“Dave would tell him, ‘Turn your back to the audience, dude’”: Michael Anthony reveals the advice David Lee Roth gave Eddie Van Halen in his early “tapping” days
Before Eddie Van Halen changed the face of guitar playing, he was perfecting his craft behind closed doors – and sometimes, quite literally, with his back turned to the crowd.
In a recent chat with Get on the Bus, former Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony opens up about the band’s early garage rehearsal days, when Eddie Van Halen was still developing what would soon become his signature two-handed tapping technique.
READ MORE: “Oh man, I’ve really been playing a lot of cello!”: Sammy Hagar claims Eddie Van Halen was spending a lot of time playing an instrument that wasn’t guitar before he died
“We used to rehearse in this little garage when I first joined the band, and we used to rehearse there every day for a while,” he says [via Ultimate Guitar]. “That’s when Eddie was also developing his ‘hammers,’ his tapping style.”
“And it’s funny, because there were like two or three guitar players in the area that Ed was friends with, and they knew that we rehearsed there. And I remember one time we went to take a break, and we walk outside, and there were a couple of guys there like this, listening at the door, and they wanted to hear what Ed played.”
Concerned that Eddie’s technique might be copied before the band had released an album, Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth made sure to take protective measures to guard it from prying eyes – even on stage.
“There were gigs that we would play. We played a place called the Golden West Ballroom in Norwalk, California. And that was one place where we could play original stuff. And we opened up for UFO there. I think that was one of the biggest shows we ever did. It held about 1,500 to 2,000 people,” Anthony recalls.
“But when Ed would play a solo, Dave would tell him, ‘Turn your back to the audience, dude, because you got this thing, and you don’t want everybody to see it.’ So Eddie would, literally, play solos, and he would turn his back to the audience when he would be tapping. Which was really, really interesting.”
“And it wasn’t so much the tapping,” the bassist adds, “but the way he did it was different than what anybody else was trying to do.”
Also in the interview, Anthony reveals that the late guitarist actually had plans for a huge Van Halen reunion tour before he died.
“Unfortunately Eddie and I never [made amends],” he says. “We had some issues, and I’m sure that if he had not passed when he did that we would’ve reconciled or we would’ve really calmed all that stuff down, because I did hear, and I’ve talked to Wolfgang about it, that they were planning on coming to all of us and putting together a big reunion tour with all of us.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
