Celebrity Drive: Chickenfoot Bassist Michael Anthony

Quick Stats: Michael Anthony, bass player, Chickenfoot and the Circle
Daily Driver: Mercedes-AMG GL63 (Michael’s rating: 10 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other cars: See below
Favorite road trip: California coast
Car he learned to drive in: 1960s Ford Ranch wagon
First car bought: 1963 Ford Falcon wagon

Every time Chickenfoot and the Circle bass player Michael Anthony drives any of his cars, it makes him feel like he’s going on a little road trip.

“I don’t mind going to the hardware or the grocery store then,” he says, laughing. “I [get excited about] just getting into one of my cars and driving it. But if I’m home and I need to go to the hardware store, I jump in my GL or something. It makes me feel good.”

Anthony has nine cars to choose from, down from a larger fleet. “It shrunk up because my wife started yelling at me, and I like to drive everything that I have,” he tells Motor Trend. “I don’t collect things for the sake of collecting. I don’t really see the point.”

2016 Mercedes-AMG GL63

Rating: 10

Anthony used to live in Glendora, California, where he had a six-car garage and a warehouse in Pomona that was easy to get to. Now that he lives in Newport Beach with a two-car garage, the GL63 is his daily driver.

“Before I owned this Mercedes, I had a full-sized supercharged Range Rover and it was fast and really bad on gas—not that the Mercedes isn’t. But the Mercedes—I designed the one that I bought, so I have everything in it that I like, as far as creature comforts. It’s 550 hp so it’s a beast when you get out on the road,” he says. He rates it a perfect 10.

Anthony says the Range Rover was fast but it didn’t have the amenities the Mercedes does. “My Mercedes has the heated and cooled seats, the massagers, it’s got everything,” he says. “If I’m going to drive it every day, I want to be comfortable. And I’ve got three dogs so it works perfect as far as the dogs—in and out.”

Anthony likes the fact that the Mercedes has plenty of seating. “It’s got a third row of seats that you pull down flat, but if I’ve got the family, I can pull those seats up and have those extra seats, too,” he says. “If I can’t have one of my hot rods or my sports cars here, I can jump in that thing, and it’s fast and it handles great.”

He liked his Mercedes so much, the weekend before Christmas, Anthony bought an AMG GT C as a Christmas gift to himself. “I hate to admit it now, but I guess I’m a Mercedes guy, because I’ve got those two and then my wife has an SL 550,” he says with a laugh.

2018 Mercedes-AMG GT C

Rating: 10

“There is nothing about that car that I don’t like and I’ve been going over everything with it since I bought it—the drivability, the comfort for what it is. It’s obviously not a big luxury Mercedes, but that’s not what it’s supposed to be,” he says.

Anthony likes that the GT C is fast and handles great. “If I’m going to jump in the car and go flying down the road and have a great time, it’s perfect for all of that,” he says.

A local dealer who’d sold the musician his past cars called him about this model. “They told me they were getting one of the limited 50 that were coming out and they’d give me the first shot at it,” Anthony says. “I took my Ferrari and drove down there and I ended up driving home with that car that day. They gave me a good price on my Ferrari, so I just traded it in.”

1933 Ford Roadster

Rating: 10

Anthony has been a hot rod fanatic for years and was good friends with the late Boyd Coddington, who built this roadster for him in 1994. “Black with flames, that’s how I always envisioned a roadster. That was the classic hot rod. I used to draw pictures of roadsters with flames on them in school,” he says.

Anthony had total input into this car. “It’s pretty basic: There’s no air conditioning, no heating, it has no side windows, it has a lift-off custom aluminum top they made for me, so I can drive with the top on to keep the sun off my head,” he says. “Or I can take the top off and have it [be a] total roadster. It has a nice 350 Chevy motor in it. The car weighs basically nothing … so it doesn’t take much to just light the tires up on that car.”

Anthony always turns heads when he drives this car, and he’s had a couple close calls from people who were too distracted by it and didn’t realize they were drifting into his lane.

1940 Ford Convertible

Rating: 10

This is another car Coddington built for Anthony. “That’s an all-steel car. After we’d done the roadster, we decided to build one that had all the comforts,” he says.

That includes heating, air conditioning, a Grand Sport Corvette motor, and a Corvette suspension. “It’s a 1940 Ford body, but … it handles really well, plus with the top up, [you can] put the windows up, great stereo, and be comfortable driving this one,” he says.

