Sammy Hagar has stopped asking politely. Ten days after Alex Van Halen called him “a complete idiot,” the former Van Halen singer used a SiriusXM appearance to issue a direct public challenge to his old bandmate: say what the problem is, out loud, and let everyone judge it.
Hagar made the remarks on the September 17 episode of Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk. He opened with a joke — “Guilty as charged, first of all. I’m probably the most successful idiot on the planet,” he said, as transcribed by Blabbermouth — and then turned serious in a way he mostly has not before.
“I want to call Alex out and say, ‘Dude, we all know, you act like there was never a Sammy Hagar,'” he told Trunk. “You act like there was never a ‘Van Hagar.’ We sold 40-some million records, four number-one albums, and you just scratch that off of your brother’s legacy, saying, ‘No, that never happened.’ You don’t even want to acknowledge it. That’s deep. That’s weird. That’s not right, for Eddie, for me, for Mikey, for anybody.”
How it got to this point
The insult that set this off was almost incidental. Alex Van Halen was being interviewed by Brazilian journalist Marcelo Vieira — who translated the drummer’s 2024 memoir Brothers into Portuguese — for the magazine Roadie Crew, and was asked about the autobiographies written by Van Halen’s two most famous frontmen. He was warm about David Lee Roth’s Crazy From the Heat, calling it “quite fun” and a faithful reflection of Roth’s humor. Asked about Hagar’s 2011 book Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, he was not: “I don’t know what he wrote, and I don’t wanna know. In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.”
Red is the wound underneath all of this. In it, Hagar described Eddie Van Halen during the band’s 2004 reunion tour in unsparing physical detail and wrote at length about the guitarist’s drinking. Hagar has since said he regrets that material: after Eddie’s death in 2020 he said he would now “only put the good of Eddie Van Halen” in the book, while maintaining that what he published was accurate. Eddie disputed that in his lifetime, telling Rolling Stone in 2015 that a portion of Hagar’s account was “embellished.”
Hagar joined Van Halen in 1985 as Roth’s replacement and fronted four consecutive US number-one albums — 5150, OU812, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge and Balance. Brothers does not mention him. It ends in 1984, before he arrived, and skips the Hagar years, the brief Gary Cherone era and the band’s later reunion with Roth entirely.
Two explanations that don’t quite match
Alex has given more than one account of why the book stops where it does, and they sit awkwardly together. Promoting Brothers, he told USA Today that “for me, the spirit of the band ended in 1984.” Elsewhere he framed it as timing rather than judgment, saying the early years were “true rock and roll” and that what came later was “for another book.” To Billboard he was blunter about why he has refused to take part in Hagar’s Van Halen-celebrating tour: “I’m not interested. They’re not doing the band justice.”
Hagar reads all of it the same way. In an April 2025 Rolling Stone interview he offered his own theory — that Alex resents that he and former bassist Michael Anthony are still out playing the songs while Alex is not. “He’s not a singer. He’s not a guitar player. He is not really a band leader,” Hagar said then. Asked about Alex’s documented health problems, he softened: “Yeah, I’d say so. And I’m okay with it.”
The two men have not spoken in roughly 25 years. Hagar has publicly floated several candidate reasons — the book, or Cabo Wabo, the Cabo San Lucas cantina the band launched together in 1990. Hagar bought out his bandmates’ stakes when it ran into trouble, turned it around, and later sold the associated tequila brand for $91 million. He says he has asked people around the band, including former manager Irving Azoff, and never got a straight answer.
The new grievance, and what happens next
What appears to have sharpened Hagar’s tone this week is not the insult but Alex’s latest release. The drummer has a new photo book, Van Halen, published by Genesis Publications and packaged with a previously unreleased early demo. It carries a list price of $475.
“Alex wants to just keep releasing all this old stuff and these photographs and charging people for old pictures that you could find on the internet,” Hagar said. “You should be putting them out there for free. To me, he’s doing a lot of stuff wrong for the legacy of Van Halen.”
Hagar also recalled an episode from when Wolfgang Van Halen joined the band, saying Alex had old photographs on the band’s website altered to replace Anthony with Wolfgang before fan backlash reversed it. He offered it as evidence of a pattern: “Don’t pretend like something never happened.”
Then, having spent several minutes calling his former bandmate out, Hagar undercut the whole thing. Asked what he would do if Alex walked into his Las Vegas residency, he did not hesitate. “Alex? Oh, come in. Oh, 100 percent, I’ll grab him, I’ll kiss him right on the lips. … I’d treat him like the person that I used to love and I could still love.”
He also said he has given up expecting it. “I don’t really care anymore. If he doesn’t wanna do it — he’s the one that has a problem.”
Hagar’s Best of All Worlds residency, with Michael Anthony, Joe Satriani and Kenny Aronoff, resumes in Las Vegas this week with four more shows scheduled over the next fortnight. Alex Van Halen has not responded publicly to any of it.
