Whatever you were doing when you were 16, it is highly unlikely to top what Wolfgang Van Halen was doing. That’s the age that US guitarist and Mammoth leader Wolfgang was when he walked onstage at the Bobcats Arena in Charlotte, North Carolina on September 2007 to play his first public gig as bassist with the reunited Van Halen, his dad Eddie’s band. Speaking to Classic Rock for a feature in the new issue, out now, he describes as a moment akin to “being fired out of the cannon”.
Having to deal with the miffed reaction of sections of the band’s fanbase, who were disproportionately livid at the idea that he’d taken the place of original Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony, was tough, he tells Classic Rock’s Dave Everley. “I was there to support my dad, but I was aware that I’d become the biggest enemy of every forty-to fifty-year-old man out there in the world. It was something I didn’t know how to handle. That did a lot of damage to me.”
