This one has been sitting in the vault for a while. And since I haven't made a Van Halen post in a long while, I thought I would dig it out.It's a very funny "open letter to Michael Anthony" from the editors of SPIN Magazine. Read the whole thing here. But here is a teaser:
Look, there's something undeniably poignant about watching a chubby-cheeked teenager get to share the stage with his pops and his uncle and that weird guy everyone's bitched about at the dinner table his whole life, but how is it that a 16-year-old novice is the most ambivalent -- and sure, I'll say it, most out-of-shape -- guy on a stage full of fiftysomething jillionaires? This kid just won the rock 'n' roll lottery, shouldn't he be doing...something? Mike, you would have been all over that catwalk, stomping, mugging, punishing that Jack Daniels bass. Wolfgang mostly just stood there in his hoodie, nodding his head, barely even deigning to smile. During "Romeo Delight" from Women and Children First -- I'm not afraid to say I had to look it up, it's been a while -- the enormotron showed Wolfgang finger-tapping the fretboard of his bass. Where do you think he learned that? (Hint: Not from you.) And come to think of it, shouldn't he be in school or something? Did he just hand a note to his principal?
To Whom It May Concern,
My son Wolfgang won't be attending school this year because he's in fucking Van Halen now.
Suck it,
Eddie Van Halen
True dat - double true!
4 comments:
Whoa, pretty strong letter. Guess that says a lot about the music industry where the money is huge and the egos even more so. As you have said before, though, Michael Anthony has handled this quite professionally and that is saying a lot. Maybe he is glad to not have to deal with the personalities and ego clashes that touring with Van Halen had always brought. Insights?
I think my Social IQ is somewhere in the single digits. I'm not really sure what that letter is about, to be honest. It was written with so many layers of sarcasm, I can't tell who steve is honoring, making fun of, and if he even has a real opinion about the topic -- or if he is just making fun of the reader for thinking something like this was important enough to write a "letter" about.
I need someone to 'splain this to me real nice and slow like.
Ya know I have said alot about this on my blog and I think Mike is getting shafted big time in this whole matter. He takes it better than I would. From what I understand he has been getting shafted since Fair Warning.
If anyone could write a book about what really when on in Van Halen from 1974 to 2005 Mike could be that person.....I think you could get an honest look under the hood of the machine too. I think you would see the good, bad and the ugly.
I would buy that book in 5 seconds. And it would be VERY ugly.
Post a Comment