WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO BLAME ALIENS FOR CHICKENFOOT

Massive amounts of alcohol: Never responsible for altered memories or people saying stupid, insane shit.

So the thing is, Sammy Hagar seems like a swell fella — certainly much nicer than any of his former cohorts from Van Halen — and there was a time when I really enjoyed Van Hagar, and was able to view the (then-) two different VH eras in a kind of different-from-one-another-but-both-killer-in-their-own-way light. (“Poundcake” and “Runaround” from For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge actually still get my blood pumpin’.) But the Van Hagar albums have not aged very well, and Chickenfoot is certainly a total waste of resources. But, on the whole, I have nothing against Sammy Hagar.

Oh, yeah, except that he’s apparently crazy, and thinks he was abducted by aliens — multiple times. Mr. Not DLR tells MTV:

“[Aliens] were plugged into me. It was a download situation. This was long before computers or any kind of wireless. There weren’t even wireless telephones. Looking back now, it was like, ‘Fuck, they downloaded something into me!’ Or they uploaded something from my brain, like an experiment. ‘See what this guy knows.’”

And:

“Another thing happened when I was about four … One time I saw what I considered to be, well, at the time I thought it was a car with no wheels. We lived out in the country and I saw this thing floating across a field, creating this big dust storm. I threw rocks at it and shit. And I don’t know what happened after that… I just have no memory of it. And that wasn’t a dream. It was during daylight.”

Alright, so a few random thoughts about this:

• Just because it happened “during daylight” doesn’t mean it wasn’t a dream. It is a little known fact that one can actually dream at any hour of the day or night, so long as he or she is asleep. It’s true! It’s, like, science.
• He was four? Are you fucking kidding me? Fucking guy is 63 years old, which is the same age as my father (their birthdays are actually within spitting distance of one another). My father can’t accurately remember what he watched on television last night, let alone shit from when he was four, and he doesn’t subsist on a liquid diet. So I have a hard time imagining that Sammy’s memory of that bygone era is Crystal Pepsi-clear.
• Why the fucking fuck would aliens want to download anything from a four year old’s brain? What could they possibly gain from him? “This kid knows the words to ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star!’ WE MUST HAVE HIM!!!” And if they uploaded anything, well, it was either nothing useful, or otherwise aliens may have crappy taste in middle-of-the-road corporate supergroups.
• I know there’s a joke to be made here about the fact that Hagar was really impressed that the aliens had wireless service long before we did, but I can’t find it right now.

So, yeah, pretty nutty. But the good news is, he doesn’t seem to think that the characters from Street Fighter are spiritual beings, so he has that going for him.

-AR

Thanks: “John Fucking Smith”