Sammy Hagar has responded to Alex Van Halen skipping the “Van Hagar” era in his memoir, calling the lack of acknowledgement “blasphemy” to Eddie’s legacy.
Hagar’s remarks came via an otherwise innocuous Instagram post that saw the Red Rocker nostalgically reflecting on his time in Van Halen. In the original post, featuring a photo from 1991 of Hagar and Eddie heading to the stage, Hagar joked about their choice of fashion at the time before taking a more serious tone when commenters began to compare the David Lee Roth years to Van Hagar.
“No disrespect to Alex but it’s ok to like VH with Sammy, even if he doesn’t anymore,” wrote one commenter, prompting another: “Most purists believe VH ended with DLR.”
Here, Hagar chimed in.
“It could have [ended], my friend, but instead we went on to sell over 50 million records for [a] No. 1 album [then] sold out every building and stadium in the world for a whole decade,” commented Hagar. “That never happened again.”
Then Hagar addressed the absence of the post-DLR era of Van Halen in Alex’s new memoir, Brothers (purchase here).
“Alex is not doing his brother’s musical legacy justice by not acknowledging all the No. 1 albums and some great music Eddie and I wrote together — not Alex — but Eddie and I wrote together,” wrote Hagar. “To not acknowledge [those] 10 years of music is blasphemy to his brother’s musicianship, songwriting and legacy.”
Alex’s book makes no mention of the Hagar years, instead ending just before DLR’s initial exit from the band in 1985. Alex later explained the omission in an interview with Billboard.
“What happened after Dave left is not the same band. … The magic was in the first years,” he said, “when we didn’t know what we were doing; when we were willing to try anything.”
Alex maintained that “the original band was the driving force,” in a more recent interview with the “Bringing It Back to The Beatles” podcast.
“That’s why the book ends in 1984, because that was true rock and roll,” he said. “After that, it became much more — I don’t know; I can’t explain it. But it’s not to say that it was not any good. We always did our best at whatever we were doing, but it wasn’t the same.”
You can see Sammy Hagar’s Instagram post and Alex Van Halen’s recent video interview below.