In a new Variety interview, Sammy Hagar touched on his struggle to reconnect with Eddie before his passing.
When asked, Sammy said:
“I heard he was in bad shape and I wanted to reach out; I finally said, ‘I’m just calling him,’” he said. “I was calling his brother, I was calling his manager, I was calling his friends, and I’d say, ‘Hey, tell Ed, give him my phone number. Tell him if he ever wants to talk to me, I really, really want to talk it out, help him and see what I can do,’… but they never got it done.”
It was comedian George Lopez, who finally put the former bandmates back in touch.
Sammy recalls:
“[H]e said, ‘Sammy, Eddie’s in bad shape, he loves you brother, you need to reach out.’ I said, ‘Give me his f*cking number and I’ll make sure I call him.’” When they finally made contact, he added, “it was like, boom, we were good. It was a beautiful thing.”
On the reunion tour, Sammy said:
“They were looking at doing the reunion tour with everybody, which is the way it had to be.”
He continued:
“You know, you go see just me, I’ll sing some of the Dave songs, but I wouldn’t ever sing enough… and then [Roth] can’t sing my songs, so they never heard [all] the Van Halen hits.” Asserting that just wasn’t “fair,” he added.
“You know, there’s always a b*tch. Every time we do a reunion, whichever one it was, it was a b*tch. But yeah, that would have been wonderful.”
He concluded:
“Let’s go give the fans the biggest band in the world, you know what I mean? You don’t get bigger than Van Halen, and the fans deserve to see it all, hear every song.