CHICKENFOOT bassist Michael Anthony (ex-VAN HALEN) spoke with Joe Matera from Ultimate-guitar.com recently about a number of topics. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Ultimate-guitar.com: With all your years with Van Halen, what do you consider one of your most treasured memories of your time with the band?

Anthony: "It is probably when we walked out on stage in Southern California at the US festival in 1983. There was like 300,000 to 400,000 people there as we walked out on to that stage. I mean my mouth just dropped wide open. It was Woodstock times ten to me."

Ultimate-guitar.com: My personal favorite Van Halen album of all time is the Fair Warning album.

Anthony: "Cool, Fair Warning is my favorite Roth era album."

Ultimate-guitar.com: I really think that album has been highly under rated over the years. Looking back now, what do you remember about the making of that album?

Anthony: "After having had made a few Van Halen records, we were obviously becoming a lot more comfortable in the studio. I think at that stage, as players, we were really becoming more accomplished as far as playing better than we have ever had as a unit and as a band. I just remember it was all good times. One great thing about a lot of that early stuff too is that we never, or used very, very few, overdubs, guitar overdubs. We always wanted to play it live, like we did on stage because that was how we would ultimately end up playing it to the people anyway. At that stage we were also learning a lot of the technical stuff, all the magic and all the stuff, the fairy dust that you can spread on stuff in the studio, but we always wanted to maintain that raw type sound. I think at that point we were probably rocking as a band."