“How I would have liked”: The Van Halen album that Eddie always wanted to make
It’s never easy to figure out the right sound for your band in one fell swoop. Most people can spend years fine-tuning their craft until they hit something that works, but in the case of Van Halen, it turned out that capturing their live set was all they really needed when working on their blockbuster debut album. Eddie always thought that they could aim higher, though, and it wasn’t until years into the game that he started to realise what the depth of the band could sound like on record.
Then again, it’s hard to really argue with the higher-ups when putting together anyone’s debut record. This is normally the first time that any artist is behind the board listening back to their stuff, and even if they are killing it onstage, sometimes that doesn’t end up translating to what the record should sound like, either having too much bleed in the mics or sounds that didn’t cut it.
And by the time Van Halen found their stride with David Lee Roth, Eddie had already begun seeing problems. He wanted to have the final say in what many of the songs sounded, but he wasn’t really interested in trying to make something that forced him to do the work, like Fair Warning, where he was practically the producer telling everyone what to play for half of the tracks.
But by the end of the Roth era, that was the only way things could get done. Eddie had no time to listen to Roth talk about what he thought the band’s future should be, and working on songs like ‘I’ll Wait’ and ‘Jump’ became a headache when everyone said that they would never work with their sound.
Even though anyone could get satisfaction in proving everyone wrong when those tunes became hits, Eddie did have a few hangups when Roth left the group. Once he got ahold of Sammy Hagar to join the group for 5150, he finally had a formula that worked. Here was a singer that actually played an instrument and could get into the nitty-gritty of a song, and listening to them work off each other, Eddie had never sounded more at home working on tracks like ‘Love Walks In’ and ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’.
Despite having some incredible moments in his back catalogue already, Eddie felt that this was the album he was always building towards, saying, “The way we did 5150 is basically how I would have liked to have done all the previous records. And I think that’s another thing that maybe drove Dave away.” But just because Eddie was happy with it didn’t mean they didn’t pick up a few bad habits along the way.
5150 is already aces from back to front, but on the subsequent Hagar albums, there’s a bad case of fluff on a lot of their material, including songs that go on for a bit longer than they really should. Say what you will about Roth’s time with the group, but hearing them put on a damn fireworks show and be out of there within the span of 30-40 minutes was what kept them exciting on record.
Still, Eddie wasn’t about to start tightening things up all over again. He had spent years having to listen to producers tell him to trim things down, and now that he finally had the creative freedom he wanted, he wasn’t about to give it up.
