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Sammy Hagar has suggested he will “never play again” with Alex Van Halen more than 20 years after they completed their last tour together.
“I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan. I see David Gilmour saying: ‘I’ll never play with Roger Waters again,’ and I know what he means,” the 78-year-old told Classic Rock in a recent interview. “That’s how I feel about Alex Van Halen. They’re negative people.”
Hagar told Rolling Stone last year that he and his Van Halen bandmate hadn’t spoken in 21 years.
“I hate to say it, but I had a dream about Alex the other night, man,” he told the magazine last April. “It was crazy. And it was really intense. I was like, ‘Are you mad at me, man? If—? Now just tell me what’s wrong with you. What do I do? Just tell me.’
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Van Halen members Michael Anthony, Eddie Van Halen, Sammy Hagar and Alex Van Halen in 1985. (Ann Summa/Getty Images)
Alex Van Halen didn’t even mention Hagar by name in his 2024 memoir “Brothers,” about his relationship with Van Halen co-founder Eddie Van Helen, who died in 2020.
When the interviewer suggested that Alex was hurt by Hagar writing about Eddie’s personal problems in his personal book, the Red Rocker disagreed.
“And I had this conversation with several people, including them [former VH manager] Irving Azoff,” he said at the time. “I asked him, ‘What’s the problem?’ And some people have said to me, ‘Oh, Cabo Wabo. At one point, Van Halen, when you were building, you all had a hand in that. And then they didn’t want it anymore when it was losing money, and they gave it to you, and you turned it around and made hundreds of millions of dollars with it. And they are angry. Alex is angry about that.’
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He said his response was: “How the f— could be angry about that? They gave me a bad thing, walked out on me, and left me with it. And they made me pay them back in case I got sued and lost everything. They made me sign very quickly. And I’ll go, ‘I hope not.’
Sammy Hager hasn’t spoken to Alex Van Halen in over 20 years. (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic; Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage)
The “I Can’t Drive 55” singer told Rolling Stone that she thinks Alex is mad at her “because I’m out, with Mike. [Anthony] and I’m out doing it, and he can’t. He is not a singer. He’s not a guitar player. He is not really the leader of the group. And it looks like he doesn’t want to play drums anymore or he can’t play drums anymore, and he won’t be able to write a new record.”
“Alex was not the songwriter in the band,” he continued. “He was the drummer. Eddie and I wrote the songs. Dave [Lee Roth] and Eddie wrote the songs, and so we could go out and do them. And I think that really bothers him that Mike and I are still there doing it. I would be sad. If I put myself in his shoes, I’ll be sad if I can’t do it anymore.”
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Hagar, who replaced Roth as Van Halen’s lead singer in 1985, told Classic Rock in an interview this week that he is very fond of his time with the band.
“Since Eddie passed away and since Alex sold his drum kit, I feel more comfortable leaning into my Van Halen time, even playing a few old songs,” he said. “Because frickin’ Mike Anthony is in the band I feel good about playing a lot of Van Halen stuff, because nobody’s ever going to hear it again. And that was a big part of my job, and everybody’s job, for god’s sake. It was the biggest band in the world.”
Hagar previously feuded with Eddie, but the former collaborators reunited before the Van Halen founder died in 2020 of a stroke following a battle with cancer.
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“Eddie was the nicest guy I ever met when I first joined that band,” Hagar recalled in Classic Rock. “He was a genius, nobody looked at him and said: ‘Wow, f—ing Eddie Van Halen’, but it never got to his head. He just drank too much – he had an addictive personality. I guess you could say that drugs and alcohol and fame and fortune came to him, but that took a long time.”
The Red Rocker told Fox News Digital that he and Eddie reconciled a few months before his death.
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“To be able to talk to Eddie and have a good rapport with him on the script, it means everything to me,” Hagar said. “If he had died and we wouldn’t have said ‘I love you’ to each other, I would have been very sad.”
He continued, “I couldn’t talk to you about it. So that means a lot to me. And it means a lot, I think, to me to feel good about talking about being in Van Halen now. Because I feel like we buried the hatchet. Otherwise, I’d be saying, ‘Well, those people.’ Because, you know, I was crazy. I was injured. And it’s very important that we connect.”
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Hagari also told Fox News Digital about her difficulties with Roth.
“David is a stranger to me,” he said. “We’re oil and water. We just don’t turn. I mean, I tried. I thought it would be really cool if he and I were friends. It would be really cool if he and I went out with a big band and did all those famous Van Halen songs together,
