The Van Halen album the band were initially disappointed in
By the end of the 1970s, most rock fans were ready for a band like Van Halen to come out of the woodwork. Compared to the massive sounds of prog rock clogging up the airwaves, the progenitors of hair metal began to make heavy music feel fun, with fans latching onto their massive hooks as much as they did the guitar riffs from Eddie Van Halen. Although the group kicked ass throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, they have been known to notice a few blemishes in their discography.
Before they played a note in the studio, the band had a long way to go working the California club scene. Initially kicked out of certain clubs because some members were too young, the group eventually found their calling when drafting in frontman David Lee Roth.
Turning himself into a glorified cartoon character whenever he played, Roth embodied everything expected in a rockstar frontman, having the gift of gab onstage and presiding like a heavy metal emcee at the most incredible party in the world. Quickly capturing the eye of Warner Bros, the band hooked up with Ted Templeman for their debut album, who had previously worked with bands like Montrose featuring a young singer named Sammy Hagar.
Even though the band would take their career to new heights in the studio, Templeman thought they could finish the job by recapturing what they did live. Booking them in the studio for their debut record, Templeman thought the group should recreate their live set on tape, making for an album that felt like a wild night through West Hollywood. While Van Halen would define what the hair metal scene would become a few years later, engineer Donn Landee remembered the band’s dissatisfaction with the final mixes.
Reminiscing on the group’s first record, Landee remembered the band thinking the sound wasn’t up to their usual standards, telling TapeOp, “They were extremely quiet. We didn’t hear anything about [the sound of the album] until well after Van Halen was out. They were disappointed; it was not what they had in their mind when they came in to do the record. But Alex [Van Halen] told me we got it right later on. What we got on tape for 1984 was much more to his liking”.
Alex wasn’t the only one vocal about his disapproval of the album at first. When talking about his signature solo ‘Eruption’, Eddie initially thought that the guitar showcase shouldn’t have been put out, thinking that it had a few mistakes that he couldn’t recreate properly whenever they played live.
What were seen as errors by the band would turn into the album’s greatest strengths, though. While most of the album does have a barebones style of production, it only enforces the power of the tunes, whether that meant Eddie embracing the hybrid sounds of heavy metal on ‘Atomic Punk’ or going into the world of bluesy swagger on ‘Ice Cream Man’. Every artist might see a handful of albums as mistakes, but Van Halen’s “mistakes” on their debut have turned the rock world inside out for years.
