VAN HALEN Trivia — 41 Entries
41 sourced facts about VAN HALEN.
Trivia
Van Halen's Japanese releases of the late 1970s and early 1980s carried Japanese titles unrelated to the originals. The debut became a phrase meaning roughly "the burning fuse"; Van Halen II "the legendary bomber"; Women and Children First "the law of darkness"; Fair Warning "martial law." From Diver Down onwards the practice stopped, and the records simply carried transliterations of their English titles or the English titles themselves.
The 2013 Japanese tour was the first time Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth had stood on a Japanese stage together since 1979. It opened at the Aichi Prefectural Gymnasium, where a sold-out five thousand were met with "Unchained." The line-up was Roth, Eddie and Alex, with Eddie's son Wolfgang on bass. Tokyo Dome followed on 21 June, and the Osaka Municipal Central Gymnasium on the 24th and 26th.
1991's For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, the band's ninth studio album, entered at No. 1 and held the position for three weeks that summer — the third consecutive US chart-topper for the line-up with Sammy Hagar. It also brought the band their first Grammy.
The live recordings released in 2026 come from one night: 27 August 1986 at the New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum in New Haven, Connecticut. More than ninety minutes of it had never been issued. The line-up is Sammy Hagar, Eddie, Alex and Michael Anthony. The concert video Live Without a Net, which went on to be certified double platinum, was filmed at that same show — audio and film are two records of the same evening.
The man who signed Van Halen was Ted Templeman of Warner Bros. What set it off was Marshall Berle — nephew of the comedian Milton Berle, and at that point looking after the band — telling him he simply had to go and see them. Templeman went to the Starwood and watched from upstairs so they would not spot him. Seeing Eddie play, his reaction was that he had never seen anything like it. He left without the band ever knowing he had been there, phoned Warner Bros. chairman Mo Ostin, brought him along the following night, and they walked into the dressing room and told the band they had a deal. Other labels had already passed — A&M among them — and the band had not been able to land a contract even during the period when Gene Simmons was involved with them.
The 1978 debut was cut at Sunset Sound, and the method was essentially live. The band played together in the room; only Roth went into an isolation booth, and that booth was positioned so that Templeman could see him and so that Eddie and Alex could too — the point being to preserve the eye contact they were used to on stage. Roth sang with the band and his vocals were patched up afterwards rather than tracked separately. By Templeman's count the whole record took less than two weeks. The songs had already been played into shape live.
"Eruption" got onto the album by accident. Templeman was in a small room next to the studio making phone calls, wandered in, and found Eddie sitting there playing something. Asked what it was, Eddie said it was just what he warmed up with before every show. Templeman shouted at engineer Donn Landee to roll tape — and Landee was already rolling, having heard it too. Templeman's account is that he had never heard tapping like it, and never heard anything that brilliant. Eddie's own response was that it was nothing. He had not intended to play it for him at all.
"Jump" started on a keyboard rather than a guitar, and not even in a studio. Eddie wrote it in his bedroom on a Sequential Circuits Prophet-10 while 5150 Studios was still being built. The problem was that every time he got the sound he wanted out of the right-hand split of the keyboard, the machine began to smoke and blew a fuse. He replaced it and the same thing happened. Someone he knew suggested an Oberheim OB-Xa; he bought one, and that was the sound.
Eddie built his own studio, 5150, because he wanted to decide how the records were made. The person who saw it the same way was engineer Donn Landee, who had recorded all five previous Van Halen albums. Landee helped build the place and engineered 1984 — and he named it, taking 5150 from the section of the California Welfare and Institutions Code covering the involuntary confinement of someone mentally unstable. From then on the studio was the band's base for every album they made.
Diver Down was a turning point for Eddie, because half of it was cover versions. He and Templeman had been at odds for a long time over what makes a good record. Templeman's position was that re-doing a proven hit gets you halfway there. Eddie's was the opposite: he would rather fail with his own music than succeed with someone else's. That disagreement is part of why he built his own studio — and his summary of what came next is that 1984 was him showing Templeman how a Van Halen record is actually made.
Between Diver Down and the middle of 1984, Eddie did a remarkable amount of work outside his own band: the guitar on Michael Jackson's "Beat It," the Star Fleet Project with Brian May, soundtracks for the films The Seduction of Gina and The Wild Life, and — with Donn Landee — producing a single for Dweezil Zappa. That last one began with a phone call from Frank Zappa while Van Halen were rehearsing for the Diver Down tour at Zoetrope Studios. Eddie's explanation for the volume is simple: writing was all he did, so there was music lying around.
By 1984 Van Halen were one of the biggest rock bands in the world. The album 1984 sold more than five million copies in the United States and reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 — their highest placing to that point, kept off the top by Michael Jackson's Thriller. The single it produced, "Jump," is the only Van Halen record ever to top the singles chart. The tour behind it sold out all 101 shows.
