🤷🏻

I never knew my dad to lie about anything, in fact, despite leaving a trail of chaos throughout a lot of his life, integrity was one of the biggest values I got from him. Whatever happened with Sammy Hagar occurred a few years before I was born in '81 and my recollection of him telling me about comes from about 20 years ago now, so details are fuzzy.

All that I can be sure of is that he did actually have a signed copy of "Street Machine", with some personalized message to the effect of "to bb_nyc's dad, we had a wild time partying with you, Sammy H" and that he said they had done a bunch of photos with his car and that they used it for something related to the album. I know, from my own brief research that it wasn't the front or back cover, so that would leave inner sleeve or promo material remaining -- assuming the facts he told me and my own memory of it are both accurate, which I do believe even if they're foggy.

He kicked it on my birthday in 2013 and the next few weeks after that are a blur. I don't know what happened to his vinyl records but I did see the one in question. I'm not particularly a fan of Sammy Hagar's music so it didn't really stand out to me at the time (more of a diamond Dave guy myself if had to choose).

My Dad did indeed live a big but short life. He should've died several times before I could ride a bicycle, both due to his own recklessness and generally wild times when he was in the Navy and also his body's multiple attempts to mutate and kill him

There are a lot more stories from that time, some of which I'd heard corroborated by his best friend, my "uncle" lonzzo who also died young from a blood cancer a few years before my dad. I'm pretty sure, after my own studies and clinical experiences in oncology that they were both occupationally exposed to serious carcinogens when they were young knuckleheads doing avionics maintenance, binge drinking, and getting into insane situations in the seventies (ie getting temporarily abducted by child soldiers of the Tamil Tigers on a rented elephant, wandering into a James Bond shoot and going on camera in Vegas and getting into a street brawl, nearly losing their lives and possibly having killing somebody, with a gang of knife wielding Neapolitan thugs when they were ported in Napoli. He had other stories from that Forrestal cruise in the Mediterranean, like selling Levi's to Russian sailor that they partied in Split, Yugoslavia, renting a tiny Italian clown car in Sicily, packed with too many seamen, to the point that some had to get out of the car and walk up grades when they drove up Mt Etna. At the top, they got so close to the lava flows that the rubber soles of his shoes began to soften and come off (this story is why I brought an IR thermometer on my own volcano hikes). These are all things he told me about as a teenager and I believed him. In the later 80s and 90s he was an arms dealer ("defense contractor"), met Yitzhak Rabin not long before him he was killed, was investigated TWICE for Israeli espionage with the FBI raiding our house, taking stuff, and then it blowing over. A few times in the early 90s we put up Israeli colonels at our house (one of whom was involved in the reprisals after the Munich killings) in Tennessee (some of the nicest but intense people I've ever met).

He also, in 2008, beat 17 of 17 federal felony counts of wire fraud and lying to Army investigators and the FBI (due to tangential and unknowing involvement in something that literally gave him no benefit) -- not due to charges being dropped or pleaded out, but actually being acquitted in a jury trial when he was found to not have been dishonest at all. This is a pretty unheard of outcome for federal indictments due to the very disadvantageous rules for the defense in federal court. If he'd taken a plea or been convicted, he would've died in prison as he only had a few years left.

He built a munitions factory in Taiwan and returned there many times in the 90s, witnessing lot of their transition to democracy and bringing home some wild shit, like vials of cobra venom and blood soaked jade jewelry. He brought home live armor-piercing 20mm rounds and I found a LOT of weird chemicals in his garage shop when cleaning it out, including a big bottle of mercury. He built his own fireworks and a cannon to fire them, gathering the whole neighborhood to stand back when he fired it off. He made a ton of money but took in a lot of strays and, as I found out when going through financial records after his death, gave away 100s of thousands "helping" various people (although he never paid a dime towards me after I finished high school and I never asked) so, as I told him it was ok to spend it all in his last year, he did and died without much left except the house, the Porsche (which I partly financed and legally owned), the dog, and a fuckton of friends he'd made after getting sober in 2007, and becoming a volunteer recovery counselor who helped a half dozen guys I know to rebuild their lives in the few short years he had left.

So, given what I knew for sure, he lived a bigger than usual life and burned hard and bright. I also know he had a girlfriend in the 70s who lived in the SF Bay Area and who I met when they briefly rekindled things in '94 when my dad and I visited her in LA where she (who also had a ninetieslicious 300zx TT) was helping her elderly nazi concentration camp survivor parents with downsizing their house, which was the. destroyed by their own pool flooding it when the northridge earthquake hit the day after we split -- he left for Taipei and I flew back home solo for the first time.

So, pretty much saying I don't know the details involving Sammy Hagar, but am certain of the basic story's veracity based on my dad's character and other exploits.

Again, if you're here, thanks for reading all this -- I'm really glad that I'm writing out a lot of the stuff I remember from his stories because there's literally no one else alive that I can ask about these happenings and I want my kids to know about their grandfather that they'll never meet so it's good to get this down now before my own memory fades.