“We could do no wrong. The crazier we got, the more you loved us, and the more you loved us, the bigger we got,” remembered Anderson in a recent Van Halen News Desk post. “Nobody could improve on what we’d perfected. The Stones may have been a rock ’n’ roll circus, but we were a rock ’n’ roll zoo.”
Anderson, who was with the band for what he called “the insane ’round-the-world ride” of 1980-84, had a simple job description — “Protect the band” — but, as he pointed out, taking care of the guys “not always such a simple thing to do.”
Why was it so tricky? Let Anderson count the ways: “I had to keep them safe when they were playing live. How did I know that the lunatic jumping on stage only wanted to sing along with Dave? I had to keep them out of harm’s way when they were back at the hotel, when they were partying, when they were traveling. Berserk fans. Jealous boyfriends. Sold-out shows. Drinking. Drugs. Women. I had to protect them from each other and from themselves.”
If those years weren’t a non-stop party for Van Halen, they seem to have come awfully close. For the guys behind the scenes, however, life wasn’t always glamorous,
