Michael Anthony: the real secret weapon of Van Halen
Anyone in the band Van Halen who doesn’t have that last name will have to go the extra mile to get noticed. Eddie and Alex had already formed the band after playing at different backyard parties, but once Eddie started launching into his signature tapping runs, there was no one focused on anything else onstage except for him. Although David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar managed to hold their own next to the brothers, Michael Anthony gets criminally overlooked when looking at the evolution of their sound.
Then again, it’s not like he didn’t have an uphill battle ahead of him. When he joined the group, Anthony remembered that half of his time was spent trying to keep up with the rest of them whenever he played and making sure that he didn’t make an ass out of himself trying to showboat too much.
While Anthony already had chops after working in the LA rock outfit Snake, he learned a thing or two standing next to Eddie. There was no way that he would become the next Geddy Lee of bass playing or anything, but by keeping things low to the ground and swinging, he gave Eddie a firm foundation to stand on whenever he played his licks.
You have to remember that a lot gets lost when there’s only one guitar player onstage, and thanks to Anthony’s rock-solid tone, Van Halen still sounded larger than life as Eddie started playing. He also wasn’t afraid to hog the limelight every now and again, whether it was that massive one-note bass break at the top of ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’ or matching Eddie note-for-note on the Motörhead-tinged rocker, ‘Loss of Control’.
But the real power behind Anthony isn’t his stage presence or bass playing; it’s his voice. During every facet of Van Halen’s career, his high-register backing vocals had always been a fixture of their sound, always soaring above the music and never really competing with what either Roth or Hagar were doing in their prime.
In fact, if you want to pinpoint the moment when Van Halen started to go off the rails, it usually comes down to when they start moving Anthony out of the picture. Throughout albums like Balance and the infamous Van Halen III, all the power behind their vocal prowess is just gone out of nowhere, which often made them feel like a glorified cover band of Van Halen material who happened to have the guitar god himself playing lead.
Even though Anthony would get forced out of the recording studio before getting fired from the band in the 2000s, he’s hardly suffered from it. Granted, it’s going to sting when your old band relaunches themselves without you, but ever since then, his work on Hagar’s various solo joints, as well as the supergroup Chickenfoot, has made him one of the most reliable sidemen in rock and roll.
But above all else, Anthony’s demeanour throughout each chapter of Van Halen’s legacy is the real reason why he should be so revered. While Eddie could do whatever he wanted as the leader of the group and Roth became a glorified cartoon character by the end, Anthony remained almost completely egoless throughout the entire thing, usually just coming off as the guy who seemed to win the musical lottery after joining the group.
It’s easy to look at Anthony as the glorified ‘Ringo’ of Van Halen, but his influence is worth more than that. As much as the power dynamic fluctuated through the years, each piece of the band was integral to their success, and if Anthony’s bass fills and high voice wasn’t there on that first record, who knows if they would have scaled the heights that they did?
