Sammy Hagar revealed that Alex Van Halen demanded that he sign a contract before they played music for the first time in a new 95.5 KLOS interview.
“It was so honest and humble, it reminded me of Montrose. I walked into Eddie’s studio, I had a suit on – not an uptight suit – I was all dressed up cool…When I walked in, Eddie was not in there, the engineer guy Don Landy was there, the place was a junkyard – beer cans, and whiskey bottles, cigarette butts, guitars laying everywhere!
It was so filthy dirty! I walked in and thought, ‘Wow, I thought these guys were rich! Can’t day afford a maid?’ Here comes Alex [Van Halen], he’s got a beer in his hand and a cigarette, Mike [Anthony, bass] was there as well, and Ed comes up later with shades on, really wrinkled clothes, he just pulled them out of the suitcase, I guess…
But they were so humble and shy. I was intimidating them, maybe because I got that damn suit on looking like a lawyer. I said, ‘Let’s play some music.’ And then Alex goes, ‘You gotta sign this before we start playing music.’ I looked at it, he had some legal document with him, I said, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’
He was trying to be all managerial and legal, it was just funny. Looking back at how we all were the first time we all got together, it was hilarious! We were all intimidated, we didn’t know what to do, so I said, ‘Come on, let’s just play some music.’ And Ed says, ‘Yeah!’ We plugged in, Eddie started playing the riff to ‘Summer Nights.’
He showed me the guitar he just got, he goes, ‘Check this guitar. You can adjust it’ – I forgot what it was, it was this special guitar, nobody could play shit because you had to do so many things. He starts playing ‘Summer Nights,’ I just went, ‘Woah!’ And I started singing the lyrics, I just made it up, Alex goes, ‘Yeah!’ And we played for about 10 hours without stopping.”
