SAMMY HAGAR: I Will Never Tour With DAVE LEE ROTH Again

Sammy Hagar, who, along with fellow ex-VAN HALEN frontman David Lee Roth, spent the summer co-headlining the laboriously titled "Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth Tour 2002: Song for Song, the Heavyweight Champs of Rock and Roll", is once again dissing Diamond Dave's oversize ego, deteriorating singing voice and vanishing hairline.

In an interview with Guitar World magazine, Hagar reflects on the experience of touring with Roth and vows never to work with him again.

"I think it was pretty good, but it could have been a heck of a lot better," Hagar said of the aforementioned tour. "Dave's an unreasonable guy. He's a not a cool guy, he's not a fun guy. He's got this persona, this image like he's Mr. Party — but the guy's Mr. Fuckin' Uptight! [laughs] I mean, you can't even imagine.

"Boy, I hate to ever say I'm sorry I did something, so I can't say I'm sorry I did it," Hagar continued. "But I certainly wouldn't do it again, let's put it like that. I spent five years of my life with the WABORITAS, building my audience, catering only to them and trying to shed myself of VAN HALEN. Not because I'm not proud of what I did with them, but I'm not in VAN HALEN anymore. It's time to move on. I thought I'd made so much headway, and then I got out there with Dave. And once I got involved with him, I realized that I was thrown right back into the VAN HALEN arena and all I was was an ex-VAN HALEN singer. The three or four thousand fans who just came to see me each night, they got it. But those seven or eight thousand fringe people that came to see the VAN HALEN singers — not David Lee Roth, because he doesn't have any fans — they didn't get it.

"The whole tour threw me right back into where I had to compete with a guy that I shouldn't have been competing with. Dave doesn't belong with me. Dave belongs on those POISON/RATT tours, which are fine, but you know what you're gettin' — you're going for this Eighties trip. And that's where Dave belongs. When you start puttin' on a platinum wig, wearing spandex bell-bottoms and singing all VAN HALEN shit, doing the classic leap off the drum riser — I mean, he was pretending he was inVAN HALEN. And I'm going, 'Oh, boy, look what I've let my manager and my agent talk me into!' [laughs] Because my first gut was, 'Nah, I don't trust this guy.' And then everybody said, 'Are you crazy? This could be the biggest tour of the summer! By the time you've finished this tour, you'll have tripled your audience!' I started thinking, 'Ah, maybe it'll be fun. Maybe Dave will be cool.' And he wasn't. [laughs] It was great for the fans, but if he'd been cooler, it would have been so much greater."

"I hit on him about [doing a duet onstage] every night for three weeks of the first leg, and he would say, 'Yeah, well, maybe tomorrow night. My throat ain't feeling so good.' I mean, I see now that he's insecure, he's not a great singer, and maybe he didn't want to stand out there and sing with me. But I wasn't about that. I was like, 'Okay, we'll do one of your songs, Dave. I don't give a shit. Let's just give these people a treat and show 'em we're together on this and it's cool, instead of making it such a WWF thing.' He just tried to lower my whole trip, you know? [laughs] Other than that, the shows were awesome."