I ended up with a copy of Sammy Hagar’s memoir as reading material for my last air-travel adventure, and found it quite entertaining (in spite of the tedious anti-David Lee Roth/Van Halen brothers diatribes). His tales of being the son of Fontana’s town drunk are worth reading, but the only real shocker came when Hagar describes the car he bought in 1973 with the first real money advanced to Montrose. You’ll never guess what type of vehicle the Red Rocker bought with his first rockstar-grade paycheck!
That’s right, a Citroën 2CV! Perhaps this car was the real inspiration for “I Can’t Drive 55″ (“I Can Only Drive 55 Downhill” didn’t have quite the same ring to it). In his words: “…and I bought a car. Not just any car, of course, but a Citroën Deux Chaveux, the most uncool car on the planet— a French car that looks like a sardine can. I thought it had class.” For what it’s worth, his next car purchase was a right-hand-drive Ferrari 330GT 2+2.
All right, let’s all crank up the song Mr. Hagar wrote for his very first album, a song that makes up for all that hot-selling-yet-forgettable stuff he did with the post-Roth Van Halen. Truly one of the greatest— if not the greatest— beer-soaked-burnouts-in-the-convenience-store-parking-lot anthems ever recorded