Sammy Hagar's route into Van Halen ran through a car dealership rather than the music business. The go-between was Eddie's friend Claudio Zampolli, an exotic car dealer. In late June 1985 Hagar dropped into Zampolli's shop on Wilshire Boulevard to look at Ferraris. Eddie had bought several Lamborghinis there and had mentioned in a recent conversation that he was looking for someone to replace Roth. Zampolli passed the problem on to Hagar, Hagar told him he could hand over his phone number, and Eddie rang to arrange a meeting and an audition.
The changeover was made public in an oddly staggered way. The band issued a statement confirming that David Lee Roth was no longer a member in August 1985. Hagar's formal induction came later, on 22 September 1985, on stage at the Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois — which was also the last time he played with his own backing band. Seconds before Eddie walked out to join him, a co-host of the live television broadcast said it out loud first, which settled the rumours whether the band was ready or not.
Who would make 5150 was settled by an awkward coincidence. The obvious choice for both the band and Hagar was Ted Templeman — but he was unavailable, having committed to producing David Lee Roth's Eat 'Em and Smile. So Eddie and Donn Landee took the producer's role themselves until December, when they brought in Foreigner's Mick Jones. The opening came when Jones was in town playing with Foreigner and invited Hagar to the show; Hagar asked him there and then whether he wanted to co-produce, and he said yes. The band's reasoning was that they did not want to do the whole thing alone — they wanted an outside opinion.
There is a reason the second album was made in such a hurry. After the debut went platinum and the band had spent a year on the road, Warner Bros. informed them that they owed the label two million dollars — the contract of the day required two albums a year. They went back into the studio with Ted Templeman on 10 December 1978 and cut Van Halen II in a matter of weeks.
The story that Van Halen's contract banned brown M&Ms from the dressing room has a document behind it. In 2008 the reporting site The Smoking Gun obtained and published the band's 1982 World Tour rider, acquired from the family of the late upstate New York promoter Jack Belle: fifty-three typewritten pages which, alongside that clause, called for herring in sour cream and four cases of sixteen-ounce Schlitz Malt Liquor. As for the purpose, the explanation given by a photographer who travelled with the band is that it had nothing to do with the sweets — it was a check on whether the venue had actually read the rider. The clause dates from the World Invasion Tour, which opened on 22 March 1980 in Eugene, Oregon.
Much of what is on 2012's A Different Kind of Truth is not new. "Beats Workin'," "Big River," "Bullethead," "Outta Space" and "She's the Woman" all go back to demos recorded before the 1978 debut; "Let's Get Rockin'" was renamed "Outta Space." The person who set it in motion was Wolfgang Van Halen, who went through the archive at 5150 and picked songs out of it. The band demoed thirty-five of them. His original idea had not been an album at all, but something closer to a collection of hardcore B-sides than a Best Of.
The familiar version of this story — that Eddie went uncredited on "Beat It" — is the wrong way round. He did not want his name in Thriller's credits, mainly so that the session would stay hidden from his own bandmates. Record company and musicians' union agreements put it there anyway, four times over in the liner notes, with thanks alongside to his wife Valerie and to Donn Landee, the engineer who had recorded every Van Halen album to that point. Concealment was never going to work in any case: David Lee Roth knew it was Eddie the first time he heard "Beat It" coming out of a car stereo in a 7-Eleven car park.
Eddie Van Halen died on 6 October 2020, aged 65. His son Wolfgang announced it on social media the same day, saying that his father, Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, had lost his long battle with cancer that morning. Eddie had been born in Amsterdam on 26 January 1955 and had come to Pasadena, California with his older brother Alex in February 1962.
That 2013 visit should have happened the year before. In August 2012 the band announced that Eddie had undergone emergency surgery for a severe bout of diverticulitis, with a full recovery expected to take four to six months. The Japanese dates scheduled for that year were postponed and rescheduled into 2013.
1995's Balance is the last studio album made by the line-up with Sammy Hagar. Released on 24 January 1995, it entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1 and was certified triple platinum by the RIAA. The eight previously unreleased live tracks on the expanded edition issued in August 2025 come from the band's Wembley Stadium appearance on 24 June that year, which the BBC had broadcast at the time.
The New Haven tapes surfaced as part of the fortieth-anniversary programme for 5150. Rhino released 5150 (Expanded Edition) on 27 March 2026, days after the album's fortieth anniversary, with the album itself remastered directly from the original master tapes under the supervision of Donn Landee, the band's longtime engineer. Ahead of it, on 3 February 2026, the New Haven performance of "Summer Nights" was issued digitally alongside an HD remastered video.
The reunion with David Lee Roth was announced on 13 August 2007, and the same announcement introduced Eddie's son Wolfgang Van Halen as the band's bass player. Twenty-five dates were announced, opening on 27 September that year in Charlotte, North Carolina — their first tour with Roth in twenty-two years. They had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that March.
