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Alex Van Halen Called Sammy Hagar an Idiot in a Brazilian Magazine, and the English Press Had to Quote It

Foto: Montreal Concert Poster Archive — Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Alex Van Halen Called Sammy Hagar an Idiot in a Brazilian Magazine, and the English Press Had to Quote It

The insult went around the world in a weekend. The part nobody dwelt on is where it was printed: Roadie Crew, in Portuguese, by the man who translated Alex’s own book.

The quote, and where it came from

On September 3, 2026, the Brazilian magazine Roadie Crew published an interview with Alex Van Halen in issue #293. The interviewer was Marcelo Vieira, and Vieira had a specific claim on Alex’s attention: he is the journalist who translated Brothers, Alex’s 2024 memoir, into Portuguese for the Brazilian edition, published as Irmãos by Belas Letras.

Vieira asked Alex what he made of the autobiographies written by his two former singers. On Sammy Hagar’s Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock (2011), the answer was short: “I don’t know what he wrote, and I don’t want to know. In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.”

Twenty words. By the weekend they were on Ultimate Classic Rock, Louder, Blabbermouth, Consequence, Guitar Player, Fox News and a chain of roughly ten Beasley rock stations (WMMR, WMGK, WRAT and the rest), all citing a magazine most of their readers had never heard of and could not read.

Why Alex talked to Roadie Crew

Alex does not do many interviews. He did a round of them in 2024 when Brothers came out, and then mostly went quiet again. So when he sits down with a Brazilian monthly, the choice of interviewer is worth a look.

Vieira did not just read the book. He spent months inside it, sentence by sentence, deciding how Alex’s voice should sound in another language. That is a level of familiarity no American outlet’s staff writer brings to a phone call. It changes the questions, and it changes how the subject answers them. A man who has been asked about Sammy Hagar a thousand times by strangers got asked about him by someone who knew exactly which chapters of Brothers Sammy barely appears in.

The result was the most quoted Van Halen line of the year, and it was born in Portuguese.

A week of English-language rock coverage, running on a translation

Here is the timeline as the sources lay it out.

Roadie Crew put the piece online on September 3. Sammy responded on September 5, in an Instagram comment under a post by the fan account Rock Celebrities, not on his own profile: “This comment and post is so unnecessary at this time in our lives, but I guess the truth hurts sometimes. Peace already.”

Ultimate Classic Rock ran the story on September 6, with Sammy’s reply already in it. Louder and the first Beasley station pieces followed on September 7. On September 9 the Beasley network republished the item across its stations in one go, which is why the headline was still circulating this week.

Every one of those pieces is built on a quote that Blabbermouth, Louder and the rest had to render back into English from Vieira’s Portuguese. The wording you have seen (“a complete idiot”) is a translation of a translation: Alex spoke in English, Vieira printed it in Portuguese, and the English press translated it home. The Roadie Crew original is public, in Portuguese, at the link in the sources below.

Sammy answers in a comment box

Sammy’s reply is worth reading twice, because the two halves pull in different directions.

“So unnecessary at this time in our lives” is the peace offer he has been making for years. He has said in interview after interview that he would like to speak with Alex again. According to an April 2025 Rolling Stone interview, cited by Blabbermouth, the two have not talked in about 25 years.

“The truth hurts” is Sammy not taking the book back, whatever he has said since about regretting parts of it. Red is the book that put Eddie Van Halen’s drinking and erratic behaviour in print, and in 2021 Sammy apologised “from the bottom of my heart for exposing his dark side,” saying that if he wrote it today he would only include the good. The Instagram comment does not go that far. It says the book was true.

And then “Peace already,” which is the closest thing to a shrug you can type.

The half of the answer that did not go viral

Vieira’s question covered both singers, and Alex answered both. The David Lee Roth half is the one nobody put in a headline.

On Crazy From the Heat, Roth’s 1997 memoir, Alex told Roadie Crew it was “quite fun and accurately reflects [David’s] sense of humor,” and that although “the text is somewhat abstract and loses its train of thought at times, it’s still a very interesting perspective on that era.” Blabbermouth and Louder both carried that passage. It just did not travel, because a fair review of a book is not a headline and “complete idiot” is.

Put the two answers side by side and the contrast is the actual story. Same question, two ex-singers, two books. Alex read Roth’s and gave it an honest, slightly grudging notice. He refused to open Sammy’s. One of those books is a comedy about a frontman’s own ego. The other is about his brother.

What the postmark tells you

Brazil has had a serious rock press for decades. Roadie Crew has been publishing since the late 1990s. Vieira is one of a group of Brazilian journalists who do the unglamorous work of translating rock memoirs for a Portuguese-speaking readership, and that work is what earned him the interview.

The English-language outlets that ran the quote are used to being the source. For one week in September they were the aggregators. There is no scandal in that, and Roadie Crew got its credit line in most of the pieces. It is just a useful reminder that access is not geographic. Alex Van Halen gave the most quotable interview of his year to the person who had read him most closely, and that person happened to work in São Paulo.

The thread to pull

There are now three Van Halen memoirs, one per surviving frontline voice. Roth’s, from 1997, that Alex finds funny. Sammy’s, from 2011, that Alex will not read and Sammy half regrets. And Alex’s own, from 2024, which is the one that reached Brazil in translation and started this whole week.

Three books, three versions of the same band, and the drummer has now reviewed two of them in a single paragraph.

Which one tells the version you believe? Tell us at @realrocklab on X or Threads.

Sources

In this web: Van Halen · Alex Van Halen · Sammy Hagar · David Lee Roth