“40 years ago today, four guys set out to rock the world!! I want to thank all of you for rocking and supporting us all these years!”
— Micheal Anthony, on his Facebook and Instagram today
Also, here’s a new interview with Michael on the early days of Van Halen:
Van Halen exploded onto the scene with their self-titled debut in 1978, which turns 40 today! Jesse Fink, author of the new biography of Bon Scott, Bon: The Last Highway: The Untold Story of Bon Scott and AC/DC’s Back In Black, spoke with the band’s former bass player, Michael Anthony, about the late ’70s, Van Halen, AC/DC, David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar.
On the Van Halen brothers:
The brothers have this closeness; there’s this certain type of bubble that you cannot penetrate, no matter how close you get to them. Eddie and Alex, my experience with them anyway, was in their monitors Eddie wanted to hear Alex, Alex wanted to hear Eddie. They’d throw me in just to kinda fill the whole thing out but they were just so locked in together. They had this musical force between them that was amazing.
On Van Halen’s touring philosophy:
Just kinda pound the pavement. We started our first tour opening up for Journey and Ronnie Montrose. Whenever there was a stage that wasn’t big enough to hold all three bands we just kinda peeled off and we would look for a club in that same city and do that. We just tried to get on everything we could get on to play.
On Van Halen’s critics:
For some reason critics didn’t really like us in Los Angeles. There’s this one critic I remember, he wrote for the Los Angeles Times, Robert Hilburn. No matter how well we did, how well the concert went – they were always great, sold out or whatever once we were really hitting our stride – he never gave us a good review. Never. Not once. He was probably one of the main reasons why we were just pretty much disregarding anything that any of these critics would write. It was all like, “Hey, the fans are our biggest critic” and when you’re playing the live shows, that’s what it is out there and that was happening so we didn’t care what those guys were saying. I guess we were too immature for some of these critics.
On David Lee Roth:
Dave was the loudmouth. We allowed him to be the loudmouth because he then took care of the press part. There even came a time later on before Dave had left the band that we for a while let him do all the interviews and everything. We said, “Hey, we’ll do the music, you do the interviews. We’re just fine with that.” But that’s a lead singer for you.
On the issue of whether Van Halen created a “monster” with DLR: With everything that happened that led him to leaving the band, we probably did kind of create a monster. But then he just pretty much did it himself, too, because he always considered himself a big star; where the three of us we were probably more like how AC/DC was. They just considered themselves musicians playing rock music. I don’t think any of them, from knowing them, considered themselves as being a big rock star. They didn’t have that kind of ego.
Read Jesse Fink’s full interview to see what Michael had to say about Sammy Hagar, managers, and AC/DC!
Eddie Van Halen also posted on Facebook today, saying, “On This Day In 1978 The Van Halen Album Was Released! I used a Shure 57 microphone and my famous stock 100 watt Marshall through my variac down to 89 volts and a 4X12 slant cabinet to record the whole record.”