Hagar vows to rejoin Van Halen

Sammy Hagar vows he’ll work with Van Halen again – even if it takes them until their 90 years old.

He tells RollingStone.com: “I would love to make another record with them. I’d say the odds are up there around 90 percent.

“That’s if Eddie was totally cool and back to the guy I used to know – or a new guy. Just not the guy I knew the last time. I wouldn’t do it if he’s like that. But if Eddie got his life together, which it seems he has judging by the pictures I’ve seen, then definitely.

“There’s no rumour. There’s no reason to say, ‘Yes, I’ve got this vibe going,’ and right now there’s zero chance. When my book comes out it’ll be zero for a while. But some day, before we all die, fuck yeah. We might be in our nineties though.”

In a passage from Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock Hagar describes going back to work with the Van Halen guitarist in 2003: “This was one of the sweetest guys I’d ever met. He had turned into the weirdest person I’d ever seen – crude, rude and unkempt. He looked like he hadn’t bathed in a week and he certainly hadn’t changed his clothes in at least that long. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He had a giant overcoat and army pants, tattered and ripped, held up with a piece of rope.

“I’d never seen him so skinny. He was missing a number of teeth and the ones he had left were black. His boots were so worn out he had gaffer tape wrapped round them – and his big toe still stuck out.”

Hagar has no regrets about saying what he wants in the book, maintaining it would be worse not to do that.

“If you choose to write an autobiography, you only have one shot,” he says. “If you don’t tell it all you sit there for the rest of your life telling stories and people are like, ‘Well, why wasn’t that in the book?’ I don’t want to have to do that.”

And the singer is at pains to ensure people read through the mud-slinging and understand how positive he feels about his time in Van Halen: “The last two years were really tough and everyone immediately goes to the dirt. But quite honestly, being in the band was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

“We had the greatest relationship and wrote some of the greatest music. We had five number-one albums and sold 50 or 60 million records. I wouldn’t trade it for anything and I’ll take the dirt right with it.”

Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock is published on 3/15/11