Where ‘All’ Began
Sammy Hagar’s roots are firmly planted in the Inland Empire
They say, “If you remember the ’ s, you weren’t there,” but newly minted Hollywood Walk of Fame honoree Sammy Hagar not only remembers the ’ s, but the ’ s as well. As someone who grew up in that same era in Hagar’s hood, the former hometown of America’s biggest steel mill west of the Mississippi and birthplace of the Hells Angels — Fontana — I can attest to the veracity of Hagar’s crystalclear total recall.
Now a bustling metropolis (well, bustling mostly with logistic centers aka shipping warehouses,) back in the ’ s Fontana had a population of just under , and Kaiser Steel had a payroll of about that same number. It was more “Deer Hunter” than “Surf ’s Up,” with a richly diverse blue-collar working-class hamlet of transplanted Rust Belt Slovenians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians as well as Dust Bowl refugees, Black people and Latinos.
The story of the “Red Rocker,” Hagar, is the story of a West Coast artist, who may go south to make great tequila, or north to vibe with the ’ s and ’ s Bay Area hipsters or swing west to join the boys from Pasadena in Van Halen, but his soul is Pacific Ocean Blue.
Most important of all, Hagar — whose career not only includes stints in great bands like Montrose and Van Halen and a successful restaurant chain and tequila brand — has roots planted in the soil that once featured bounteous citrus groves, almond and peach orchards and sprawling grape vineyards. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer has ample, sharply recollected fond memories of his Fontana (aka Fontucky) youth and his musical coming of age there.
“I loved growing up in Fontana” says the seemingly eternally ebullient Hagar. “If you think about it, it’s got an incredible location: an hour to the mountains, to Joshua Tree, to the beach, to Hollywood. My friends and I used to pool our gas money and head out to all those places. I loved the mountains in the summer and the desert in the
winter. I started out as a greaser but then I got hip and became a hodad. I got white shoes and white jeans and started to spend my time at the beach.”
With two older sisters, the pre-teen Hagar joined the s rock and roll revolution.
“I got caught up in Elvis,” Hagar recalls. “I had a paper route, and I bought my first single, which was Elvis’ ‘Big Hunk of Love.’ I didn’t even have a record player! I just stared at the label! My big sisters used to comb out my hair and I pretend I was Elvis.”
But then the British Invasion kicked into high gear. “The Beatles led the British Invasion, but what really got me was when the Rolling Stones hit. They looked like tough guys from Fontana.
Then, “somebody said, ‘Let’s start a band’ and pretty soon we had our set of seven or eight songs, which included a couple of surf songs for the locals. But I was also a soul music guy. I was into James Brown and Hendrix. And I actually saw Otis Redding at the Monterey Pop Festival. I went there, not to see the rock groups, except maybe Eric Burdon, but I wanted to see Otis!”
As we compare notes on our teen years in the Inland Empire, my own recall kicks in and I realize that before I saw Hagar with his band the Justice Brothers at the Night Club in San Bernardino, I caught his act at a Battle of the Bands in the mid
s at a Fontana Shopping Center, when he was fronting a soulful combo colorfully called the Mobile Home Blues Band. “Our dream,” Hagar recalls, “was to live in a motor home and drive up and down the coast playing our music.”
In those days, everywhere Hagar turned, there was an influence that could get the future Red Rocker’s motor running.
Digging deeper, Hagar delineates the fine points of s rock iconography.
“‘Meet the Beatles’ changed the world, but it was the Stones for me. They changed the way I looked. Every time I joined a band, I wanted to be Keith AND Mick. Then, in my heart, I wanted to be Jimi Hendrix. Then I wanted to be Jeff Beck, but not the later-era Beck. That guy was too good. I can’t play like that. I wanted to be the Jeff Beck Group Jeff Beck. AND Rod Stewart. The two guys from that album ‘Truth.’ And I rode that bus until I heard Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and I realized how important lyrics are. And then I started writing my own music.”
Hagar, one of hard rock’s preeminent showmen, makes a surprising admission about his softer side.
“Around the time of Dylan, I also got turned onto Donovan and to be honest, I was more of a Donovan guy than a Dylan guy. Donovan had the same feelings as I had about lost love and had a romantic streak I identified with. I actually cut a version of his song ‘Young Girl Blues’ on my first solo album. I’ve met him and I still love his music. He’s a great poet.”
Once Hagar split from Southern California and took his act up the coast to the Bay Area, he blended well into the Haight-ashbury peace and love scene.
