Area 5150: Sammy Hagar Sees Dead People

Dear Gen Xer,

I was reading Rolling Stone magazine (don’t judge me) when I came upon an article about Sammy Hagar. For those of you who may not know, Sammy Hagar is the singer who replaced David Lee Roth in the band Van Halen, a move that caused plenty of concern amongst teenaged boys in the summer of 1985. Hagar was besieged by letters of complaint, which typically went like this:

Dear Fuckface,

Who the hell do you think you are to replace David Lee Roth? Something something over thirty million records. How many records have YOU sold, asswipe? Something something showmanship. Something something talent. Because if you knew anything you’d know that I listened to Mean Street forty-seven times in a row and all my zits were GONE. How are you going to sing And the Cradle Will Rock? How are you going to sing Jump? Why don’t you jump off a something something or I swear to god I’ll pick up the phone and cancel my Columbia Record Club subscription.

Hagar recorded four albums with Van Halen. They sold 16 million albums and produced plenty of hits, including Love Walks In, When It’s Love, and Why Can’t This Be Love? (And you thought your ex was needy.)

Hagar parted ways with Van Halen in 1995. If you recall, that was right around the time when the ozone layer began to heal.

Hagar went back to making albums no one in their right mind listens to. Van Halen, meanwhile, hired Gary Cherone, frontman for the band Extreme, a move that went about as well as a Sadie Hawkins dance in prison.

Van Halen eventually reunited with David Lee Roth in 2012 for an album called A Different Kind of Truth. Apparently that truth was no one gives a shit. The album sold so poorly, you can’t even find numbers for it in the US. We know it sold 40,000 copies in Canada, which makes perfect sense as Canadian radio is typically besieged by Men Without Hats.

Van Halen’s lackluster sales were buoyed by reunion tours and compilation albums. There was even talk of recording with the great Chris Cornell. But then he died and Eddie died too, and the band’s dream of making new music went the way of the Zune.

Until 2021, that is, when Hagar had a dream:

“[Eddie] had a guitar around his neck and we were having a love fest since we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. And he just started playing this riff, and I started singing.” – Sammy Hagar

Riffs from Eddie?

Riffs from a God?

Riffs from beyond the grave?

“This was one hundred percent a communication from the beyond. There is no question about it. I dream about Eddie all the time, quite honestly.” – Sammy Hagar

The result was Hagar’s brand new song: “Encore, Thank You, Goodnight”.

I was stunned.

Hagar had written a song with the dead. Not only that, but apparently no one in the afterlife could come up with a better title.

I needed to learn more about Hagar’s powers. I wanted to collaborate with dead people, too. How many years have I yearned to work with the magnificent Tiny Tim?

I decided to seek the answers I craved in Hagar’s autobiography, Red.

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“I WAS LYING in bed one night at the Anastasia Street place in Fontana, asleep, dreaming. I saw a ship and two creatures inside of this ship. I couldn’t see their faces. I just knew that there were two intelligent creatures, sitting up in a craft in the Lytle Creek forest area about twelve miles away in the foothills above Fontana. And they were connected to me, tapped into my mind through some kind of mysterious wireless connection. I was kind of waking up. They said, in their communication to each other, no words spoken, “Oh. He’s waking up. We’ve got to go.” They fired off a numerical code, but it was not of our numerical system. There was a split second where I was still seeing everything, and then it was over, like someone pulled the cord or whatever.”

This is an astonishing revelation, and one that raises a couple of questions. First of all, who on earth wants to live in Fontana? Secondly, if the aliens “fired off a numerical code” but it wasn’t “of our numerical system”, then how did Hagar know they were numbers in the first place?

I found my answer a bit further down:

“I started looking up in the night sky, sifting through my dreams more often, looking for patterns, breaking things down, and reading books. In the back of the yard was an old, abandoned chicken coop. It wasn’t even on the property, but next to the driveway, a dilapidated shed with a roof ready to collapse. One day I decided to check it out and see what was inside. The door came off in my hands. Inside there was nothing, except for a dirty, fucked-up trunk. I opened it and the only thing in the trunk was a book on numerology. I’ve always been a bit of a mathematician.”

