The Van Halen song that was recorded in one take
Most great rock and roll songs don’t have to rely on having the perfect take. Even though many artists spend an age trying to get the sound right whenever they enter the studio, there are just as many who capture the magic on the tape that they felt in the room, not willing to sacrifice the final track to clean up any of the subtle imperfections. Although there was hardly any note out of place whenever Van Halen entered the studio, Sammy Hagar remembered that one of their most celebrated songs came together in just one take.
Then again, Van Halen’s recording career feels like a tale of two different bands half the time. Although they may have been able to get their foot in the door with David Lee Roth, the different creative tensions between Roth and Eddie Van Halen led to him leaving the group after the tour for their album 1984.
While most bands would have collapsed if they had to lose a frontman of Roth’s calibre, Eddie was determined to continue with a completely different sound. Embracing the sounds of keyboards and guitar, Eddie got the idea to go with Hagar after a chance encounter with his local mechanic, who suggested that he work with Hagar after working on the singer’s car a few weeks before.
Although the band could have been dead in the water, Hagar’s way of internalising Eddie’s melodies made for a career resurrection unlike any other. After one of their most blockbuster albums yet, 5150 held its own next to the Roth era, taking the basic building blocks of what Eddie had been doing and pairing them with more thoughtful lyrics, from ballads like ‘Love Walks In’ to powerful anthems like ‘Dreams’.
If 5150 saw the band getting settled in with Hagar, OU812 was where they began to experiment with what they could do. Outside of the massive single ‘When It’s Love’, the rest of the album would feature a more complex approach to rock and roll, putting together traditional Van Halen staples like ‘Mine All Mine’ next to bluesier material like ‘Sucker in a 3 Piece’.
Midway through the album, ‘Cabo Wabo’ would become one of their most complex undertakings yet. Spanning seven minutes, the band would fluctuate with different song arrangements without any regard for the traditional pop hooks, which Hagar would later admit were deliberately recorded off the cuff.
Instead of the usual approach to honing the song, Hagar remembered the track coming together after one singular pass, saying, “They had already recorded an instrumental version, and I wrote those lyrics. I came home, picked up the microphone, and read the lyrics to the track. I was just roughing it. It worked so good, and it was one take, and I wrote those friggin lyrics away from them, and they wrote the music away from me, and it was like [a] perfect song. I didn’t change one word”.
Granted, Hagar would also have some not-so-fond memories of working on the final album, thinking that most of it wasn’t produced to its fullest potential because no one was around to police them. While many of the songs may have benefited from having another producer in the room, ‘Cabo Wabo’ captures the spirit of four guys in a room making music for the hell of it.