Anthony helped design this car, as well, and Coddington put in everything he asked for. “It’s a great car, we can go somewhere for a week,” the musician says. “We built it and completed it in 1997. The day after, we debuted the car over at Boyd’s hot rod shop that used to be in Stanton.”
Coddington used to debut cars by having a big party and inviting people to come see it. “There was smoke and lights, and all of a sudden we came driving out of all this smoke with the car and people applaud and they get to see one of Boyd’s latest creations,” he says.

Anthony and some other Coddington clients drove out in a caravan to Springfield, stopping off at events each night. “Back then there were a lot of people that were skeptics about his cars. ‘Oh, they’re just built to be shown, they’re show cars, they’re not built to be driven.’ He did not like that. This was a brand-new car, and we drove it there, and the only problem I even had with it was one leaky brake line, which we fixed,” Anthony says.

2005 Ford GT

Rating: 10

Anthony’s Chickenfoot bandmate and fellow Celeb Drive Sammy Hagar also has this car.

Anthony met people at Ford through a project for SEMA. “We customized this Thunderbird and won first place at SEMA,” he says. After that, his friends at Ford got him and Hagar a couple spots on the coveted list of those first Ford GTs, he adds.

“I was excited because when I saw one at SEMA, they let me sit in it and I said, ‘I’ve got to have one of these.’ It won Le Mans in the late ’60s and I just loved that car. I followed all the press on that car, and when I saw my chance I jumped in and was able to get a spot,” he says, laughing.

Anthony rates the Ford GT a perfect 10. “I totally love that car. It’s not the most comfortable car, but it’s fast and so easy to drive. You can drive that car to the grocery story every day if you wanted to. That is my car I just have reserved for if I want to go out somewhere and drive really fast,” he says.

Anthony likes his 2005 better than the new Ford GTs. “The ’05 and ’06s remain more true to the early GT40s,” Anthony says. “The new one—they’ve taken the body style and they’ve massaged it and put in big horsepower and made a bunch of improvements and took it away from the look of what it used to be.”

1957 Chevy Nomad

Rating: 6

“I’m still working on it. I bought that car at the Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale in 2007 and it’s a work in progress,” Anthony says. “The body’s beautiful, and I’ve changed some interior stuff. I put an Art Morrison chassis underneath it.”

Anthony likes that this is a car he can really work on with friends. “That’s my beach cruiser,” he says. “I like to bring it down near the beach because it’s all about surfing and the ’57 Nomad fits right in with all that. The Tri-Five Chevys—’55, ’56, and ’57—that to me is one of the most timeless body styles. Those cars will never go out of style.”

He says even though this is a custom restomod, it was original enough. “I didn’t want to get an original and do a bunch of stuff to it,” he says. “I’d rather leave something like that original. This one already had work done on it. It wasn’t original when I bought it, so I didn’t feel bad about doing any kind of modification.”

Car he learned to drive in

Anthony learned how to drive in Arcadia in a big, blue 1960s Ford Ranch wagon. He lived close to the Santa Anita Park, and his dad took him to the racetrack’s parking lot to practice.

“He’d take me to the parking lot there where there was plenty room, and that’s where I first got behind the wheel of a car,” Anthony recalls.

Since it was his father’s car, that was the only time Anthony really drove it. “I didn’t have any money to buy a car, so when I got my license I did not have a car at first,” he says.

Later, his sister owned a 1964 Ford Falcon Futura, which then became Anthony’s car. “My sister cracked the block, and my dad said I could have the car if I helped him rebuild the motor. Hence my introduction to working on car motors,” Anthony says. “[That was] on the older cars—I don’t have a clue on the newer cars. I wish I still had that Falcon. It was just a really cool body style.”

That was Anthony’s car when he was playing music in bands in high school and needed something to haul equipment around in. “I got rid of that Ford and bought myself, oddly enough, a 1963 Ford Falcon wagon,” he says, laughing. 

First car bought

Anthony made money working as a weekend gardener to help pay for the 1963 Ford Falcon wagon, which ended up being the right car for the up-and-coming musician.

“A friend of mine got me a job working at his uncle’s duplex in Arcadia, and I would go there and do all the gardening every weekend,” he says. “I scrimped and saved and did all the odd jobs that kids do to try to buy a car, because at that point I wasn’t making any money playing music yet.”

He paid about $500 for the Falcon wagon. “My dad helped me get the transmission rebuilt, and the next day something else was going wrong. It seemed like all the money I was making doing anything I was just putting into the car to try to keep it running and a little bit extra to put gas in it. That’s what we went through back then,” he says.

Anthony installed an 8-track stereo in this Falcon by himself. It would be the car he’d make a lot of memories in. “I always had to have music in my cars,” he says. “That was my school car, I’d take my equipment to play parties, [it was a] whatever-we-were-doing car, and I’d take out the girl who would become my wife.”

