Michael Anthony has thorough a unforgettable – and strange – early touring sensible knowledge, when he watched Ozzy Osbourne gentle his Black Sabbath bandmate Invoice Ward on hearth.

It was 1978 when Van Halen, then a single of rock’s quickest climbing functions, was touring with Black Sabbath. “We had the very best time opening up for Black Sabbath,” Anthony recalled via a newest conversation with Sirius XM’s Eddie Trunk. “We arrived out like gangbusters each individual night.”

By all accounts, Osbourne’s group was in challenging shape at the time due to the fact of to alcoholic beverages and drug abuse, but Anthony renowned that the metal legends “still realized how to have fun offstage.”

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“Ozzy, Monthly bill Ward and myself would be sitting at the bar at the hotel just after the show possessing a beer,” the bassist recalled, detailing a single of his most loved memories from the tour. “Ozzy would elbow me and go, ‘Hey, Michael. Test this out.’ And he’d just transform in excess of and select up a lighter and mild Bill Ward’s beard on fireplace.”

To Anthony’s shock, Ward didn’t appear fazed by the spontaneous ignition

“He just snuffed it out,” Anthony remembered, “and failed to even skip a conquer.”

The Van Halen bassist shortly deduced that Ward was produced use of to these types of shenanigans, even if this sort of an act appeared wild to everyone else.

“[Ward] didn’t even flinch,” Anthony renowned. “He just saved ingesting his beer.”

Michael Anthony’s Beloved Tour Prank

Though Black Sabbath seemed to get pleasure from fireplace play, Anthony found his personal prank of choice was really the reverse.

“My forte was fireplace extinguishers. Just kind of shooting them off wherever I shouldn’t be,” the bassist confessed. “I’ve cleared a pair of hotels out my time. Experienced to spend the law enforcement off, things like that.”

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As Anthony explained, trashing accommodations was identified as a rite of passage for rock bands at the time.

“We’d go through what like Led Zeppelin would do, what Sabbath would do, what all these persons would do on tour,” he recalled, ideal ahead of admitting “there was a whole lot of shenanigans that went down” on Van Halen’s early tours.