Sammy Hagar recalled the time his loudmouth ways landed him in trouble with Mick Jones.
The incident took place when Hagar’s solo band opened for Foreigner in 1978, and led to their friendship taking a temporary tumble. As Hagar told Classic Rock in a new interview, the pair had met a few years earlier when Montrose had toured with British rockers Spooky Tooth, which featured Jones at the time.
“We must have done a whole year – 150 shows with those guys,” Hagar said just after inducting Foreigner into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the weekend. “We just hit it off. I dug his guitar sound. I love Spooky Tooth; if you listen to Foreigner, you’ll hear Spooky Tooth in there.”
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Citing the example of Foreigner hit “Feels Like the First Time,” the Red Rocker continued: “They always did the half-time choruses, so you hear a lot of Spooky Tooth in there, and I was a Spooky Tooth fan. When Mick quit, I kept in touch.”
He went on to say that he used to joke with Jones about replacing Foreigner singer Lou Gramm. “I’m going, ‘I sing a lot like him – I’m broke off my ass, man!’” Jones’ reply was: “Me too. You were on the West Coast, I was on the East Coast. I couldn’t afford to fly you out for an audition!’”
But Hagar admitted he’d overdone his traditional big-mouth manner during a radio interview while he was opening act on Foreigner’s Double Vision tour. “We bumped heads one time,” the former Van Halen frontman recalled. “They were starting to get big, and I opened for them, and I killed it. I went on to do an encore and they turned the [house] lights on on me…
Sammy Hagar Talked Trash on Radio While Mick Jones Listened
“I said, ‘Hey, fuck it – I’m doing it anyway.’ And we stayed out and did an encore and really got the people [going] like, ‘Now we gotta get behind Sammy ‘cause he got robbed!’”
He continued: “The next day I’m at a radio station in Detroit because we were there the next night. I’m sitting there talking shit – Sammy ’78, beating my chest. ‘Yeah man, we blew ‘em off the stage. They turned the lights on and we did it anyway…’
“I come walking out of the room and Mick Jones is sitting right there, getting ready to go on next. And he looked at me and just put his head down, and I said, ‘Aw, man. Aw, Mick, y’know…’
“But we patched it up – he ended up producing Van Halen’s 5150 – that’s the only time we had a little rub, really.”