Well, of course. How could I forget? Hagar’s basically Stephen Hawking. OU812 isn’t just the title of a Van Halen album, it’s also the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

“Then I started getting deep into it. I’d add the numbers in my home address to see what it was as a one-digit number. I discovered that if you add 9 to anything, it disappears. 9 + 1 is 10. Back to 1. 9 + 7 is 16 or 7 again. Any numbers divisible by 9 always comes back to 9. Three 9s are 27 and 7 + 2 is 9. It will always come back to nine. Four times 9? 36. 3 + 6 = 9. Whenever you add a nine to anything else, it disappears. That intrigued the hell out of me. It drove me crazy. I went, okay, if you added 999 to 9,999, it’s 9 again. You can go on around the block with nines. It always adds up to 9. But if you add 9 to anything else, it disappears.”

Some may roll their eyes at this, or wish that Hagar would “add a 9” to his temple and do a little “disappearing” of his own, but that is juvenile and extremely insensitive, especially to the person who has to clean up.

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I learned that Hagar experienced the inexplicable all the time.

There was the psychic Miss Kellerman, for example, who offered Hagar the prescient advice of moving to San Francisco. More importantly:

“Don’t cut your hair,” Miss Kellerman said. “It looks very good under lights.”

I also learned that Eddie Van Halen wasn’t the only dead person Hagar had dreamed about. There was his manager, Ed Leffler, who visited Hagar in a dream before passing away the following morning. The same thing happened with Hagar’s father, who appeared in a dream, drunk and in his twenties, before Hagar was awakened minutes later and told that his father had passed away. Then there was session guitarist Scotty Quick, whom Hagar had worked with while recording in England:

“One night he came to me in my dream and I told him off, but he was vague, hard to reach, and I couldn’t communicate. Next day I found out that he’d OD’d shooting coke in a Union 76 gas-station bathroom. Real quickly, we lined up a new guitarist.”

Not too sentimental, old Hagar, is he, but can you blame the man? All he wants is a good night’s snooze. I’d be cranky too if my sleep was interrupted every time somebody kicked the bucket. I mean rest in peace already, will ya?

Aliens, numbers, and the mounting dead weren’t the only things on Hagar’s mind. There was also the question every rockstar must confront at some point in their career: What’s your favorite color.

“Somewhere it came to me that the color red was my color. That was the magical color. Red was everything. …Red is fuzzy, if you look at it. You light red with a red light, it doesn’t have hard edges, like most colors. It turns into fuzz. It isn’t like a defined circle. It gets deep. It looks soft. Yet it’s aggressive as hell. It’s blood. And it’s energy. It means so many different things. Red is my color. It means everything for me. I dream in red.”

And I dream of dating Helena Bonham-Carter, but you don’t hear me going on about it, do you? Then again, I’m not in tune with the paranormal. Or (sigh) numerology.

“I took it to numerology. R is a 9, E is a 5, D is a 4. Red’s a 9. I became the red/9 guy. That was it. They both mean the same thing. They have a power. Red has a rhythm. I put red as my color, nine as my goal. I want to raise my consciousness to the nine. I changed the name of my publishing company from Big Bang to the Nine Music, wrote the song “Red,” and started dressing in red. I thought this was going to represent what was going on inside of me. If I put on a pair of red pants, red shoes, red shirt, red guitar—that’s Sammy Hagar. I just felt it. I believed it. No one told me to do it. It was what I wanted to do.”

What I wanted to do at this point in the book was review my entire life’s choices. The world’s most powerful computers have proven that violent crime spikes across North America every time Hagar opens his mouth and sings, and yet I couldn’t help but be impressed by what he had accomplished. Hagar hadn’t even joined Van Halen yet and he’d already communicated with aliens from outer space, mastered the realm of numerology, and conquered the captivating spectrum of color. I, on the other hand, have finally figured out how to use the can opener.

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At one point, Hagar decided to live off-grid.

“I had been reading this book The Coming Hard Times by this guy who said the banks were going to collapse, everything was going to fall apart, the bottom’s going to come out of society, and gold was the only thing that would be valued. Paper money would be worth nothing. I really believed this shit.”

Hagar looked for cabins around Nicasio and Big Sur. He stocked up on food and guns and ammo, learned how to kill, skin, and cure animals bigger than your average squirrel. Just when he was about to go full Ted Nugent, Eddie Van Halen called. He asked Hagar if he’d be interested in crushing the dreams of Van Halen fans all around the world.

Hagar decided to table the apocalypse. He knew David Lee Roth was beloved by fans and that he had giant shoes to fill. Not to mention the spandex.

