Time Capsule: Van Halen, Van Halen

Before 1978, producer Ted Templeman had worked with artists like the Doobie Brothers, Van Morrison, Little Feat and Carly Simon. He’d never really done anything heavy, largely existing in the then-buoyant soft-rock world, lapping up the effervescence of singer-songwriter’s golden age. But soon came a Pasadena four-piece led by two brothers, an energetic madman and a cover band bassist, who’d formed four years prior out of the ashes of a band called Mammoth. Eddie and Alex Van Halen, David Lee Roth and Michael Anthony made a 29-track demo tape with Gene Simmons (who was introduced to the band by radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer) and, after years of making noise in the West Hollywood club scene, signed with Warner Bros. in 1977 and went to work on their eventual debut album. Cue the oversight of Templeman, who worked for Warner and was a major catalyst in Van Halen’s signing—having seen the band’s performance at the Starwood on Santa Monica Boulevard in February of that year.

While KISS’s manager, Bill Aucoin, had no interest in working with Van Halen, the joke’s on him—as Van Halen’s debut album came out better than every KISS record, even their most beloved projects, like Destroyer and Love Gun. While KISS had turned the shock rock world into a mainstream, fire-breathing, blood-spitting wonder of pyrotechnics, glam makeup and brash, melodic, thunderous hooks, Van Halen transformed hard rock with just 11 songs. Marshall Berle would become Van Halen’s manager, having discovered the band after seeing their sold-out hometown show in Pasadena and (with Kim Fowley) later putting them on a bill with Venus and the Razorblades at the Whiskey a Go Go. Simmons had left Van Halen in the dust for a KISS tour after the demo sessions at Village Recorders and Electric Lady Studios.

Recording for Van Halen began on August 29th and lasted until October 4th (though most of the song trackings were completed by September 8th, save for some overdubs that happened later that autumn), taking place at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood. Anthony claimed that, despite those demo sessions with Simmons, Van Halen had very little material to work with and wound up recreating their usual live sets in the studio. Templeman was keen on straying from the path of his own softer dependencies, wanting to make a big, colorful, heady guitar record packed to the brim with riffs and ear-candy hooks that cut all the way to the bone. With the one-in-a-million good looks of David Lee Roth and the lead guitar maestro antics of Eddie Van Halen (and his custom Frankenstrat built from replacement parts) in tow, Templeman got his wish and a little extra.

Van Halen very well endures as one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll debuts of all time—a puzzling truth now, given how maligned the initial critical reception was. Charles M. Young was especially critical in his review for Rolling Stone, writing that “in three years, Van Halen is going to be fat and self-indulgent and digusting,” signaling that the band would become irrelevant in the same vein as Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin in due time. “In the meantime, they are likely to be a big deal,” Young continued. For the record, three years after the release of their debut, Van Halen put out Fair Warning, which went to #5 on the Billboard 200 and is certified 2x Platinum by the RIAA. Fair Warning wasn’t the band’s best work, but they were by no means any less popular in 1981 than they were in 1978—and Van Halen would become even bigger just three years after that, capitalizing on the release of their pop mainstream crossover album 1984 (a smash success built off the back of #1 hit single “Jump”).

But Van Halen does everything right. It’s hormone-soaked masculine rock that doesn’t feel unavoidably toxic, and it outpaces everything bands like Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Bad Company, Blue Oyster Cult and UFO ever did during that same era. I like what Robert Christgau said about the album, that “Warners wants us to know that [Van Halen] is the biggest bar band in the San Fernando Valley… The term becomes honorific when the music belongs in a bar. This music belongs on an aircraft carrier.” Van Halen were local heroes in SoCal before any contract ink dried; it’s hard to imagine them playing any venues smaller than a sardine-packed stadium. The lyrics on Van Halen don’t require any decoding; the four-piece lets their own showmanship do all of the heavy lifting—and it’s one of the last instances that such a dynamic ever worked so well.

First impressions are crucial in all walks of life, and a debut rock album ought to get off on the right foot. In the previous 11 years alone, some of the greatest opening tracks came out—including the New York Dolls’ “Personality Crisis,” Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Purple Haze” and the Doors’ “Break On Through (To the Other Side).” Van Halen would join the party with “Runnin’ with the Devil” (the title inspired by the Ohio Players’ “Runnin’ from the Devil”), a blistering welcome fit with a mirage of car horns sounding. Templeman pitched the horns down, something the band had done in their demos with Simmons, too.

While Roth compares playing gigs across the country to getting in bed with Satan (“I found the simple life ain’t so simple / When I jumped out, on that road, I got no love, no love you’d call real / Ain’t got nobody waitin’ at home”), Eddie played four-measure guitar solos after the second and third choruses. There’s a sensuality to “Runnin’ with the Devil”—an energy alive and beating in much of Van Halen’s catalog—but as a kickstarter to a career, few opening tracks can ease in slowly and then erupt into one of the greatest hard rock songs of all time. A grand entrance, indeed. (Guns N’ Roses would learn a thing or two from Van Halen by slotting “Welcome to the Jungle” in as their debut album’s opener, and Appetite For Destruction would be the next man up for ubiquitous, bulletproof rock introductions just nine years later.)

What happens next on Van Halen very well might be the record’s most recognizable chapter, as Eddie Van Halen steps into the spotlight and plays a song-length guitar solo for one minute and 42 seconds. It’s on “Eruption” that we get a glimpse of Eddie’s trademark two-handed “tapping,” a playing style where he’d tap the strings and make machine-gun arpeggios and legato notes—which he claimed to have hawked from Jimmy Page, who’d done a pull-off on an open string during his “Heartbreaker” solo seven years prior. “Eruption” on the album, on the radio and everywhere in-between segues into a cover of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”—just one of numerous instances where Van Halen’s cover of a famous song is as good (or better) than the source material (“(Oh) Pretty Woman,” “Dancing in the Street” and “Where Have All the Good Times Gone” stick out first).