Is Alex Van Halen lying about Michael Anthony? | Matt Connarton Unleashed

0:00 Speaker 1: I wanted to.

0:01 Speaker 2: A couple of music industry things. One of them involves... And we talked about on the show... What was it? Maybe two months ago? There was a story in the music industry news about David Lee Roth canceling his current tour. And we speculated and talked about... You know, what might be the reasons for that? You know, I had my theory, of course, I think it's because he frankly just can't sing anymore. But there's some other Van Halen related news that has emerged that's got people online chatting quite a bit.

0:32 Speaker 2: But there's an angle to this that no one else is mentioning that I want to point out.

0:38 Speaker 1: OK, little backstory just quickly.

0:40 Speaker 2: And I've been on a kind of a Van Halen kick recently, so I've been paying a little extra attention. You know, I go through these phases because Van Halen's always been one of my favorite bands, but then I go years without listening to any Van Halen and then I'm like, ah, time to listen to some Van Halen again. And I'm a big fan of, you know, sometimes fans dismissively refer to it as Van Hagar, but I actually prefer the Sammy Hagar era to the David Lee Roth era. I'm like the only Van Halen fan on earth who says that out loud.

1:09 Speaker 2: It's like, I'm the uncool kid in the room, but I don't care. They were every bit as successful, if not more so by some metrics with Hagar as they were with Roth.

1:17 Speaker 1: So, you know, Just saying.

1:21 Speaker 2: I love them both for different reasons. I love both Dave and Sammy. They're different flavors, but I prefer Hagar. He's got the pipes. Dude can sing. 5150 is my favorite Van Halen album to this day.

1:32 Speaker 1: I love 5150, the.

1:34 Speaker 2: First one with Hagar. Anyway, the reason they've been in the news recently is, well, I shouldn't even say recently because I feel like there's this this controversy that just sort of goes on and on, but Alex Van Halen, not too long ago, I guess within the.

1:50 Speaker 1: Last year, probably, right?

1:53 Speaker 2: His autobiography, Brothers, which is really an autobiography of his story with his brother, Eddie Van Halen, who passed away a number of years ago, has been.

2:05 Speaker 1: There's been some controversy.

2:06 Speaker 2: I haven't read the book yet, but there's been some controversy about it because.

2:12 Speaker 2: Not so much because of what he says in the book, but because of what he doesn't say.

2:18 Speaker 1: So the book focuses.

2:20 Speaker 2: On, in terms of the band Van Halen, apparently, the book focuses entirely on the David Lee Roth era, and he completely snubs Sammy Hagar in the book, which is surprising to a lot of people and frustrating to a lot of people. But part of, part of what I wanted to mention, because I feel like people are missing an important detail with this. The latest controversy is this. He said in an interview very recently, Alex Van Halen did, because obviously he's doing a lot of interviews.

2:55 Speaker 1: To promote his book.

2:56 Speaker 2: He said in an interview that they called Michael Anthony, bass player for Van Halen before Wolfgang, before Wolfgang Van Halen became the bass player. Um, when they did the reunion tour with Roth, uh, Michael Anthony was left out, and Eddie Van Halen's son, Wolfgang, who now has a very successful career as a solo artist, but Wolfgang became the new bass player. And this upset a lot of people, maybe not enough people, because the tour still did gangbusters numbers, but it wasn't a true reunion because Michael Anthony, the original bass player, was left out.

3:34 Speaker 2: And by the way, if you ever want to do a deep dive on this, and we don't have time to do it today, you know, unless we circle back to it later in the show, if we have time, I don't think we will. But Michael Anthony's history in Van Halen is very, very interesting, but also disappointing in a lot of ways. When you learn about how the Van Halen brothers even conspired with David Lee Roth very early on to screw over Michael Anthony financially and And in terms of contracts and rights to the royalties and rights to merchandise money and all of it, they really screwed over Michael Anthony.

4:14 Speaker 2: And Michael Anthony took it, he put up with it, to stay in the band because apparently from his perspective he thought better to stay in the band and deal with this terrible mistreatment than to be kicked out and then no longer be in Van Halen. But And then Hagar, you know, obviously Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony are very close friends. And so Hagar did a lot to protect Michael Anthony financially. When Hagar joined Van Halen, he insisted that Michael Anthony's share in everything be reinstated or he wouldn't join.

