In a new interview with former Iron Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain, Alex Van Halen has shared what it was like seeing Black Sabbath for the first time. Guesting on the season finale of McBrain's YouTube series Metal Sticks, Alex recalled going with brother Eddie Van Halen to see Sabbath open for Grand Funk Railroad.
"I had to stick my head in those low bins," he says. "I got my head blown off when Bill [Ward] was hammering the kick drums. It blew me away[...], it really left an impression on me. That's the kind of thing you want. You want the sound to move you."
Infamously, Van Halen would open for Black Sabbath in 1978, though by that point Sabs were on the wane with Ozzy Osbourne's dismissal from the group imminent. In his 2021 book Eruption: The Eddie Van Halen Story, author Paul Brannigan explained that Van Halen were running rings around the headliner every night.
"On 22 August, the quartet re-joined their friends in Black Sabbath for their US tour," Brannigan writes. "The promoters should also have hired a crime-scene investigator to document the tour and draw chalk outlines around Ozzy, Tony, Geezer and Bill onstage, for it was clear to all in attendance that Sabbath were being murdered, night after night."
Even if that was the case, there was clearly no bad blood between the groups. In the same book, Ozzy Osbourne admits that Sabbath weren't up to the challenge Van Halen posed.
"When a band goes on stage before you and goes down better than you, you either say, 'Right, we’re going to go out there and fucking show them how to do it,' or you just fold up," he explains. "And they had years on us, and we’d been fighting this lawsuit with our old manager for fucking years, and I was just fucking tired of fighting."
For his own part, in the Metal Sticks interview Alex admits Van Halen were eager to support their heroes. "We were honored and blown away that they asked us to open for them," he admits.
You can watch the full interview with Alex Van Halen on YouTube below.
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