Funky Feng Shui

The Zoo Crew is spinning "Funky Feng Shui" by Sammy Hagar & The Circle off the album Crazy Times, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO, you already know we like a record that smells like a party and still tells the truth. This little two-minute rascal is the grin in the middle of a heavier trip. Crazy Times came out in 2022, cut at the old RCA Studio A in Nashville with producer Dave Cobb, and Sammy has called it the best record he ever made. That is a bold line from a man who has been at this since the Fabulous Castiles, but he meant it. The Circle is Sammy, Michael Anthony on bass and those high harmony vocals, Vic Johnson on guitar, and Jason Bonham on drums. Four road dogs who had already been jamming backstage for years before the world shut the doors.

"Funky Feng Shui" was the first song Sammy started writing for the album, and it almost stayed a sketch. During the lockdown stretch he only had two verses and a couple of choruses. The band was stuck at home, the tour was parked, and Bonham dared the rest of them to cut a warmup jam they had been playing before shows. Their digital guy, Jon Luini, showed them how to lay tracks down on their phones from the den, the closet, even the shower. That became the Lockdown Sessions, and "Funky Feng Shui" was the first thing they sent out so the fans would know the band was still thinking about them. Sammy wanted a James Brown kind of tune while everybody was stuck inside. When they finally got into the studio, Cobb heard those two verses and would not let it go. Finish it, he told Sammy. Cobb jumped on a half-country, half-rock lick, they swapped parts back and forth, and the song made the record. Sammy later said you can dance to that rascal or you can get loud with it. Funk and rock, same glass.

The story behind the title is pure Red Rocker, and he has told it more than once. He was watching women out walking big dogs, dressed up, doggie bag in hand, glove on, picking up after the animal and tying the bag off. In the old days, he said, nobody did that. The girl would look the other way and leave the pile. He would rather people pick it up, but the picture cracked him up. That, to him, is some funky feng shui. The rest of the lyric rides the same sidewalk. A tall beehive piled high, a red dress on the beach, a drink in her hand, alligator sneakers, knocking them dead on the dance floor. He wrote the last verse around those dog-walkers on purpose. Crazy Times is full of darker notes about the years everybody lost, about feeling jaded and faded, about a country that did not feel like itself. Sammy told interviewers he lost some of his usual optimism writing those songs, then took a break with this one because he still sees the funny beautiful stuff too. He still has a sense of humor. The video shoot matched the joke. The director kept yelling at the band to remember a fifty-foot woman was going to be stepping over them while they played. Sammy's line on the whole thing was that the video is more fun than a frog in a glass of milk.

Cobb did not want the Americana record Sammy thought he was going to make. Sammy had reached out years earlier about farmers, acoustic guitars, big drums, something in the Mellencamp neighborhood. Cobb grew up on the Red Rocker and said he already made those records. He wanted Standing Hampton. He wanted the hungry kid from Montrose and the high Michael Anthony harmonies from the Van Halen years. They walked in with a handful of songs and walked out with ten. Cobb played rhythm guitar all over the album and co-wrote a few, including the title track. "Funky Feng Shui" sits near the end of the sequence, right before the more serious looks back on "Father Time" and "Childhood's End." It is the exhale. Short, loose, and built so a room full of Zoo Freaks can stomp without thinking too hard.

If you want the long road that leads to a song like this, it starts in Fontana, California, the place Sammy still calls Fontucky with a grin. Born Samuel Roy Hagar in 1947, he grew up with a paper route, fruit picking, and lawns to mow. His mother Gladys left with the kids when he was about ten. He caught the rock and roll fever off Elvis. He bought "A Big Hunk o' Love" before he even owned a record player and just stared at the label while his older sisters combed his hair so he could pretend. The British Invasion flipped the switch. He snuck into the Rolling Stones' 1964 American debut at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino and wore out the Riverside armory catching Dick Dale. He taught himself guitar on a cheap Sears catalog axe and fronted his first band, the Fabulous Castiles, around age fourteen. They played "Surfer Stomp" at Brunton Hall through one amp and did not even have a drummer. He has said he started out a greaser, then got hip, bought the white shoes, and turned hodad.

After high school he wanted out of Fontana as fast as the road would allow. He landed in Riverside, ran a music department in a store, and sang and played in a string of bar bands. The Justice Brothers, the Johnny Fortune Band, Cotton, Jimmy, Manhole, and a few more. In 1970 he was back in Fontana with a wife and a baby, trying to make music the whole living. The break came up the coast. Playing in a San Francisco cover band, he got pulled into Montrose by session guitarist Ronnie Montrose. The first Montrose album in 1973 carries "Bad Motor Scooter," the first song Sammy ever wrote. From there the solo years, the red party shirts, "I Can't Drive 55," Cabo Wabo, Van Halen, Chickenfoot, and The Circle are all the same guy who used to stare at an Elvis 45. He has said the ship that visited him one night in Fontana told him, without words, that he was waking up. Whether you buy the visitors or not, the work never stopped.

The Circle is the later chapter of that same stubborn streak. Anthony, Johnson, and Bonham are not hired hands. They are the band that cut Space Between in 2019, then the phone-booth Lockdown Sessions, then Crazy Times when the doors opened again. Sammy has said going back in the studio felt natural, that two years of not being able to do much fell away, and that there was joy in the hard work. "Funky Feng Shui" is the postcard from that room. A James Brown itch, a dog-walker joke, a producer who would not let a half-finished groove die, and four players who already knew the backstage jam by heart.

You can dig the whole Red Rocker trail at the official site, Sammy Hagar, where the Crazy Times pages and the "Funky Feng Shui" news still sit in the archive. The verified socials are the same camp. Find him on Facebook, on Instagram, and on X. The fans call themselves Redheads, and Sammy still shouts them out from that Facebook page like family. No separate fan site we trust as much as the man's own porch, so we send you there. Crank it, Freaks. The beehive is tall, the dog bag is tied, and the groove is funky on purpose.