I’ve written about Van Halen a few times before, but I wanted to take a few minutes today to talk about how Van Halen went from a relatively acceptable vehicle for the talents of bassist/golden-throated background singer Michael Anthony to a truly terrible waste of sensational musician and all around fun-lover Michael Anthony’s prodigious gifts.

As those of you who read my post about jump closely paying special attention to the subtext (such as referring to them as “these two assholes”) already know, I blame the guitarist and the drummer for this. They might seem fun, since they changed their last name to the band’s name like The Ramones or The Donnas, but actually (ACTUALLY) they named the band after themselves like a couple of real assholes.

How did they ruin the band, and by extension waste Quetzalcoatl’s gift to the world/golden boy/golden-throated angel Michael Anthony’s talents? Besides by being assholes, I mean.

Well, let’s start at the beginning with Running With the Devil:

This video is for a song that pre-dates MTV, so it is relatively primitive in its live without an audience sparseness, but I think it makes it clear what the band in its full fun-loving mode was capable of.

One of the key reasons this video is good is that most of it consists of shots of our rockin’ heroes, the fun-loving part of the band:

In the early days, there was balance.

You might still have an excessively flashy guitar solo, but you’d still see the other members of the band during it.

Notice how your eyes are still drawn to Michael Anthony here?

And immediately after the solo spotlight, the guitar player joins the rest of the band to showcase the rocking out as a group.

Toward the middle of the ‘80’s, the band’s balance started to be disrupted. The fun-loving and the “serious” parts of the band started to be in conflict.

For example, here’s the video for Panama:

It starts with the singer bungee-ing in holding a boombox.

The talented Mr. Anthony and the guitar player do a fun jump off a riser on the stage.

Michael Anthony gets his chance to bungee as well, in his case holding a bass that looks like a bottle of Jack Daniels.

The man virtually oozes fun.

On the other hand, though, you have the Van Halen brothers in white jacket tuxedos playing classical music.

Where did the fun go? It’s like they know they should be frolicking, but they’re so worried about seeming cool that it’s just sad.

Also, in this video when the obligatory overly-complicated guitar solo comes along, the rest of the band melts away and we just get close ups of the guitar player’s fingers moving fast.

I am not impressed.

As the band moves into its “late” period, balance is completely destroyed as the singer switches sides from the fun-loving, pro-golden-throated background vocalist Michael Anthony camp to the boring, self-important Van Halen brother camp. To emphasize his camp-switching, he changed his name and voice, as well as received extensive plastic surgery to alter his appearance.

Just take a look at this mess, When It’s Love:

Christ.

Just look at how serious the singer looks.

It’s such a harsh contrast with the very same singer at the beginning of the Panama video.

The “guitar” player is actually playing keyboards here, also with a thoughtful and serious face.

The singer pretends to be having fun by kicking, but nothing can hide the fact that he is wearing what appears to be a leisure suit.

Hero to gods and men Michael Anthony, on the other hand, is smiling while wearing a sleeveless Mickey Mouse t-shirt.

It’s like the rest of the band had a meeting about what to wear and “forgot” to invite him.

The only real levity in the video comes from when Michael Anthony forces his way into the shot to lend his golden throat to this shit show.

This shot, however, is more representative of the video:

Michael Anthony, cut out of the picture. A tragedy for the ages.

So, to answer my question from early (go ahead and re-read it, I’ll wait), what happened? How did the Van Halens ruin Van Halen? By not naming the band The Michael Anthony’s, that’s how.

-PTD