Girl dad Wspmfp Braves/Flyers/Hokies Knows more ball than you.
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Eddie Van Halen put his 16-year-old son Wolfgang on bass for Van Halen's 2007 reunion tour, and it grossed more than $93 million. Michael Anthony, the bassist Wolfgang replaced, had once taken 20% of the band's profits.
Wolfgang got the job in September 2006, at 15. Six months later, before the tour started, Anthony accepted Van Halen's Hall of Fame award while Eddie was in rehab.
In the video below, he starts that night with Eddie: "I wish you were here, buddy... He's home getting some help and I love you, man." Sammy Hagar calls it "hard for Mike and I to stand up and do this."
Their 1980s manager, Noel Monk, says Eddie, Alex and David Lee Roth cut Anthony out of the royalties on the 1984 tour. "From that moment on," Monk wrote, "Michael was basically a wage earner." That album sold over 10 million copies.
In 2004 he came back for a tour as a hired musician, reportedly on a pay cut and without rights to the band's name and logo.
The case for Eddie: he wrote the music. "Every note Mike ever played, I had to show him how to play," he said in 2015.
If you build something with friends, don't swap your share for a wage to keep the peace, because a wage is much easier to take away.
So was Eddie giving the job to the best bassist he knew, or squeezing Michael Anthony for 22 years until only the job was left?
I post one famous deal like this every day, with who got paid, who got played, and the numbers that never made the poster.
