Sammy Hagar has a show tonight.

Actually, he has five of them coming up in Las Vegas, three Birthday Bash nights waiting in Cabo, and then — according to Sammy — he’s taking a break.

But first, there was Eddie Trunk.

Hagar joined Trunk on SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation Thursday, the day before Best of All Worlds returns to Dolby Live at Park MGM, and the conversation went about the way Sammy conversations tend to go.

A little bit of everything.

Touring. Vegas. Cabo. Getting older without acting old. Knowing when to get off the stage. Fans who got left behind by COVID. Van Halen. Alex Van Halen. A reunion that never got very far.

Nobody announced a farewell tour. Nobody rode off into the sunset.

Sammy just talked — openly, candidly and with the kind of ease that makes his conversations fun to listen to.

Tonight, the talking gives way to the thing he’s been doing for more than half a century.

Hagar returns to Dolby Live with Michael Anthony, Joe Satriani and Kenny Aronoff for Best of All Worlds shows September 18, 19, 23, 25 and 26.

The Vegas setup makes a lot of sense for where Hagar is now. He can dig into a career’s worth of music, put the Van Halen years right in the middle of it, blow the roof off the place — and wake up the next morning without discovering he’s in another state.

He’s done the endless-road thing.

He doesn’t have anything left to prove there.

What Hagar does seem conscious of is how he wants to keep doing this.

During Thursday’s conversation, he talked about knowing there will eventually be a point when he can’t perform at the level he expects from himself. And when that happens, he doesn’t intend to be the guy who keeps walking up to the microphone anyway.

That’s not Sammy saying he doesn’t want to perform.

Quite the opposite.

He can’t seem to imagine not wanting to do something.

It sounds like he just doesn’t want to become a lesser version of himself in front of an audience and pretend nobody notices.

Fair enough.

For now, the tank isn’t empty.

Vegas starts tonight. Cabo comes next, with Birthday Bash shows at Cabo Wabo Cantina October 9, 11 and 13.

Then he’s taking a break.

Somewhere in all that talk about where he may or may not go, a fan asked if he’d return to England. Hagar’s answer landed somewhere else entirely: South America.

If there were somewhere he still feels he owes the fans, that’s the place.

And there’s a story behind that.

Sammy Hagar & The Circle were finally headed to South America in March 2020, with five shows booked across Chile and Brazil.

We all know what happened next.

COVID hit the brakes. The shows were canceled. Those fans never got Sammy.

Six years later, he remembered.

No tour announcement. No wink-wink tease about dates coming soon. Just an acknowledgment that those are fans he still feels he owes.

Sammy hasn’t forgotten them.

And who knows? Maybe someday he’ll make it there.

Of course, nobody gets Sammy Hagar on a microphone for very long without eventually opening the Van Halen drawer.

Alex Van Halen came up.

The recent comments came up.

And Hagar still doesn’t seem to know exactly what Alex’s problem with him is.

The book? Cabo Wabo? Something else?

Whatever it is, Hagar’s answer wasn’t another declaration of war. He talked about wanting to know what the actual issue is and fixing it. He also made it clear that if Alex walked into one of these Vegas shows, the door wouldn’t be slammed in his face.

Considering the number of headlines that can be squeezed out of every sentence either man says about the other, Hagar was pretty civilized about the whole thing.

Then a caller asked about the other Van Halen subject that refuses to die: the reunion.

Specifically, how close did Sammy himself ever get to one?

He didn’t.

That’s it.

Years of rumors, ideas, proposed scenarios and Van Halen “what ifs” exist, but Hagar’s answer about his own involvement was pretty simple.

He personally never got close.

And then life continued.

Which is probably as good a place as any to leave the Van Halen drama for the day.

Because Sammy Hagar is 78 years old, starting another Vegas run tonight, headed to Cabo to throw himself a three-night birthday party next month, still thinking about fans in South America who got screwed out of shows six years ago, and still talking about what comes next — even if “next” includes doing absolutely nothing for a while.

For now, Vegas is calling. Cabo is waiting.

Photo: Matt Becker / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0