Much Is Now Clear

Sammy Hagar, solo guitarist and vocalist as well as a member of Van Halen for several years in the 1980s and 90s, says that his brain has been tapped into by aliens.

Hagar makes the claim in an interview about his new biography, Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock. Hagar also apparently, in talking about his time with Van Halen, takes some shots at his predecessor, David Lee Roth. I remember holding the opinion along with other Serious Music Fans, during the band's most MTV-ish heydey of the mid -80s, that guitarist Eddie Van Halen's artistry was obscured by Roth's clownish antics. Although I elevated myself to Serious Music Snob by saying that Hagar wouldn't really help much, I still saw the move as an overall positive one.

Of course, the trajectory of the band post-Roth, as it charted several singles but never matched its 1984 level of ubiquity, demonstrated where I and my fellow Serious Music people were wrong. It's hard to have a clown act if you get rid of the clown, and guitar wizardry doesn't sell very well if its mired in the middle of sludgy songs shrieked out by an aging party animal with a mop on his head.

We should have known, of course. Diamond Dave wrote: "Whatta snappy little mammy gonna keep a pappy happy/And accompany me, to the ends of the earth, ah yeah." Sammy Hagar wrote: "...only time will tell/If we stand the test of time."

Anyway, HarperCollins Publishers must have figured the world had too many trees, using its pop-culture centered imprint It Books to offer us Hagar's version of his story. So we can all learn that Sammy Hagar believes his brain was experimented upon by aliens.

PS -- I forgot add that Sammy Hagar was a founding member of the hard rock band Montrose. I don't know why I'm supposed to mention it, since the only two albums he recorded with them charted at #133 and #65 and the second of those represents the peak of Montrose fame. But every story I read online about this item pointed it out so apparently I need to also.