Did Journey try to sabotage Van Halen’s big break in 1978?
Perhaps one of the worst things that can happen to a rock band is that they take to the stage after a support band has completely blown them out of the water.
You’d be surprised just how much this has happened, particularly in the earlier decades of hard rock, as different bands were constantly on the rise, pushing musical boundaries and blowing the minds of everyone within earshot in the process. One of the worst bands for upstaging those they were supporting was Van Halen.
This probably won’t come as a surprise to you. Just imagine standing in the midst of a sweaty crowd, waiting for the main act to come on, but before that, Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth take to the stage. You have a lead guitarist playing the instrument in a way which was completely alien, meanwhile, one of the greatest frontmen to ever take to the stage was running around and delivering killer vocals.
To put into perspective just how exciting Van Halen was to crowds, they wound up upstaging Black Sabbath when they were on tour supporting them. Yes, even the founders of heavy metal couldn’t hold a candle to Eddie and co, as they would stand side stage and wonder how they could possibly go on after the crowd had just witnessed that.
“They were very good. They were very energetic. You’ve got David Lee Roth there, jumping up in the air and doing somersaults, and God knows what else,” said Tony Iommi, “The way they’d run around the stage, of course, it was the complete opposite to us […] You knew then that they were gonna make it. There’s no two ways about it. They just got something that nobody else was doing at that time.”
Rock band Journey was also victims to Van Halen support slots. When they went on tour together, Journey was completely blown out of the water by their support act, who were very much on the verge of making it big.
Their singer, Steve Perry, said that his band simply couldn’t keep up, recalling, “They cleaned our clock plenty of times. They were so focused and so on fire that they were just relentless”. So, what’s a band to do? Well, Journey decided to sabotage Van Halen by messing with their PA system before they went on stage in a bid to make the band sound significantly worse.
This was incredibly detrimental to them, as Eddie didn’t tend to use very many effect pedals. He was able to achieve his guitar tone by having his amp set to a very specific setting, and as such, the moment people started messing around with his PA, the entire sonics went down the plug hole.
Journey is very much of the opinion that they were only playing around with Van Halen’s sound for a joke; however, Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony thinks there was a lot more malice behind it than that. He believed that Journey was jealous of the band and the ‘practical jokes’ were essentially an effort to try and get them off the road. Joke or genuine sabotage, which side Journey was on, remains in contention, but Anthony was of the opinion, “[Journey] were trying to kick us off the tour every week on that one”.
