The Van Halen Mystery: Who Turned Down The Bass?
Our last Van Halen post of the day, we swear. But this one might actually count as a public service: Since a handful of commenters have asked why bassist Michael Anthony was not invited to the reunion jaunt, a tipster forwarded this 2006 interview from Japan’s Burrn! magazine, and posits that Anthony may have burrned! some bridges with his comments on the last reunion tour. Some highlights after the click-through:
On the 2004 reunion tour:
“We got along great. Obviously, there was tension between the brothers, basically Ed and Sammy’s tequila thing, because he was never happy about that, the whole Cabo Wabo thing…I think Ed would get a little put off when he’d see a lot of Cabo Wabo banners up around the arenas and sometimes that would even create some tension onstage and offstage. There were nights where you know you have that after the show flight on the jet and things would sometimes be a little tense on that plane and without getting into any great detail there came a point to where we actually split it up and we traveled on two different jets; Eddie and Al would fly on one jet and Sammy and I would fly on another…
“[Ed] did not want Sammy doing any promoting of his stuff at all using the VAN HALEN name but a lot of that you don’t have any control over. I came out with a hot sauce about the same time we were putting the tour together and the local radio station here in Los Angeles, KLOS, they would talk about the tour and then they would talk about my hot sauce. Well the brothers caught wind of that and they thought that I had my people, as they would say ‘my people,’ calling the radio station and telling them to pump my hot sauce on VAN HALEN’s dime here or whatever and they finally asked me to have my people ‘cease and desist,’ I remember that distinctly…
On trying to record new songs with Roth:
“We were going to do videos for the songs [on the ‘Best Of Volume 1’] and everything but Roth was really trying to take control and we finally just said, let’s not even do the videos for these songs because he’s going to kill the whole thing and so it fell apart. But yeah, before that tour yeah, we tried to make it work. We went into the studio and it was kind of funny because we first got together in the studio and we were all in the one room together and we did ‘Hot For Teacher’, ‘Mean Street’ and a few other songs and it’s the weirdest thing because once we started playing it was like, son of a bitch, there it is, that’s the magic!…But then of course the longer we spent in the studio, you know we had two or three different producers in there trying to work with us and Dave would just come in with tapes of the CHEMICAL BROTHERS, all different kinds of weird stuff and say ‘Hey, let’s do a song like this,’ and Ed was having a hard time dealing with him.
On why the band, at that point, had not been inducted into the Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame:
I tell you it would be one damn interesting show when they ask us to get together and play for the induction ceremony. I know Dave; he’ll be there a week ahead of the show just waiting.”
When you consider that most of the other VH members have kept relatively mum about the group’s on-again, off-again status, maybe Anthony’s loose lips sank any hopes he might have had about hitting the road with them this summer. Or maybe, as Eddie says in Rolling Stone, it’s because Anthony and Hagar have become too buddy-buddy. Either way, it feels a little unfair; he’s like the little stubble-faced angel who’s still flying in the air with his Jack Daniels bass, unable to get his feet to touch the ground.
MICHAEL ANTHONY Speaks Candidly About VAN HALEN’s Past And Future – Mar. 17, 2006 [Blabbermouth.net]
