Brothers

Knowing that they had to play outside of Pasadena to make it big, the band made the Sunset Strip of Hollywood their “hunting ground” (77) in the spring of 1974. The hot spots for music on the Strip included the Whisky a Go Go, the Roxy, and the Troubadour, but they found their home at Gazzarri’s, where they became the house band, attracting large crowds. Alex Van Halen describes the nightclub as “kind of down and dirty and [having] a seedy vibe to it” (78). Playing regularly at Gazzarri’s made them all better musicians and entertainers. This was especially true for Eddie, who perfected the guitar technique known as tapping.

After being talked up by a popular radio personality, the band started playing other clubs. Gene Simmons, the bassist of the famous band rock Kiss, and who had just started his own record company, saw them perform and flew them to New York City to produce a demo record. However,, they were unhappy with the results and this incident did not represent the big break they were looking for. Nevertheless, Alex Van Halen writes warmly that “Gene’s a great man and I love him. I’ll always appreciate his early enthusiasm for us and understanding of what we were doing” (89). Alex feels nostalgia for those early days: “there’s a way in which the club days were the pinnacle of our experience on planet Earth. That’s when we got the highest highs, because the potential of being great was still out there!” (90).

In 1977, the band finally got their big break—a signed record contract with the record label Warner Bros. While they were headlining a string of shows at the Whisky a Go Go, impresario Marshall Berle convinced Warner Bros. executive Ted Templeman to come and see them perform. Templeman was blown away by Eddie’s guitar playing; he compared Eddie to jazz legends saxophonist Charlie Parker and pianist Art Tatum. Within a week, they were signed by Warner Bros., a whirlwind experience of success: “it was like a cascade of dominos knocking each other over. Every obstacle to our dream becoming reality just cleared out of the way” (94). 

However, their contract was terrible. Alex Van Halen describes it as akin to a “Motown contract” (96), referring to the fact that Black Motown artists had often been taken advantage of by record executives. While Alex Van Halen was grateful to Berle, who would become the band’s manager, and to Warner Bros. for signing them, he also came to resent the industry for “making money off our sweat and talent without paying us what we’re worth” (97).

In the spring of 1977, Templeman took the band to Sunset Sound studio to record. While the band was happy with the recording, Templeman “was worried about Dave’s singing” and was “angling to have him replaced with Sammy Hagar, of all people” (101), whom he’d worked with on a previous recording. The band, however, told Templeman that “Van Halen was indivisible. Take it or leave it” (102). They were also told by the label to stop playing clubs in preparation for a tour and for the release of their first album—titled simply Van Halen. While Templeman tempered the record with an eye toward sales, they were pleased with the inclusion of the song “Eruption,” featuring Eddie’s famous guitar solo. In early 1978, the studio released five songs from the album to radio stations, the band embarked on an 11-month tour, and the album climbed to number 19 of the US charts.

Alex Van Halen remembers the 1978 tour fondly. He “loved touring at that point in [his] life; so did Ed. It’s a pretty ideal life for a young man who just wants to play music, meet women, and party” (110). However, the band had to be strategic about their partying because they “had an obligation to the audience” (111). The band’s hijinks on the road primarily included destruction of property at hotels and playing childish pranks on one another. Noel Monk, the Warner Bros. touring manager, called this behavior “part of the process of becoming a tried-and-tested rock star; understanding that you could do almost anything, and ignoring the switch that stops you from doing it,” but Alex Van Halen provides the simpler explanation of being young and not at “the peak of your powers of judgement” (115-16). Writing from the vantage point of adulthood, he sees himself and his bandmates as closer to childhood than to maturity: “whether we knew it or not, we were still kids. Every night of that tour we called home to talk to our dad” (116).