Sammy Hagar Responds to Alex Van Halen’s “Complete Idiot” Comment: “What’s Your Problem?”

Sammy Hagar appeared on Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM, where he responded to Alex Van Halen‘s recent comments calling the singer a “complete idiot.”

In a recent interview, Alex was asked what he thought of Hagar’s 2011 memoir Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, and answered, “I don’t know what he wrote, and I don’t wanna know. In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.”

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In the book, Hagar had exposed some of the “dark side” of Eddie Van Halen’s life, an aspect of the memoir that the Red Rocker expressed regret over following the guitarist’s death in 2020.

When asked by Trunk what he thought was the root of Alex Van Halen’s issue with him, Hagar said, “I don’t know what Alex’s problem is. If I wanted to get into a tug-of-war again, but you know, there’s so much clickbait going around now. It turns on you every time. And I’m always honest. I tell the truth. And I have never lied in my book. None of those are lies. Those are all truth. All those things happened. Whether or not anyone’s happy about some of the stuff that they did that, you know, that I brought up to the people in the book, I don’t know.”

After some nudging from Trunk, Hagar elaborated:

“I don’t know. This is why I’m saying, this what I was getting to is that my only question is, I want to call Alex out and say, “Dude, we all know. You know, you act like there was never a Sammy Hagar. You act like there was never a Van Halen. We sold 40-some million records, four No. 1 albums, and you just scratched that off of your brother’s legacy, saying,’No, that never happened. You don’t even want to acknowledge it.’ That’s deep. That’s weird. That’s not right for Eddie, for me, for Mike, for anybody. All the things he does, it’s like, why? So, I’m asking Alex, like, why? Come clean. What’s your problem? Just come out and say it. Is it the book? Say it. Is it Cabo Wabo? Say it. You know, maybe if I knew what the problem was, I could fix it. But right now, he just acts like there’s not a problem. It just never happened. He’s trying to erase. It’s almost like, you remember when [Wolfgang Van Halen, Eddie’s son] joined the band, Alex took all the old catalog, all the records, all the photos that were on their website, and Photoshopped Wolfie in and took [Michael Anthony, Van Halen bassist] out. He did that for about two weeks, and then the people gave him so much shit he fixed it. This is as stupid as that to me. It’s like, dude, don’t pretend like something never happened, you know?

And something’s wrong. Like I said, it’s deeper. It shouldn’t be. That’s all. It just shouldn’t be. Like, just tell me why. So, this is my thing. So, Eddie, so I want to hire you. I want to know how much you charge an hour to see if you can mediate this thing. See, you know, this is like, you know you’re good at this stuff. Like, at least we can dig down and find out the real reason, and Alex needs to say it, not from the fans. The fans got all kinds of reasons. Every time I get into that, it’s awesome, though. But, you know, a lot of people say the right thing. A lot of people do know that it’s not right, you know. But I’m not trying to cause a conflict. I’m trying to fix something, you know. Whether Alex wants to play drums ever again is his business, you know. Whether he wants to, you know, just keep releasing all this old stuff for these photographs and all this stuff, and charging people for old pictures that you can find on the internet and stuff, even if they’re just his, it’s like he should be putting them out there for free. To me, he’s doing a lot of stuff wrong for the legacy of Van Halen. And the one that is my business is I just want to know why. Just come clean. Tell the people, tell me, make a public statement why, and then we can figure out whether you’re right or wrong, and whether we can fix it or not. And if we can’t fix it, then just go about my business. It’s all good. It’s not changing my life. And it doesn’t really even bother me anymore because I think the fans really know it’s wrong. You know, they’re starting to, you know, I see a lot of negative stuff on what he’s doing. But it would be really fun for you to try to figure it out.”

Eddie Trunk then offered to arbitrate a truce between the two if the opportunity arises.

Sammy Hagar is currently set to play a five-night residency in Las Vegas beginning tonight, September 18th, with his “Best of All Worlds” band featuring Michael Anthony, Joe Satriani, and Kenny Aronoff. Get tickets here.

Listen to the full Trunk Nation episode featuring Sammy Hagar at SiriusXM.