‘Come Clean, What’s Your Problem?’

Sammy Hagar offered both humorous and serious responses to his former bandmate Alex Van Halen calling him a “complete idiot” earlier this month.

“Guilty as charged, first of all. I’m probably the most successful idiot on the planet,” Hagar laughingly told Sirius XM’s Eddie Trunk during an interview Thursday.

The former Van Halen singer then got more serious, declaring that he wish he knew exactly why – in Hagar’s view – his former band’s namesake drummer was ignoring everything they accomplished together.

When Van Halen was recently asked about Hagar’s 2011 book Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, which featured numerous unflattering stories about the drummer and his late guitar playing brother Eddie’s addictions and other personal issues, he was dismissive.

“I don’t know what he wrote, and I don’t want to know,” Van Halen remarked. “In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.” Van Halen’s recent autobiography Brothers notably didn’t include any mention of Hagar’s decade-long stint in the band.

“What happened after [original singer] Dave [Lee Roth] left is not the same band,” Van Halen declared in 2024 while promoting the book. “I’m not saying it was better or worse or any of that. … We always gave it our best shot. But the magic was in the first years, when we didn’t know what we were doing; when we were willing to try anything.”

This hasn’t sat well with Hagar. “I want to call Alex out and say dude, we all know, you act like there was never a Sammy Hagar,” he told Trunk in Thursday’s interview. “You act like there was never a ‘Van Hagar.’ We sold 40 some million records, [had] four No. 1 albums and you just scratch 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 Mikey [longtime Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony], for anybody.”

Insisting that he wasn’t trying to cause conflict, but instead to fix the problem, Hagar put forth a public challenge. “I’m asking Alex, like why? Come clean, what’s your problem? Just come out and say it. Is it the book? Say it. Cabo Wabo? Say it. Maybe if I knew what your problem was, I could fix it. But right now he just acts like there’s not a problem, it just never happened.”

Van Halen – the band – launched the Cabo Wabo cantina in 1990 in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. When the club encountered legal and financial difficulties a few years later, Hagar bought out his bandmates’ stakes, then turned around the venue’s fortunes.

That success – combined with the $91 million the singer made from selling his tequila brand of the same name – reportedly became a large source of conflict between him and his former bandmates.

Hagar also took issue with Alex’s newest book project, a photo collection which comes with a previously unreleased early Van Halen demo. “[He] wants to just keep releasing all this old stuff and these photographs and charging people for old pictures that you could find on the internet,” the singer declared. “You should be putting them out there for free. To me, he’s doing a lot of stuff wrong for the legacy of Van Halen.”

Read More: Van Halen Albums Ranked Worst to Best

Hagar Would Love for Alex Van Halen to Visit His Las Vegas Residency

Hagar will start the final 2026 leg of his Van Halen-celebrating Best of All Worlds Las Vegas residency Friday night, with four more shows set for the next two weeks. You can get complete show and ticket information at his official site.

Despite everything he said previously in the interview, when asked by Trunk how he’d respond if Van Halen suddenly showed up at the venue, Hagar didn’t hesitate to offer an olive branch. “Alex? Oh come in, oh 100%, I’ll grab him, I’ll kiss him right on the lips. …I’d treat him like the person that I used to love and I could still love.”