Greg Prato for Ultimate Guitar spoke with bassist Michael Anthony about unreleased Van Halen material, the conversation appears in its entirety below.
Ultimate Guitar: To the best of your knowledge, how many unreleased Van Halen songs are there from when Dave was in the band? Because if you read old interviews with Dave or Eddie, they mention titles of songs that were never released.
Michael Anthony: There were quite a few songs that I was a part of and worked on and written, even a couple of things before the first Van Halen record and the early part of Van Halen that they actually restructured and used on the A Different Kind of Truth album that they put out. Songs like She’s The Woman, that’s the only thing that comes to mind.
There were songs that were basically written way back in the early days when Dave, Eddie, Alex, and myself were together that they ended up using on that. But, God, I can’t recall. There’s probably miles of stuff. I mean, you’ve probably seen pictures of all the boxes of the tapes and everything [in Eddie‘s studio]. Which is miles of stuff.
Every time that we went into the studio, whether it was Donn Landee or whoever was engineering for us, we had him press record. We recorded everything, every idea that we had. And there’s stuff in there that…
I hope Wolfgang goes through some of it because I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff that Eddie did on his own, too, that might be kind of interesting to listen to also. But there’s tons of stuff that we’ll probably never see. Or hear.
Ultimate Guitar: You just mentioned the A Different Kind of Truth album. Did you ever listen to it, and if so, what did you think about it?
Michael Anthony: I listened to a little bit of it. It was different. Dave was singing differently. And adding Wolfgang into the mix. It was different than what we were obviously doing when I was in the band. There’s a lot of good stuff on there. But yeah, I thought it was a good album.
3 Responses
As with everything else Van Halen related, I’m not going to hold my breath for any unreleased material. For this to happen, there would have to be a concerted effort on the part of Wolf (who’s busy with his own career) or Alex (who, by all indications, is retired), or a trusted archivist with permission to go through all the stuff. It’s always seemed like VH themselves – Ed and Al, in particular – never recognized their own musical significance or legacy. For a band with mass commercial appeal, they’ve never given much regard to their audience. They seemed to have operated solely as artists and their audience is an afterthought or “icing on the cake.” On the one hand, that’s great because they never pandered or followed trends. On the other hand, as a fan, it’s kind of baffling that they would be so oblivious to their own audience and its curiosity/demand for unreleased music.
If Wolfgang needs help listening to all the miles of tapes to find material that could be released, I’m surely available to listen to them…..
Yea I’m not holding my breath, same goes for a DVD live performance of the Roth era ’78-’84, unfortunately I don’t think that’ll ever happen.