HUNGRY LIKE THE WOLF

Life isn't always a bed of roses when you're following in a famous parent's footsteps. But with his two albums so far Wolfgang Van Halen is escaping from his father's shadow and determined to succeed on his own terms.

- Dave Everley

The night Wolfgang Van Halen stepped on stage as a frontman with his own band for the very first time is seared into his memory. It was July 21, 2021, at 350-capacity club The Bottleneck in Lawrence, Kansas. His solo project-turned-full band Mammoth WVH were making their live debut and his family were there to support him: his mum, the actress Valerie Bertinelli, his uncle Pat and Wolfgang’s thenfiancée (and now wife). But still he was, by his own description, freaking the fuck out.

“I was sitting there in the little dressing room, going: ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’” he says. “I’ve found that the time that I’m most unable to control my anxiety is the first time I’m doing something. And that was a really, really, really big first – the first Mammoth show, the first time I was the frontman, the first time having to be the thing that everybody was looking at.”

The thing is, he’d played venues bigger than this before. Much, much bigger. In 2007 and 2008, when Wolfgang was in his mid-teens, he played bass on Van Halen’s hugely successful North American arena tour, which saw his dad and uncle, Eddie and Alex Van Halen, reuniting with original singer David Lee Roth. That was followed in 2012 by a second, equally high profile VH tour, and another three years after that.

“It was a lot of pressure, but we had rehearsed constantly, to the point where those songs were in my bones,” he says of his time playing with Van Halen. “And luckily nobody was staring at me – they were staring at Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth on the stage together – so I got to lay back and do my part.”