REVIEWED BY TOM SINCLAIR

Sammy Hagar is not in recovery. Sure, the 63-year-old rocker knows a thing or two about excess. This is, after all, the guy who wrote and sang the 1984 ode to speeding “I Can’t Drive 55,” plunged headlong into prodigious promiscuity during his decade-plus tenure as lead singer of Van Halen, and famously founded his own brand of tequila. But, as his highly-readable memoir bears out, Hagar has somehow avoided the horrendous consequences that have befallen so many of his party-hearty rock & roll brethren; he never truly bottoms out on any of his behaviors, be they vehicular, sexual, or chemical. By the book’s end, he even seems to have outgrown casual sex and reckless substance abuse (although possibly not fast cars).

Which is not to say that addiction – specifically, other people’s – hasn’t affected his life in major ways. Indeed, Hagar writes vividly and viscerally about the over-the-top drunks he’s known, beginning with his dad. “My father was the town drunk,” he writes. “He was living on the streets [of Fontana, California]. I’d be driving my car around and there was my dad, stumbling down the sidewalk drunk.”

Like many children of alcoholics, Hagar channeled his anger and embarrassment at his dad into workaholism. Of course, Hagar’s chosen work – singing and playing rock music – brought him in contact with many drug users, and some of their habits rubbed off on him. But an early pot bust soured him on drug use for many years, and gave him increased motivation to make it in the rock world. Still, singing and playing music always felt like fun; as Hagar puts it, after he got out of jail, “I never worked another day in my life.”

His career hit a plateau when he was tapped to succeed David Lee Roth as the lead singer of Van Halen in the mid-’80s. His detailed account of his time with that band – and of the drinking habits of the Van Halen brothers, guitar god Eddie and drummer Alex – provides a view of addiction’s ravages as hair-raising as any literary account since the late Art Pepper’s “Straight Life.”

Though Alex eventually got sober, Eddie was still drinking in 2003 when Hagar got together with Van Halen for a reunion tour. The merciless portrait Hagar paints of Eddie’s behavior on that tour is as harrowing as any low-bottom drinking story. Smoking heavily, even after having had a third of his tongue removed because of cancer, Eddie was unwilling and unable to sober up. Hagar writes about an attempted intervention, during which Eddie smashes the bottle of booze he was holding and yells, “Fuck you. I will kill the first motherfucker that tries to take this bottle away from me.” Sadly, no one tried very hard after that. (Even sadder, alcoholism seems to have robbed Eddie, arguably the most talented guitar player of his generation, of much of his musical talent.)

“Red” also touches on the mental illness of Hagar’s first wife, whom the rocker was apparently devoted to for many years. Further belying Hagar’s rep as a not-too-bright boogie-band blowhard, the self proclaimed “Red Rocker” reveals his abiding interest in such new age-associated phenomena as psychics and numerology. Who knew?

The book ends with Hagar, a multi-millionaire, proclaiming that he doesn’t want to go through the requisite hassle of becoming a billionaire – an attitude you’ve gotta love. Too bad the guy’s not in recovery. He’s a hell of a power of example of what a working class kid can do with a fistful of talent and a little bit of grace.

Tom Sinclair spent nearly a decade as a writer in the music department of Entertainment Weekly. These days he works as a substance abuse counselor and dabbles in rock criticism.