The first thing Templeman did after signing them was cut a demo. He and engineer Donn Landee recorded the band's entire set of songs in a single day. The place where the band was licked into shape was the basement of David Lee Roth's house in Pasadena — Templeman rehearsed them there, and during the same stretch the two brothers, Eddie and Alex, took to coming round to his own house as well.
After the debut was finished but before it came out, Templeman went to see the band play the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. When "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" started, the room — some two thousand people — sang the words back. The record did not exist yet. Templeman compares the scene to the Beatles at the Cavern and says these men were already stars in Pasadena; that was the moment he knew something was happening. He also names that same song as his own favourite of everything he ever produced.
"Jump" is the only Van Halen song ever to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and the first. For all the argument about pushing a synthesiser to the front of a hard rock record, it is the one single of theirs that went to the top of that chart.
Eddie considered 1981's Fair Warning the album closest to what the band actually was. His argument was that they were a hard rock band and an album band, not a singles band. Templeman and Warner Bros. wanted singles, and this record did not have them. It was not a commercial flop, but it was not a success either — and it was that outcome, by his account, that produced Diver Down next.
"Girl Gone Bad," from 1984, took shape inside a hotel wardrobe. Eddie carried a microcassette recorder everywhere, and with his wife asleep in the room he took it into the closet and hummed and whistled the song into it. By his account he wrote virtually the whole thing that way, and only assembled it properly once he was home.
1984 is arranged so that anyone approaching it as a guitar album is wrong-footed at the start: across the album's first two songs, two minutes and ten seconds pass before Eddie's guitar is heard at all. Three of the nine tracks are synth-led; the rest are guitar records in the older manner. There is a neat symmetry to it — when listeners first heard the tapping at the end of "Eruption," many of them assumed they were hearing a synthesiser. Six years later they actually were.
Eddie held out hope that Roth would come back until 15 July 1985. That was the day Hagar came to 5150 to play and record a few songs with the band. The first thing they played was "Summer Nights," and Hagar wrote the lyric and the vocal melody to it on the spot — a complete song in twenty minutes. Part of what made him an attractive candidate was his record: his solo career was climbing, with his three most recent albums all certified gold, and the Van Halen brothers were admirers of the albums he had sung on with Montrose in the mid-1970s.
Two songs on 5150 — "Summer Nights" and "Get Up" — were written days after Eddie got hold of a new instrument. At the Summer NAMM convention in New Orleans in 1985, Ned Steinberger handed him a Steinberger GL2T, a headless guitar fitted with the TransTrem system, which lets the vibrato bar move whole chords up or down while keeping them in tune. Eddie had both songs written within a few days of receiving it.
For "Good Enough," the opening track of 5150, Eddie played a modified Kramer 1984. He took off the low E string and replaced it with a low A taken from a bass, so that the guitar ran A-A-D-G-B-E from the bottom up. That gave the rhythm parts something of the weight of a baritone guitar while leaving him able to play his usual lead lines on the rest of the neck.
1980's Women and Children First was the first Van Halen album made up entirely of original compositions. It was also fast. By Eddie's account the music took six days and the album as a whole eight, at a cost somewhere between thirty and forty thousand dollars. It was released in the United States on 26 March 1980.
The first time Eddie played keyboards on a Van Halen record was "And the Cradle Will Rock…" — an old Wurlitzer electric piano pushed through his own Marshalls with an MXR flanger on it. The band did not want their guitar hero standing at a keyboard on stage, so live the part went to Michael Anthony.
The title of 1988's OU812 is a dig at David Lee Roth's Eat 'Em and Smile. Read the letters and numbers aloud and they resolve into a short remark aimed squarely at him.
Sammy Hagar wanted the 1991 album titled with a single obscenity. What it got instead was For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, whose initials spell that same word. All four studio albums Van Halen made with Hagar reached No. 1 in the United States.
1998's Van Halen III is the only album with Gary Cherone singing. It entered the Billboard chart at No. 4 but was certified only gold — half a million copies — where every previous Van Halen album had sold at least two million. Fourteen years passed before the next one appeared.
Gary Cherone joined Van Halen within three months of his own band Extreme breaking up — close enough together, he says, that people came away with the mistaken impression that he had quit Extreme in order to take the job. He has also been clear about how the record was written: Van Halen III was put together almost entirely from scratch, unlike A Different Kind of Truth later on, which drew on material from the vault.
A Different Kind of Truth was produced by John Shanks and tracked at Henson Studios — but every guitar and bass part on the finished record was re-recorded at 5150, and the mix was moved there as well. The reason was the tape-based recording system in use at Henson, which was taking the life out of everything that went through it.
Eddie did more than play a solo on "Beat It." He first rearranged the track, had the engineer re-cut the middle section, and then improvised two solos over the new edit. Michael Jackson walked in as he was finishing the second one and approved it. He took no payment for the work.