011984 VAN HALEN
(1984)
Van Halen’s sixth album, 1984, was the climax of a battle for creative control between Eddie Van Halen and the band’s producer Ted Templeman. After 1981’s Fairwarning – Van Halen’s heaviest album – produced no hit singles, Templeman pushed for covers on 1982 follow-up Diver Down. It yielded hits, but Eddie was unhappy.
“I would rather bomb with my own music than make it with other people’s music,” Eddie told Guitarworld in 2014. “Ted felt that if you redo a proven hit, you’re already halfway there.” To wrest control from Templeman, Eddie and engineer Don Landee converted a racquetball court at Van Halen’s house into a studio. They named it 5150, and the 1984 album was its first project. Ironically, the album made entirely on Eddie’s terms became Van Halen’s most commercially successful effort. Templeman resisted recording at 5150, but relented after he heard the song Jump. “He didn’t care much about the rest of the record,” said Eddie. “He just wanted that one hit.”
With Eddie, a classically trained pianist, playing the main riff on synthesizer, Jump put a new twist on Van Halen’s sound. As Joe Satriani says now: “Jump sounded really fresh. The simple major chords that we’ve heard a million times just for some reason sound new. I would say that’s like Mozart. There’s a history of amazing classical music before him, so what did he do? He used the same chords as everybody else, but the way he did it made you go ‘Oh! I like the way he goes I-IV-V.’ Jump has that same thing. It’s just I-IV-V, but it sounds great.”
With Templeman pacified, Van Halen got serious. Limited space at 5150 made for an unusual working environment. The Marshall Plexi sat in one corner behind isolation panels, and Eddie sat on a stool in front of brother Alex’s drumkit and did not even wear headphones. There wasn’t space for cymbals, which were overdubbed later. Only the snare was live; Alex used electronic Simmons drums for everything else. “Can you imagine what it sounded like in the room?” laughs Satriani. “This is insane. He’d do a drum fill and where there should be a crash at the end, there’s nothing. How did they work that out? Just the monitoring, so that they could do something like Hot Forteacher and make it sound so perfect?”
The visual connection between the Van Halen brothers was essential. As Eddie recalled of Hotforteacher: “I distinctly remember sitting in front of Al on a wooden stool and playing that part during my solo where it climbs. Well, I can’t count, so Al needs to follow me. I’d sit right in front of him, and then he’d look at me like, ‘Now!’” Satriani is thrilled by this story. “No wonder it sounds like so much fun!” he enthuses. “They were sort of autonomous and yet they were totally linked together.”
As Satriani sees it, the sound of the brothers playing live was essential to the Van Halen sound. “That sound of Alex’s snare drum, I just hear that as something that pulls the whole album together. There are a couple of drummers out there that do that. Watching the Getback documentary [2021], I realised The Beatles were not The Beatles until Ringo started playing. When he was off having a cup of tea, it just sounded like John, Paul, and George as individuals. It didn’t sound like The Beatles. Ringo starts to play and it’s this gigantic thing. Van Halen is the same way. We’ve all heard Eddie jamming with other people and it’s nowhere near the same.”
Joe discussed the recording of 1984 with Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony when they worked together in the supergroup Chickenfoot. Since 5150’s live room only had space for Eddie and Alex, Anthony overdubbed his bass later. “Mike told me every song you’d have to find out where Eddie was tuned, because you never knew what take they used and whether anything was tuned at the time,” Joe says. “What makes this album so interesting is the fact that there are guitars that are not totally in tune - but good luck trying to get as good a take as that!”
Eddie’s 1984 tone is distinct from his early sound, but it used largely the same gear. The Frankenstrat was largely retired for this album in favour of the banana-headstocked Kramer 5150, but the magic Marshall Plexi was still his only amp. Eddie did use his Eventide harmoniser on every song, but it was not as prominent as it would become on later albums. “I used it mostly to split my guitar signal so it came out of both sides,” he commented.
The guitars are still single-tracked with few overdubs, making it unique among rock albums of the time. As Joe comments: “There’s not like rhythm guitar left and right. I’m always adding a Tele and a Strat and a Les Paul, but because David Lee Roth’s voice was so charismatic, they didn’t have to. They left space for each other.”
Templeman’s lack of concern for album tracks left Eddie and Alex free to stretch themselves creatively. As Joe says: “When you make albums, there are songs that the band likes but from the production point of view it doesn’t have commercial potential, suddenly people start to work on it differently. Everyone plays differently. They say, ‘Well, it’s not gonna be a single so we can do this instead of having to edit that part.’ I love Houseofpain so much. It’s not as complete as Jump or Panama, where you can tell they worked on it because it had single potential. The verses are so out there. When I try to imagine one of the four parts not being there, it doesn’t work. I remember just listening to that over and over again, thinking ‘This is a moment.’
“What I really like about that first the first version of Van Halen was that they all seem to be playing separate parts with separate accents, yet they came together so well. Eddie never really went for that triple-tracked, all playing the same thing, the drums and bass are doing the same thing. It’s a different kind of music altogether. It’s both whimsical and deadly serious, and you just have to be so good to pull that off.”
Joe still recalls Van Halen’s seismic impact on America’s guitarists. “When Eddie came on the scene it scared the sh*t out of
so many guitar players,” he says. “I saw it as a total vindication of what I liked to play and what I liked to listen to, whereas people in other styles were feeling, ‘This is bad competition. I don’t want to have to deal with someone who can play that good.’ I always thought Eddie is going to be great for guitar. I was keen not to copy something that Eddie had done. Like, ‘I’m not going to get in his territory. What’s my contribution?’ When I wrote the two-handed piece Midnight for Surfingwiththealien I was thinking, ‘Guys like Eddie and other two-handed players – what did they not do?’”
For Joe Satriani, 1984 exemplifies great music. “The music we listen to decade after decade is the stuff with character and love in it. You can’t get that just by sitting down with the metronome and trying to get one click faster. The thing we should be practising is just playing music. Eddie and Alex jammed for hours until they hit upon something so unique that is so perfectly natural. It jumps out of the album.”
“GUITARS ARE NOT TOTALLY IN TUNE - BUT GOOD LUCK TRYING TO
GET AS GOOD A TAKE AS THAT!”