“The Grateful Dead were playing in the park for free and I wanted to be part of that. I became a hippie. I could sleep on people’s floors. No problem! I had my guitar and I wanted to play and sing, so I fit right in, except I was never a heavy drug guy.”
Soon, Hagar put away the love beads as success and fame first beckoned when he was invited to join guitar virtuoso Ronnie Montrose’s band Montrose on Warner Bros. Records.
As his time in Montrose drew to a close in the late s and Hagar was segueing into a solo career, he found a new music hero who combined the raw soul of Hagar’s rhythm and blues heroes, the sharp edginess of Dylan and the deep, thoughtful romanticism of Donovan: Irish soul legend Van Morrison.
“Then it was Van Morrison,” says Hagar. That’s who I wanted to be. Bowie came and went, but Van remains. One of my best songs, which I just wrote recently, ‘Father
“Our dream was to live in a motor home and drive up and down the coast playing our music.” Sammy Hagar
Time,’ really has my Van Morrison influence all over it.”
Hagar explains an important aspect of his personality that has played a key role in his continual growth and evolution as an artist: “I’m a white light, positive energy guy. I’m not bitter, I’m not angry.
“When I saw the Sex Pistols at the Winterland [in ] cutting themselves, spitting on each other, they scared me. I couldn’t be farther away in outlook. But I immediately thought ‘This must be the future.’ What I think went wrong was that they were discovered too early. They needed to develop more. But what mattered was the ‘You’re all full of shit’ rawness. That was what they were selling, and it was simple and real.”
By the time the Seattle grunge got the rock music world all shook up in the late s, Hagar was the lead singer of Van Halen, one of the world’s biggest bands, but he was open to the sounds and felt a kinship with the young West Coast artists who, like him, were trying to express themselves through the wonderfully powerful medium of rock and roll.
“Kurt Cobain had a profound influence on me. As soon as I heard and saw grunge, it was like ‘I’m a Fontana guy. LET’S GO.’”
“Cobain said in interviews that his first concert was Sammy Hagar at the Tacoma Dome. But when grunge really hit, a lot of the young guys coming up were throwing rocks and we were one of the biggest bands in the world. But it was easy for me to go back to my roots, playing barefoot and in shorts, not all dressed up like when we went the wayward way! I saw Alice in Chains and said, ‘Let’s take them on tour with us.’”
More than the music perhaps, the tragedy of Cobain had a profound impact on Hagar, whose self-described “white light” outlook never blinds him to the realities of life learned early, where the young Hagar faced personal darkness in sunny Fontana.
In his autobiography, “Red,” Hagar vividly details his hardscrabble early days when his family’s very existence was threatened by the raging alcoholism of his ex-boxer father. I suspect that the pungent blossoms of my memories of the long-gone Fontana orchards may not be as romantically remembered by Hagar.
Hagar’s mother had to drive the kids into the protective cover of the orange groves to hide from the violent man whose life ended drunk and hand-cuffed in the back of a Fontana police car.
The tough love anthem “Don’t Tell Me (What Love Can Do)” is Sammy’s painful, yet moving elegy for Cobain and a potent example of how Hagar’s personal songlike writing canon contains a lot more than Sammy’s better-known shots-til-you-drop Southern California paeans to puberty and partying:
It’s OK, I’ll do what I want/i can drive/i can shoot a gun in the streets/ Score me some heroin./i can jump/ Be the sacrifice/ Bear the cross just like Jesus Christ/and I dont wanna hear/what love can do.
Those words were written in a troubled time in Hagar’s life, when the speeding Van Halen megaband train derailed.
every other turn in Hagar’s long and winding California road, this one led to some incredible successes, many of which seem to only be growing in a multitude of musical adventures and business initiatives. One of the most exciting, to this former IE kid at least, is Stage Red, Sammy’s new theater in Fontana.
Revisiting Fontana with Hagar is a blast, but revisiting Hagar’s body of work yields a rich and newfound appreciation for the depth of feeling and ambitious, restless energy of a California artist who even had a hit record about not accepting any speed limit other than his own.
In his late s, is Mr. “I Can’t Drive ” slowing down?
It doesn’t look that way. Sammy’s Best of All Worlds tour, which features Hagar along with rock superstars Joe Satriani, Michael Anthony and Jason Bonham, slams into the Kia Forum in Inglewood this summer. If you’re keeping track, that’s nearly ¢ years and exactly ¢ miles from the Fontana Square Shopping Center Battle of the Bands where “All” started.
“[Kurt] Cobain said in interviews that his first concert was Sammy Hagar at the Tacoma Dome. But when grunge really hit, a lot of the young guys coming up were throwing rocks.” Sammy Hagar