Friday, March 4, 2011

Who's More of A Mess: Charlie or Eddie?

This week did not seem to pass without the publicly de-evolving Charlie Sheen making another deposit in the sound-byte hat ("Winning!"), but our award for biggest mess was actually snatched away from ol' Chas late in the week when Rolling Stone began publishing a multi-part interview with Sammy Hagar to concide with its excerpting parts of his new "memoir" Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock (in stores 3/15) in its upcoming issue (with another public mess Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi on the cover). Hagar's book should actually be called Eddie Van Halen and I Have Unfinished Business And I Am Gunning for his Gonads because the crux of the excerpts center around the very NOT-public disintegration of Hagar's ex-Van Halen mate over the years. Its turns out, alchohol abuse, ego and general batshit behavior is much more destructive when its kept under wraps.


"To be honest, Valerie [Bertinelli] said almost all the same stuff in her book about Ed," the Red Rocker tells RS writer Andy Greene. Yes, we always knew Ed was an asshole -- it's almost expected in his milieu -- but wowie-wow-ow. "He finally invited me over to this giant, extravagant house that he and Valerie had built before she split," Hagar writes. "It looked like vampires lived there. There were bottles and cans all over the floor. The handle was broken off the refrigerator door. There were spider webs everywhere." Eddie's teeth were all black and some appeared to be rotting (shades of Sheen's golden grill!) and he claimed he once "cured" a cavity by pulling out his tooth with a pair of pliers. The kicker? Eddie says he got rid of the tongue cancer he contracted through his incessant cigarette smoking (he claims it was from holding the pick in his mouth onstage all those years) by shaving off pieces of his own tongue and then having it injected into his bloodstream.


Van Halen's subsequent bloated and dysfunctional 2004 reunion tour sounded like no one had learned anything from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's bloated, dysfunctional 1972 tour. We're talking seperate planes, seperate hotel rooms, nary a band meeting save for the actual concerts, Eddie kicking out plane windows and wandering down hotel hallways late at night shrieking Hagar's name (to be honest, we've done that), Eddie only wanting to rehearse the three new songs on their Best Of Both Worlds record and apparently had great difficulty in even relearning his old songs (including, incredibly, his tour-de-force "Eruption"). When they tried to stage and intervention, EVH snarled something akin to: "I gave up my fuckin' family for this lifestyle, you think I'm gonna stop because of you?" (Again, Charlie Sheen this week on rehab attempts: "I'm not ruled by my family. I'm 45 years old with three kids.") Hagar's conclusion: "What a fruitcake."

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