As he prepares to pay tribute to his previous band with this summer season’s Best of All Worlds Tour, Sammy Hagar says he is over the PTSD from the 2004 Van Halen reunion trek — a nightmare expertise that he documented intimately in his memoir Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock.

It was, actually, the twentieth anniversary of that outing — a commercially profitable endeavor that performed 80 reveals over 4 legs between June and November of that 12 months — that impressed this 12 months’s tour. “Mike and I were in Cabo (Wabo), sitting the dressing room drinking some tequila, getting ready to go play some music,” Hagar tells UCR. “Some guy comes in and starts saying, ‘Well, it’s been 20 years since you guys did the reunion tour,’ and I’m going, ‘What the fuck…?’ Mike and I looked at each other and said, ‘Twenty years, wow. Let’s go do this.’ The light bulb just went off. We just high-fived, went on stage and didn’t say nothing to nobody, just started planning this tour, which would be a heavy Van Halen song tour.”

The 2004 tour was Van Halen’s first in six years and its first with Hagar since supporting the Balance album in 1995. Despite a powerful field workplace and a brand new compilation — The Best of Both Worlds with three new songs — previous pressure surfaced, notably over Eddie Van Halen’s substance abuse. Hagar described him within the e-book as “unkempt, hunched over, frighteningly skinny…It was horrible to know a person that was in that kind of shape.” There was occasional combating backstage, and Hagar insisted he wouldn’t go to the stage to begin the present till he knew Van Halen was there already. He and the Van Halen brothers continued to be at odds over Hagar’s promotion of his Cabo Wabo tequila, and it was additionally the tour when the brothers made bassist Michael Anthony a employed touring musician slightly than the full-fledged band member he’d been since Van Halen’s formation; it was solely at Hagar’s insistence that Anthony was a part of the tour in any respect.

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Now, nevertheless, Hagar says that he is “way over it — I don’t even remember it.” He and Eddie Van Halen had reconciled considerably earlier than the latter’s demise in 2020, and Hagar now says that, “As a matter of fact, I miss Eddie so much I would go do that (2004) tour again, just to play with the guy again. I miss the guy. Our creativity when we were on was spectacular.” And he is been reminded of that much more throughout rehearsals for the upcoming tour, which begins July 13 in West Palm Beach, Fla., with Anthony and drummer Jason Bonham, each from Hagar’s The Circle. Joe Satriani, who performs with Hagar and Anthony in Chickenfoot, is on guitar, with Rai Thistlethwayte including keyboards and second guitar when wanted.

Hagar Says Revisiting Old Van Halen Songs Has Been ‘Enlightening’

Hagar has documented the group’s rehearsals on social media, thrilling followers with snippets of returning Van Halen songs corresponding to “The Seventh Seal,” “Summer Nights,” “Judgement Day,” “5150” and others. The reveals may also embrace favorites from Montrose, Chickenfoot and Hagar’s solo profession. “Dissecting those (Van Halen) songs that we wrote together is such an enlightening experience,” Hagar says. “It’s like, ‘Omigod, we wrote these songs! These songs are classic! These songs are lifers.’ They’re just great stuff. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, this is a tribute to Eddie Van Halen.’ No, it’s a tribute to Eddie Van Halen, Sammy Hagar, David Lee Roth, Michael Anthony and Alex Van Halen’s music. That’s what it’s a tribute to — the music.”