Hagar figured the best way to establish himself was to write great songs. Lucky for him, his voracious appetite for the world’s finest literature led him to a solution:

“I had been reading this book by Ruth Montgomery called Aliens Among Us. She claims to be an automatic writer. She just gets a pencil, closes her eyes, and goes into a trance, and the writing comes through her. The book was about walk-ins, aliens who come and take over your body in your sleep. A person can actually not die and still become a whole different person. They wake up one morning and can’t remember who the hell they were.”

I can relate to Hagar here. There have been plenty of mornings when I’ve woken up and not remembered who I was either. Or where I was, for that matter. And I’d be a different person, too, if an alien took over while I was sleeping. Who’d be the same after all that probing?

Hagar used the “automatic writing” technique (i.e. “I’m gonna get high and fart out some lyrics”) to pen his first Van Halen song: Love Walks In. If you haven’t heard it, allow me to spare you the five or so minutes you would otherwise curse yourself for losing. Imagine a saccharine chord progression (literally any one will do), then pair it with the howls of a constipated banshee. There, now you’ve heard it.

Love Walks In appeared on 5150 – Hagar’s first album with Van Halen. The revamped band kicked off their tour in Shreveport, Louisiana on March 27, 1987. It was a date that Hagar had heard before:

“The ironic thing about that date is that it had been predicted a couple of years before by a psychic named Marshall Lever. …He started by telling me that I was involved in a relationship that I was just finishing. “She was your sister in your past life in Greece,” he said. “You were separated when she was nine and you were eleven, and your parents were killed in a boating accident in the Greek islands. They put her in a convent and you went out on a fishing boat and never returned. You never saw her again, and you missed her. When you saw her and you smelled her…you realized who she was and you didn’t ever want to be away from her again.”

He went on to tell me about Betsy [Hagar’s wife at the time]. “Betsy was also your sister in a past life,” he said, “and you lived in Spain. Neither one of you ever married. You were in love but you never had sex because she was your sister and you lived together your whole life. Betsy was your big sister. Your mother died giving birth to you. Betsy cooked for you, just like your wife, but you never had sex even though you were madly in love. You were an instrument-maker named Crulli, C-R-U-L-L-I.” He spelled it out. “And your instruments can be seen in a museum in Barcelona.””

I couldn’t find anything on this Crulli character. It does seems perfectly clear, however, that the psychic Lever has a fetish. And is it me, or doth Sammy Hagar protest too much when it comes to whether or not he banged his sister in Barcelona? Come on, Sammy, it’s OK! So you served your sister some Poundcake. So you made sure to Finish What Ya Started. It was in another life! Besides, times were different then. Especially with those pervs in Greece and Spain.

It was at the end of Hagar’s session when Lever predicted:

“In eighteen months,” he said, “you’re going to go on a brand-new adventure, very much like what you’re doing now, but different. More powerful, bigger, more like ‘this is it.’ That’s when he gave me that date. He said it was going to start on that date.”

“It”, of course, was joining Van Halen. And the date Lever gave was March 27, 1987 – the fateful day in Shreveport when the band began their first of many tours.

The new Van Halen laughs as a fanbase weeps

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The adventure Lever predicted began 38 years ago.

Now Hagar’s back with a brand new song from his old dead guitarist. You can hear how much Hagar missed his pal in the lyrics to Encore, Thank You, Goodnight:

Thank you for the music
Thank you for the song
Thank you for the visit
What took so long?

There’s gratitude for you, huh? Not only does Eddie dust off his bones and plug in his six-string, now he’s got Hagar breaking his balls for not resurrecting fast enough.

“I definitely believe in God and, even if I didn’t, I believe that you should. People have to believe in something. Without belief in something, you’re just going in circles. I do believe in spiritual things. I believe in the unknown. I believe in God and I believe in UFOs and aliens and all that mystery. I’m a big sucker for all of that.”

You can be a sucker, too, by catching Hagar at his current residency in Las Vegas.

Experience the joy of being overcharged. Savor the damage you’ll do to your cochlea. Marvel at the sight of Hagar butchering a variety of hits from the past.

Last but not least, gasp in awe as he performs his new song - direct from the afterlife - the timing of which has nothing to do (I mean, seriously, how dare you?) with Hagar’s greedy, last-ditch attempt to Dance the Night Away.

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