It was in 1974 that Michael Anthony joined a band named Mammoth – and it turned out to be the smartest decision he ever made.
Based in Pasadena, California, the band had been formed by the Van Halen brothers – Eddie on guitar and Alex on drums. Singer David Lee Roth had joined before Anthony replaced Mark Stone on bass, and soon after Anthony’s arrival the band changed its name to Van Halen.
In a 2009 interview with MOJO magazine, Anthony talked about the highlights of his career with Van Halen – from his audition to the giddy heights of performing to an audience of 400,000 in California in 1983, and the amazingly successful second act they had after Sammy Hagar took over from David Lee Roth.
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Anthony began by recalling the first time he witnessed Eddie and Alex Van Halen performing on stage.
“I saw them play as a three-piece before David Lee Roth joined the band,” he said. “They did the whole of The Who’s Live At Leeds with Eddie Van Halen singing. And oh my God, that guy could play guitar! He was doing things that no other guitarist was doing. It blew my mind.”
When Anthony had the opportunity to join the brothers’ band, he didn’t hesitate.
“I was 22 and playing in Snake, my first serious band,” he said. “We opened for Mammoth at a high school in Pasadena. I spoke with Eddie in the parking lot and he said he was getting rid of their bass player. I went to jam with them in a garage and they asked me to join. I took about a second and said, ‘Sure!’”
Van Halen signed to Warner Brothers Records in 1977 and in the following year the band’s debut album revolutionised hard rock music.
But as Anthony recalled: “Van Halen didn’t immediately jump into stadiums. We opened for a lot of bands.”
One notable tour saw the young American band opening for Black Sabbath, whose singer Ozzy Osbourne liked to play tricks on drummer Bill Ward.
“When we played with Sabbath in England in ’78, I don’t know how many times I saw Ozzy set light to Bill Ward’s beard,” Anthony said. “Bill would snuff it out in a pint. We partied a lot. There wasn’t anything such as AIDS back then. We were doing everything that we’d read about Led Zeppelin doing. Trashing hotels. It was crazy.”
In Van Halen’s first imperial phase with Roth as singer they achieved superstar status in the US and scored a No 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with 1984 single Jump. But arguably the biggest high of that period came in the previous year, on May 23, 1983, when the band headlined the US Festival in San Bernadino, California, topping the bill over Ozzy Osbourne, Scorpions, Judas Priest, Triumph, Quiet Riot and Mötley Crüe.
As Anthony said: “Van Halen got so big it was unbelievable. At the US Festival, we played to 400,000 people. In my mind I had pictures of Woodstock. It was surreal.”
David Lee Roth’s exit from Van Halen in 1985 stunned the band’s fans, but Sammy Hagar proved a more than capable replacement.
Anthony admitted: “When Dave left the band in ‘85, I was wondering, ’Is the dream over?’ You don’t know what to expect.
“Then Sammy came in. He had a big pair of shoes to fill, but as soon as we got together and he started singing we thought, ‘This is the guy right here!’
“With Dave gone, the record company wanted us to change the name of the band to Van Hagar. But we said, ‘No, this is Van Halen!’”
The band enjoyed a remarkable run of success with Hagar. They made four studio albums together – 5150 (1986), OU812 (1988), For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (1991) and Balance (1995). And all four hit No 1 on the Billboard 200.
![Van Halen - Right Now (Official Music Video) [HD Remaster] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/gU7d2EHV_OQ/maxresdefault.jpg "“I saw them play as a three-piece before David Lee Roth joined the band. They did the whole of The Who’s Live At Leeds with Eddie Van Halen singing – and oh my God, that guy could play guitar!”: Michael Anthony’s good times and bad times with Van Halen 19")
But Hagar left the band after Balance, at which point the Van Halen brothers made their first attempt at a reunion with Roth.
“We tried to bring Dave back,” Anthony said. “We did two new songs for [1996 compilation album] The Best Of Van Halen Vol. 1, but we knew it wasn’t gonna work because Dave was the same as he was before he left the band.”
Former Extreme singer Gary Cherone was enlisted for the misleadingly-titled 1998 album Van Halen III, which turned out to be the last VH album that Anthony contributed to.
“That was a bad period,” Anthony said. “Eddie was dealing with his personal demons, so it was a really weird situation that Gary Cherone came into. The album we made with Gary was more like an Eddie Van Halen solo record. Eddie kept telling me, ‘I came up with this bass part!’ I didn’t play much on that record.”
Anthony continued: “Then Sammy called me. He was doing a project with Neal Schon from Journey, called Planet Us. Some Van Halen fans say I left the band to hook up with Sammy, but I never said I quit. There was nothing going on in the Van Halen camp, but Eddie kind of backed me up against a wall. I think at that point Eddie felt that I was a traitor.”
Michael Anthony’s final tour with Van Halen was in 2004.
He told MOJO: “I helped hook Sammy back up with them for that reunion tour, but Eddie didn’t want me to be a part of that originally, so I took a big pay cut. I’m not crying – I didn’t need the money. I did that because I wanted to play for the fans.
“I signed away any legal rights I had with the name, the trademark or whatever. And I did it because if that was the last time Van Halen would ever be on stage I wanted to be a part of it.”
As it turned out, Van Halen did continue without him. In 2007 the band reunited with David Lee Roth and brought in Eddie Van Halen’s son Wolfgang to play bass.
Anthony remained philosophical about it all.
He revealed: “When Van Halen got back together with Dave again, I found out about it the way the fans did – through the internet. And believe me, I was fine. Sure, it would have been great to be a part of that thing, but there’s no reason to whine – what’s that gonna get me?”
