‘5150’: the Van Halen album that was nearly burned to the ground
No band can reach the level of Van Halen and not have a ton of pressure on them when they reach the studio.
Even if Eddie managed to make every single step of the process look like a walk in the park, there are a lot of moving parts that everyone needs to latch onto before they even hit RECORD. The guitarist was never one to back down from a challenge, but no one would have thought that one of the biggest dangers to one of their classics would be a member of their own staff.
When looking through every one of the band’s records since their debut, though, there’s hardly a moment where you feel like they are phoning it in or barely keeping it together. Even for an album that was as slapdash as Diver Down, it’s easy to hear the four members of the group having some fun in the studio and scrambling together material to create an album that has the energy of a rock and roll mixtape.
Once David Lee Roth left, though, the band were left at the height of their career without one of their leaders. Roth was a core piece of their sound, and even if Sammy Hagar did have some fine moments with them, the lion’s share of original fans were always going to remember ‘Diamond Dave’ for helping to start things. They could still make a decent record with ‘The Red Rocker’, but they were going to need a true ace in the hole to start with.
And it’s not like 5150 was in shaky hands or anything. They were using a bunch of their old crew, and they even managed to get Mick Jones from Foreigner to come in as a producer. Foreigner already had the pure rock and roll sheen to all of their records, and while it’s easy to hear Eddie in fine form throughout every track, Jones’s handiwork may have helped tighten up a handful of the tunes like ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ or ‘Good Enough’.
Once the band had got their bearings, though, Jones remembered that Eddie’s right-hand man, Donn Landee, nearly ended up burning down the entire studio before the record even came out, saying, “There was a little incident where things got a little wild with [engineer] Donn Landee, whom I had tremendous respect for. I don’t know how it started, but it ended up that he locked himself in the studio with the master tapes and threatened to set the place on fire. But it all got sorted out. So it was a challenging album in a way, but I was really just giving my input as far as song construction.”
Despite those hangups, though, Hagar was responsible for making every one of their songs feel like the most care-free rock and roll ever created. He was far from the singer that Roth was, but it didn’t matter so long as he could make magical tunes of his own on tracks like ‘Love Walks In’ and ‘Dreams’.
And it’s not like Jones was one to grandstand whenever he entered the studio. Eddie was more than capable of producing the whole thing himself, and if the band was already getting some strange looks from fans that preferred the raw edge of ‘Diamond Dave’, they would have been virtually crucified if they decided to make their own take on Jones’s material like ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’.
Then again, none of those influences were ever going to seep into the band’s foundation anyway. From day one, Eddie said that he would always sound like himself whenever he picked up his guitar, and even with a new singer at the helm, it’s hard to deny what Van Halen could do if they were still bringing the riffs.
