Their reputation for drawing audiences was built quickly. Soon the band was opening for the likes of Santana, UFO, Nils Lofgren and Sparks. When scenester and show promoter Rodney Bingenheimer booked Van Halen into the Starwood club, Kiss’ Gene Simmons caught their act and was floored. Taking the Pasadena upstarts under his leathery wing, Simmons financed the band’s first professional demo tape. Basics for the songs “Runnin’ with the Devil” and “House of Pain” (the latter of which would appear on the album 1984) were cut at Village Recorder Studios in Los Angeles. Later, Simmons, who was trying to persuade the band into calling themselves Daddy Longlegs (an idea they rejected out of hand), flew the group to New York to finish recording at Electric Ladyland Studios in New York. It was there that Eddie had his first exposure with the practice of overdubbing; the guitarist was anything but comfortable with the process. “I tried to [do it], but I just didn’t know how,” he said. “You have to play to yourself. I was like, ‘How the hell do I do this?’ I hadn’t even played with another guitarist.’ While in New York, Simmons arranged for the band to perform a showcase for Kiss’ manager Bill Aucoin. Aucoin agreed with Simmons that Van Halen had spirit, but he felt their commercial prospects were limited; instead, the manager set his sights on signing a band called Piper, whose commercial prospects proved to be even less than limited. With their demo tape in hand, Van Halen headed back to California, buoyed by their brush with success but uncertain when their real break would come. Although they were stars on the Sunset Strip, the band wasn’t seeing much money; some gigs paid no more than $75. “Not even enough to buy equipment,” Eddie recalled. “Alex and I used to go around and paint house numbers on curbs to make extra money.” All of that changed during another Starwood performance when the band was introduced to Marshall Berle, nephew of comedian and TV icon Milton Berle, who became the group’s manager. Berle had a flair for hype, but something about the way he talked up Van Halen and their ability to draw crowds led Warner Bros. head Mo Ostin to believe that maybe this was more than just talk—perhaps there was something to this band from Pasadena after all. And so, on a night that saw heavy rain flood the Hollywood streets, Van Halen played to a nearly empty Starwood. Mo Ostin was there, along with Warner Bros. in-house producer Ted Templeman. Despite the nonexistent crowd, Van Halen played with unbridled brio. Ostin and Templeman looked at each other and smiled: They would sign the band, as in right away. “It was right out of the movies,” Eddie said. “Just like that, we finally had a record deal.” Templeman, who had produced albums for Van Morrison, Carly Simon and Captain Beefheart, among others, and who enjoyed a long and fruitful association with the Doobie Brothers, was astounded by Van Halen’s surfeit of strong material, and he wasted little time in hustling them into Sunset Sound Studios. Once in the studio, even less time was wasted: In only 18 days, the band raced through their entire repertoire, 40 songs in all, originals as well as covers such as the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and John Brim’s blues standard “Ice Cream Man.” On the songs that didn’t require a vibrato bar (“You Really Got Me,” “Runnin’ with the Devil,” the rhythm track for Jamie’s Cryin’ ”), Eddie employed his main live guitar, an Ibanez “Shark” Destroyer. On other songs, he used a black-andwhite striped Strat that he outfitted with a Gibson Fifties PAF humbucker. Much to Eddie’s relief, Templeman wasn’t the punctilious sort; the producer was in thrall of the band’s live performance qualities and insisted on keeping instrumental overdubs to a minimum. “It was a party,” Eddie said of the sessions. “We played the way we played onstage, and it was great. It didn’t feel like we were making a record. We just went in, poured back a few beers and played.” The tracks for the album had almost all been cut when, one day, Templeman walked into the studio and heard Eddie and Alex warming up for a show the band was to play that night at the Whisky. According to Eddie, the two were just “dickin’ around,” but Templeman sensed something else was happening, a breakthrough of some sort. He watched and listened in hypnotic excitement as the guitarist’s fingers danced along the fretboard. These weren’t the normal scales and patterns Eddie had traditionally practiced to limber up; these were strange and exciting song fragments, a voluptuous feast of ideas, operatic in scope but performed with a savage, erotic force. Templeman had already been telling friends and associates about this marvelous new guitarist he’d been working with, going so far as to compare him to the likes of Django Reinhardt and Andrés Segovia, but now he was convinced of Eddie Van Halen’s genius. He asked Eddie what it was he was playing. “Oh, that’s a little solo thing I do live,” he responded. Templeman didn’t recall Van Halen playing it at the Starwood show he attended, but he insisted that the instrumental be fleshed out and cut for the album.

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