Originally Posted by
Terry
The thing that gets me about Hagar's 2003/2004 reunion rationalizations is laid out by Hagar in his own book, though.
Hagar claims that Eddie Van Halen was in clearly visible bad shape when he first went to meet him in late 2003/early 2004. Assumedly before any tour contracts had been signed, I'm guessing. Hagar also describes in detail how befuddled Eddie was throughout the writing/recording process of the new Van Hagar tracks on BOBW during early 2004. Hagar also describes in detail how befuddled Eddie was during the rehearsals for the 2004 tour. All of which paints a picture of Eddie as not being in any type of condition to play at his best.
Hagar never describes the reunion process as a situation of Eddie being relatively sober and competent during the initial meetings, writing/recording and tour rehearsals, then going on to have some sort of relapse just before the tour started. Hagar describes Eddie as having been fucked up from the get-go, and Hagar said he assumed Eddie at some point would get cleaned up enough to go out and play a decent tour.
In the end, to my mind Hagar is just as responsible for not making the judgement call that Eddie wasn't capable of doing any better than he ended up doing in 2004 as far as the end result goes. I mean, considering the condition Eddie was in, I find it simply not believable that Hagar (if he cared about the fans as much as he later claims he did) wouldn't have insisted that Eddie either get demonstrably clean before any tour contracts were signed or Hagar simply wasn't going to go ahead with the tour. However, none of that happened. Hagar went ahead, did the tour, grinned his way through all of it knowing how shitty the performances were, took his money, fucked off into Chickenfoot obscurity, then waited a few years to make a few more bucks off that shitty tour by telling us all how shitty the experience was.
All of which tells me as much about Hagar's character as it does Eddie's: Eddie clearly had his addiction issues running rampant and unaddressed in 2004...what was Hagar's excuse? Hagar claims he didn't need the money in 2004...how much of it did he give back to "the fans" by way of refunds when that whole debacle was over?