4:49 Speaker 2: So he played some hardball there in joining the band because he was appalled at the way that the Van Halen brothers, along with David Lee Roth, had treated Michael Anthony. It's all rather troubling if you really dive into it and read.

5:03 Speaker 1: What's available about it.

5:05 Speaker 2: Noel Monk, in his book, he was the original manager of Van Halen during the David Lee Roth era. And Noel Monk, he has a great book, which I have read. It's called Running with the Devil. He talks about a lot of the mistreatment of Michael Anthony and how David Lee Roth and the Van Halens just screwed him over. And they screwed him over over the course of decades. I'm building to a point here. So when they did... Well, when they did the reunion tour with Sammy Hagar, which would have been in what?

5:34 Speaker 2: Oh six Oh five Oh six. Um, they, uh, Michael Anthony was, was essentially a, a hired gun at that point. He was a paid employee. The Van Halen said successfully pushed him out as a business partner entirely. And he was basically a hired.

5:51 Speaker 1: Gun at that point.

5:52 Speaker 2: Um, But then, by the time you get to the first official reunion tour with Roth, and you can find the press conference on YouTube, Michael Anthony is nowhere to be found, and instead it's Wolfgang Van Halen. And in a recent interview, so everyone always assumed, and I think this is still the case, Eddie Van Halen, first of all, didn't like Michael Anthony anymore. and had a lot of negative things. There's kind of an infamous Howard Stern interview where Eddie Van Halen really goes in on Michael Anthony and trashes him along with Hagar because he was mad at both of them.

6:33 Speaker 2: So Eddie Van Halen wanted Michael Anthony out, but a big reason was he wanted his son. He wanted to play music with his son, and Wolfgang is an incredible musician, one of those guys who.

6:46 Speaker 1: Can play anything.

6:47 Speaker 2: So So the thought has always been that it's as simple as that. The Van Halen brothers have decided they hate Michael Anthony, even though, by the way, the only people ever to say a single negative word about Michael Anthony are the Van Halen brothers.

7:10 Speaker 1: You know, just like with Sammy Hagar.

7:12 Speaker 2: Whoever says anything bad about Sammy Hagar other than the Van Halen brothers and, of course, David Lee Roth. But anyway, just an observation. But everyone else talks about Michael Anthony like he's the greatest guy in the world. And he probably is. And if you've ever seen an interview with him, he comes across that way. He comes across as a really great dude and a very talented musician. Very talented bass player. Although I never liked those bass solos he would do. That would be the one thing I would nitpick.

7:40 Speaker 2: They're a little long, a little much. Anyway, Alex Van Halen in an interview said that They actually called Michael Anthony about the reunion tour with Roth because he addresses it. Basically, it comes up and he says in this interview, everyone always assumes that Eddie just wanted to play with Wolfgang. So we pushed Michael Anthony out. But that's not true. We called Michael Anthony, but he never called us back. But we did try. We did call him. Now, here's the thing that everyone's missing about this.

8:15 Speaker 2: By the way, I'm going to play the audio. Actually, I'm going to play the audio first. This is a little snippet of audio from this interview on a podcast. It's from a YouTube channel called Upload Records. I'm just going to play this little clip, but then I want to point out something that I feel like everyone else is missing because everyone's mad.

8:31 Speaker 1: Well, here, let me just play this. Let's play this first.

8:34 Speaker 3: So, nobody showed up, and then one day Ed and I were playing, and this bass comes in, and it had a nice feel to it. And behind the curtain, it was Wolf. And we did call, just to put the record straight, we did call Mike because we owed him that and we did call him and he just didn't answer. So you tried. Yeah, he had the same manager.

8:58 Speaker 2: Come on.

9:00 Speaker 3: And I'm not angry at him.

9:01 Speaker 1: I love Mike. He was important for the band, too.

9:05 Speaker 3: He's back in vocals. He was my drinking buddy. Ed and Dave were the.

9:09 Speaker 1: Alright, here's what I think. First, what are people mad about?

9:14 Speaker 2: People are mad because people are claiming that Alex Van Halen is lying. And that he's lying to make himself and Eddie look better.

9:23 Speaker 1: No, no, no.

9:26 Speaker 2: Everyone assumes that we pushed Michael Anthony out of the band Because Eddie wanted to play with his son in the band. But that's not true. We actually called Michael Anthony. We called him because we owed him that. So everyone's mad because they're saying, well, Alex is just saying that to make himself look better and to make Eddie look better. Now, you can see how it might be possible that a call was made and that, uh, you know, maybe there was a, just a breakdown in communication, you know, did they, I mean, did, did anyone literally call Michael Anthony?

