It appears that David Lee Roth just cannot resist having another pop at his fellow former Van Halen frontman Sammy Hagar, and this time it has a supernatural edge!
Like two ageing grizzly bears well past their prime but refusing to retire gracefully, David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar have always waged a very personal and embittered war against one another.
In the blue corner is Diamond Dave, the flamboyant verbal virtuoso, martial arts expert, and ladies’ man whose rock just keeps on rolling. And in the red corner is former boxer and Roth’s replacement in Van Halen, Sammy Hagar.
Roth and Hagar’s beef is an ancient and highly entertaining one. Roth pretty much had Hagar on the ropes in the mid-’80s with a flurry of witty jabs and below-the-belt cheap shots, but Roth never quite managed to deliver the knockout blow that would silence his portly and frizzy-haired replacement for good.
On top of his game and posturing like a perfumed peacock, Roth once vowed that, unlike Hagar, he’d never have to sing one of the other’s songs in concert. And we all know how that ended.
Like a meaty and tenacious bull, Hagar soaked up all of Roth’s punishing jibes and turned the tables in the later rounds. Hagar’s defining moment of triumph came when he repeatedly taunted Roth to duel with him on stage during their 2002 co-headlining tour. Roth repeatedly refused.
Yet, now all these years later and things have turned a little nasty once more.
Classic Rock reports that while rocking the masses at his recent Hampton Casino show, Roth remarked that Hagar’s 2022 claim that Eddie Van Halen visited him in a dream and helped him write a song is a bit beyond the pale.
Although Hagar claims the song in question, “Encore, Thank You, Goodnight,” was built around an Eddie Van Halen lick, the dead guitarist never received a writing credit.
Perhaps leading Roth to mock the entire tale at his recent gig.
The rocker explained to the audience, “One of my esteemed colleagues, he’s a contemporary, he’s got a great voice, he’s got a great catalogue.
“You all know Sammy Hagar, right? He’s got a great voice. And Sammy, aloud, he described to the media about six weeks ago that the ghost of Eddie Van Halen visited him and graced him with a song that he memorised and then went home and recorded. It’s on the Internet.”
“I don’t know what the odds are, but last night the ghost of Eddie Van Halen visited me at the f**king hotel room. I was watching the weather report, and he came in and he was laughing. His f**king ghost was laughing.
“I said, ‘What did you do now?’ He said, ‘Dave, Dave… Dave, you know that song I gave Hagar?’ I said, ‘What now?’ He said, ‘It’s actually [Iron Butterfly’s 1968 classic] In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida backwards. Don’t f**ing tell him.'”
The jury is still out on what former Van Halen frontman the ghost of the legendary guitarist actually visited, but he certainly seems to be having a busy time of it in the afterlife!
