Sammy Hagar Just One Of Many Rock Stars Willing To Whore Themselves Out

We didn’t intend for the site to become “all Hagar, all the time” this week, but you follow the news where it leads, and Sammy’s cameo in this L.A. Times story about rockers playing corporate gigs is too good not to highlight:

“I mean, we used to make fun of Huey Lewis for doing all these corporate shows, but he would just shrug and say, ‘It’s a good life. Forty-five minutes for a couple hundred thousand’ … but I just hated the idea, doing some big arena show in some little corporate building or something. It felt cheesy to me. But then when Dylan did it, I started thinking, ‘Who am I to be so uppity about this?’ “

Where did this conversation take place, we wonder? Greg Kihn’s grotto? But we digress:

Still, Hagar at first refused when Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, called several years ago to hire him to sing “There’s Only One Way to Rock” at the billionaire’s birthday party. Then Cuban mentioned the private plane, the plan to stage the show at the arena in Dallas and, of course, a particularly large sum of money.

“The money,” Hagar said, “was very good. I won’t say how much, but it was good. But I didn’t do it for the money…. Well, maybe I did.”

Hagar had to earn it, though. He described the show as one of the most awkward stage experiences of his three-decade career. “There were 70 people in the audience, so we have this huge, empty arena. But we did a full-blown, 45-minute show, lights and everything. The front row was filled with Mavericks players, and half of them, you know, they didn’t know us or care about our music. And they were so tall they were looking me right in the eye. The whole thing was just plain weird.”

So now we know that Hagar will be prepared for his next high-profile awkward gig. Meanwhile, the story notes that while there are still a few holdouts (U2, Springsteen), the private-show industry is thriving, thanks to left-over dot-com money and Russian turnip magnates. One of the most intriguing shows, however, is a Pittsburgh soiree last weekend in which Robin Williams and Christina Aguilera co-headlined; we can only imagine which one of them had the screechier, more melodramatic green room.

You Too Can Rent A Rock Star [LA Times]