When Sammy Hagar throws a birthday party, it’s never just cake and candles. It’s tequila, rockstars, guitars, and pure chaos!
This year’s Cabo Wabo Birthday Bash delivered. Across four nights (October 7, 9, 11, and 13), Hagar turned his Cabo San Lucas home base into a full-blown festival, complete with surprise guests!
This is the night I would’ve loved to have been at… October 13th, Nickelback singer Chad Kroeger jumped on stage to rip through Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”, backed by Hagar’s all-star wrecking crew: Vic Johnson on guitar, Kenny Aronoff on drums, and Michael Anthony on bass.
Of course, Kroeger’s no stranger to Metallica worship. He once called James Hetfield his “Rock God,” telling BBC’s The Rock Show that watching Hetfield live makes him “want to grit my teeth and scream along.” Chad’s watched close, side-stage in Paris, 70,000 strong. He was impressed, not just by Hetfield’s power, but by his humility: “He’s one of the sweetest people you could ever meet.”
Nickelback (almost infamously now?!) played something from Metallica’s catalog back in 2004… a “Sad But True” cover at Rock am Ring.
As Kroeger once told Men’s Health, “”Music works on a lot of different levels. There’s a lot of melody in a great metal song. If you listen to Metallica songs, anything on ‘Master Of Puppets’ or ‘…And Justice For All’, the songs move through these beautiful parts, and then they progress back into very aggressive territory, and the riffs are constantly changing and developing, and it stays very interesting.”.”
Meanwhile, Nickelback is working on a new album, the follow-up to their tenth studio album, 2022’s Get Rollin’. And if you’ve kept up, Sammy Hagar is a guest vocalist on one of the songs: Hagar says, “I went to a studio with Chad Kroeger. He wrote a great, great song for the new Nickelback (album). He’s got a bunch of great (songs). I mean, this next Nickelback record, from what I heard — oh my God. This guy’s an amazing songwriter, and an amazing singer, I gotta tell you. But his songwriting abilities are crazy. So he said, ‘Man, I wanted to channel you. You’re always writing all these really positive songs, ‘Dreams’, about making people feel good and lifting their spirits up.’ And he said, ‘You’re like the king of that.’ And he goes, ‘And I said, ‘I’m gonna channel Sammy, and I’m gonna write a song like that.’ So he writes this song, and it’s very uplifting; it’s really awesome. And he said, ‘So just for fun, I sang it and I put A.I. your voice on it.’ And he goes, ‘And you sing it so much different, it blew my mind.’ And he goes, ‘So would you sing on it?’ And I listened to the a A.I. version and I’m going, ‘Why don’t you just use that?’ (Laughs) ‘That guy’s singing better than me.’ It was good. It had all my inflections. I’m not an A.I. guy at all, but this impressed me. Not that I would use it, but it impressed me. But anyway, long story short. So I went in to do it. And the guy from Pantera was there. And it’s a studio complex. And Tommy comes pulling up, and Chad goes, ‘Hey man, maybe you wanna play on this song Sammy just sang on.'”
Bring. It. On.
Some people throw parties. Sammy Hagar throws legendary parties with rock’s elite.
LEGEND.
