Rock & Roll as Noise Pollution

Sammy Hagar has numbers on the brain. Or rather he had numbers on the brain. One night in Fontana, California, in 1968 or ’69, he dreamed that he saw a spaceship manned by “two intelligent creatures.” Before jolting off back into the Milky Way, the creatures “fired off a numerical code, but it was not of our numerical system.” For Hagar, this late-night vision set in motion a numerical, or rather numerological, “quest” that led him to explore his dreams, his backyard, the stars in search of answers about the future. One day he discovered an ancient henhouse just beyond the edge of his driveway: “Inside there was nothing, except for a dirty, f—-ed-up trunk.” In the trunk he found a pseudo-mathematical tome, which he soon began reading. Almost immediately Hagar (“I’ve always been a bit of a mathematician”) was hooked: “It tripped me out that if you add numbers up, you always come down to one number.”