perry’s legendary shoes. Yet three vocalists have since, and the latest one, Filipino native Arnel Pineda, has helped boost their careers once again, both in terms of album and concert ticket sales. Journey are admittedly an anomaly, a beloved institution who do not seem to get sidelined for long due to limited warranties on replacment singers, two of whom have purposely sounded very close to Perry. Conversely, when revered metal bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Motley Crue, Ratt and Black Sabbath replaced famous frontmen who left — in Sabbath’s case there were two — fans did not respond as well. They were still there but in diminished numbers. More commercial bands like Foreigner, Styx and others seem to be able to pull this off a little better. Queen certainly made it be known that they were not attempting to diminish or tarnish the legacy of the late Freddie Mercury by bringing in former Bad Company and Free singer Paul Rodgers, and fans responded favorably. They also performed songs by Rodgers’ previous groups to hammer home their point that they were Queen + Paul Rodgers, rather than with. Similarly, ’90s rockers Alice In Chains have soldiered on with William DuVall as original frontman Layne Staley died of a drug overdose in 2002. Like Journey did last year with their platinum Revelation, AIC’s latest album Black Gives Way To Blue hit #5 on the Billboard charts.

Could anyone truly replace Steven Tyler in Aerosmith? Of course not. When guitarist Joe Perry was gone from the band between 1979 and 1984, the group experienced a dip in popularity. Imagine what would happen with a Tyler-less line-up? Plus he has always been the singer. Groups that have experienced downtime between singers often were going through a quiet phase (the ’90s comes to mind for many) and were a little younger when it happened and thus have been able to cope with such a transition better. A decade after the departure of original frontman and songwriter Dennis DeYoung, Styx has persevered with vocalist Lawrence Gowan. Guitarist Mick Jones has been the lone original member of Foreigner since singer Lou Gramm departed in 2003, and they had been the two lone original members for years prior. And Perry hasn’t been in Journey since 1996, nor performed live with them since 1987. (And who knows when he’ll reemerge publicly.)

Styx ten years after with frontman Lawrence Gowan (at bottom center).

We should not begrudge a group that wishes to continue once a famous member, usually the frontman, departs. This is their livelihood. They deserve to make a living. And there are people who still want to hear the music, regardless of who sings it, as long as they’re good. The irony that the aforementioned Journey follower did not even know who she would be listening to onstage may be ironic — some casual KISS fans probably do not know that Ace Frehley and Peter Criss are long gone — but the upside of this situation shows how some fans really just want to hear the music. Purists will certainly argue that point and are certainly free not to attend the shows or buy the new albums. In terms of replacing iconic singers, the cliché business concept “what the market will bear” comes to mind — even if some people think the results are unbearable.