Anthony’s friends were driving sportier cars, but his wagon came in handy. “If we were going to parties, I could load everybody in my car to go to a party or something like that,” he says. “I wished I had a smaller car like these guys were driving—a Mustang or whatever—but I couldn’t do that because I had to haul my equipment around. That was the only downside of it.”

Rock Star Car During Van Halen

Anthony has always liked Porsches, and his first rock star car was a 1979 Porsche 911 SC. “That was the first car that I spent money on when I had money and I could afford to buy what I wanted,” he says.

He bought the Porsche right after Van Halen’s first tour in 1978. “And to pay my parents back for all the nightmares I put them through rehearsing in their garage, I bought my parents a Ford Granada, which I was so proud of being able to do after our first tour,” he says.

Anthony kept his Porsche for quite a few years. “I always wanted the Turbo, but I couldn’t afford that, so when I could afford it I bought myself a 930 Turbo. I had both Porsches for a while.”

He ended up getting rid of his 911 but kept the Turbo. “That’s when the Turbos were a crazy car,” he says. “I wish I [still] had every car I’ve ever owned. You always see something that you think you’d like better. It’s the same thing with music equipment, but you don’t know it at the time, because you think, ‘Hey, I like this now.’ So you buy it, and then sometimes years later you look back and go, ‘God, why did I get rid of that?’”

Favorite road trip

One of Anthony’s favorite road trips might be the one where he drove his new Coddington hot rod to Springfield. He’s also done regular trips up the California coast with friends and says it’s always a fun drive.

“I’ve owned quite a few different Ferraris, and my wife and I would get together with other couples that we know, and … take our cars up along the coast to Carmel. It would be like a four-day weekend. There’d be three to four of us, usually,” he says.

They’d drive up California State Route 1 with two-way radios. “One guy would go way up ahead when we had a nice stretch, and when there weren’t any cars coming, he’d let us know, and one at a time we’d take our cars and do a speed run,” he says with a laugh. “That’s how we would go up the coast. Any time we’d get a chance to do that, we’re driving fast.”

Anthony and his friends also do road trips to Santa Barbara or Palm Springs if they can’t make it all the way to Carmel. “One of our friends has a place in Palm Desert, and we’d go up through Borrego Springs. There’s some windy roads coming into Palm Springs, which is a lot of fun to drive,” he says. “During the weekend, we have to keep our wives happy, so we’d go out to dinner or let them go shopping, and we would try to find a road where we can just do a little road racing ourselves.”

Sammy Hagar’s High Tide Beach Party & Car Show, Oct. 6

Anthony is joining Hagar’s inaugural High Tide Beach Party & Car Show in Huntington Beach on Oct. 6. Hagar will be joined by REO Speedwagon, another former Celeb Drive Vince Neil, Jason Bonham, Vic Johnson, Joe Satriani, and Reel Big Fish.

Mad Anthony’s Hot Sauce

Besides cars, Anthony has always loved hot sauces. He’s been making his own hot sauces since 2004, which are now offered at Outback Steakhouse restaurants.

“It got to the point where people would always say, ‘You ought to make your own hot sauce.’ I found a person who was local, a small company down towards San Diego that wanted to do a hot sauce for me but let me create the flavor,” he says. “I didn’t want to just put my name and have them put it out like a lot of celebrities do.”

Mad Anthony’s hot sauce won a couple of awards when it first came out, and it’s now sold at Bristol Farms stores in California. “It was just a small thing, but within the last year to two, I’m growing the hot sauce now,” he says. “I have a little more time to put into it. It’s not even as much for the money—sure, the money’s always nice—but to be able to have a flavor that I created and other people like it, too. It’s great.”

Bonspeed Wheels

Anthony met Bonspeed Wheels partner Brad Fanshaw when Fanshaw worked for Coddington. They’ve been friends ever since and have owned the wheel company together for at least 15 years.

“We both shared the same passion for cars, and he ended up leaving Boyd’s company and was trying to do a couple other different ventures and he knew that he would always come back to doing something automotive,” Anthony says. “We decided we wanted to do a wheel because he knew all about wheels from working at Boyd’s. That was the main thing that Boyd was known for in the beginning, was his wheel, so [Fanshaw] started doing that and asked if I wanted to partner up with him. I thought, ‘Sure, anything to do with automotive, so I can hang out around cars—I’m in.’”

For more information on Anthony’s ventures, visit madanthonycafe.com, bonspeedwheels.com, and hightidebeachparty.com.

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