10:11 Speaker 2: Did they, Alex says they had the same manager. Did they call the manager and say, call Michael? And then just somehow communication broke down. That's very possible. But the thing that I think everyone is missing about this is, this is what I want to point out. Alex never explicitly said, no one else has noticed this, apparently. I feel like I'm the only one who notices this. Alex never explicitly says in that clip that they called Michael Anthony about the tour and Because they wanted him on the tour.

10:46 Speaker 2: He never says that. It's almost his exact words. Let me back it up a little bit.

10:50 Speaker 3: I'm not angry at him.

10:54 Speaker 2: No, let me back it up a little more. Pay close attention to exactly what he says.

10:59 Speaker 1: Oh, wait, back it up a little more.

11:02 Speaker 3: Because we owed him that and we did call him and he just didn't.

11:06 Speaker 2: Because we owed him that. Because we owed him that. When I hear that, you know what I think? In other words, he's saying because we owed him a call because Michael Anthony has always said he found out with everyone else when he saw the press conference. The press conference announcing the reunion tour with David Lee Roth and it's Wolfgang on stage. I think what Alex Van Halen was saying is, I don't think he was saying we called him to offer him the spot on the tour because we wanted him on the tour.

11:41 Speaker 2: When he says he owed him that, that's a key phrase. We owed him that. In other words, I think what he's saying is we owed him a call to let him know what was happening because we weren't just going to not tell him.

11:54 Speaker 1: Because that's pretty bad. That happened to me once.

11:57 Speaker 2: I mean, obviously not on that scale, but there was a band I was in who decided to do a reunion. I was the original bass player and they just got a new bass player and didn't tell me. They apologized later. And I ended up back in that band later on anyway. It was the jinxed. And it was fine. It wasn't even a big deal. But they did kind of not bother to tell me. before publicly announcing the new bass player. That was kind of rude. But again, it was a long time ago, and who cares? But I think when he says we owed him that, because he says it very casually too, we owed him that.

12:37 Speaker 2: You know, I know I sound like I'm really nitpicking this, but if he had said more emphatically, we owed him that, Then I might think, okay, you owed him, you clearly believe you owed him something important if he said, we owed him that. Okay, then I might think, okay, so you owed him, so you're acknowledging that he was important to the band, so maybe you mean you owed him a chance to be in the band for the tour.

13:05 Speaker 1: But instead he just says it very dismissively, we called him, we owed him that.

13:09 Speaker 2: That sounds to me like he's saying, yeah, we owed him a call because, you know, he was in the band and, you know, we should just let him know, hey, dude, you're not going to be in the band on this tour. That's what I think everyone's missing. Everyone says, oh, Alex is lying. I think he's probably telling the truth. I think there probably.

13:24 Speaker 1: Was a call.

13:25 Speaker 2: And somehow communication just broke down and the message never got to Michael Anthony. But I think somebody probably did tell him to let him know, hey, there's going to be a press conference announcing a new tour. You're not included because you're not going to be on the tour. That's what I think he means when he just says, we owed him that. So. Doesn't make any of it okay, by the way. I do want to be clear about that. Even if my theory is right, doesn't make any of it okay. Michael Anthony should have been on that tour.

13:52 Speaker 2: He should have been still in the band. And the way they treated him is horrendous. Again, if you know anything about it, it's really bad. It's really bad. I remember a number of years ago, Eddie Van Halen during one of those periods where he was really on a tear about trashing Michael Anthony at every opportunity. He said that he claimed in an interview that he actually had to teach Michael Anthony how to play every single note of every song and that they would turn on a video camera so they could record the process so that Michael could study it to make sure that he really had the songs down, which...

14:28 Speaker 2: completely contradicted everything else that had ever been said about that. And everyone knows, everyone knows it was BS. And then Sammy Hagar made a video, uh, you know, really going at Eddie Van Halen for, for saying these things. But anyway, the Van Halen drama continues. It's, it's almost worse than it's ever. Well, I can't say it's worse than it's ever been, but, um, you know, because the band doesn't exist anymore, but effectively. But yeah, anyway, I just wanted to point that out and say, I think that there's something in what Alex Van Halen says that everyone is either missing or misinterpreting.