Van Halen Roth Mix

Eruption Album: Van Halen (1978)
Runnin' with the Devil Album: Van Halen (1978)
And the Cradle Will Rock... Album: Women and Children First (1980)
Take Your Whiskey Home Album: Women and Children First (1980)
Unchained Album: Fair Warning (1981)
Where Have All the Good Times Gone! Album: Diver Down (1982)
by Van Halen

"Eruption" is an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo that leads into "You Really Got Me," Van Halen's first single. It started as a warm-up exercise Eddie used. The band's producer, Ted Templeman, thought it would make a great addition to the album, so they included it.

Eddie ran his guitar through a cheap echo unit called a Univox to get the low growl at the end. He put a different motor in the unit to give it a distinctive sound. Eddie often took apart his guitars and processing devices to create new effects.

Eddie Van Halen's work on Eruption marked a giant leap forward in the progression of rock guitar. "His playing, especially on the instrumental, 'Eruption,' upped the game for everyone," longtime Guitar Player editor Jas Obrecht explained in the book Shredders! "The technique of tapping the fingerboard had been around for decades, but it was sparsely practiced, and almost always as a novelty. Eddie brought finger tapping into mainstream rock'n'roll."

"His impact was enormous," Obrecht added. "Within six months of the release of the first Van Halen album, young guitarists all across the country and in Europe - and especially Japan - were sporting copycat guitars and playing pale versions of 'Eruption.' But no one surpassed the original, because the real genius of Eddie Van Halen has always been in his hands and his imagination. I saw this myself one day in 1980, when Eddie showed me how he plays 'Eruption.' He did this with an unplugged Strat, and you know what? The whole song was there."

Rolling Stone magazine Issue 1054 asked Eddie Van Halen how Eruption came about: "We recorded our first record on Sunset Sound in Hollywood, and we were warming up for a weekend gig at the Whisky. And I was just rehearsing, and [engineer] Donn Landee happened to record it. It was never planned to be on the record. So the take on the record was a total freak thing. It was just an accident. He happened to be rolling tape."

Eddie Van Halen insisted there is a mistake in Eruption near the beginning. "Whenever I hear it, I always think, Man, I could've played it better," he said, making a great argument against perfectionism.

Eruption is often cited as one of the best guitar solos of all time. A 2001 Guitar World magazine poll had it placing #2, second only to "Stairway To Heaven." In their 2013 poll, readers picked "Eruption" as #1.

In the 2015 movie Minions, one of the animated title creatures (Stuart), blasts into Eruption, thrilling the crowd before smashing his guitar.

Runnin' with the Devil is the first song on the first Van Halen album. It starts with a backwards blare of car horns, which was made by a contraption Eddie Van Halen put together using a bunch of horns, a car battery, and a footswitch. They used to use it when they played at clubs.

Van Halen included Runnin' with the Devil on a demo Gene Simmons produced for them in 1977. After seeing them in concert, Simmons flew the band to New York, bought them clothes, and set up a recording session. They didn't get a record deal out of it, but gained valuable experience.

Gene Simmons had the idea for the car horns at the beginning. He had the band do this on the 1977 "House Of Pain" demo he produced for them.
At one point, David Lee Roth says, "Goddamn it lady, you know I ain't lyin' too ya, I'm gonna tell you one time." Roth was never eloquent, but he was occasionally introspective (see "Hang 'Em High"), and even poetic (see "Secrets").

Runnin' with the Devil contains many of the things Van Halen became famous for: David Lee Roth's squeal, Eddie's guitar solo, and Michael Anthony's backup vocals.
Eddie's guitar is on the cover of the album. He pieced it together using parts of different guitars until he got the sound and feel he wanted. It is striped black and white on the album, but Eddie later painted it red.

Runnin' with the Devil was easy for the band to record because they did not use many studio tricks. They pretty much recorded what they had been playing live for years. Later Van Halen albums became much more complicated.

Van Halen opened concerts for Journey and Black Sabbath after releasing this album, helping it sell over 5 million copies as more people found out about them.

Runnin' with the Devil gets constant play on classic rock radio. It was not played a lot when it first came out because nobody had heard of Van Halen, so it was never burned out.

Adam Sandler pretends to play Runnin' with the Devil with a devil-horned blade he uses as a guitar at the beginning of the 2001 movie Little Nicky. The song also appears in the pilot for the 1999 TV series Freaks and Geeks, and in the movies Lost & Found (1999) and Ready To Rumble (2000).

Runnin' with the Devil bears a strong resemblance to Pink Floyd's similarly titled song "Run Like Hell," particularly in the intro (one note on the bass played over and over interrupted by a guitar with echo). Both songs were released within a year of each other, so it is probably just a coincidence.

Runnin' with the Devil was featured in a 2016 commercial for the Acura NSX that first aired during the Super Bowl.

The first track and only single released from Van Halen's third album, Women And Children First, "And The Cradle Will Rock" tells a vague story about a recalcitrant youth who upsets his parents and the elders in town with his penchant for rock and roll, which they all know isn't a real job. The title is a loose play on the nursery rhyme "Rockabye Baby."

Eddie Van Halen played the keyboard on And The Cradle Will Rock. He and Alex took piano lessons throughout their youth.

Van Halen called the tour to support the Women And Children First album the "Invasion Tour." It was the first time they brought lots of equipment with them, including a monster sound system and huge lighting grid. They would soon become known for their loud concerts.

"Take Your Whiskey Home" is the 7th track on Women and Children First. This song was a leftover from the band's club days that Eddie didn't care for anymore, but that the rest of the band insisted be on the album.

It's not all that clear what's going on in Unchained, but it sure does rock. The lyric is mostly an exercise in vocal dexterity, with the line "blue-eyed murder in a side-swiped dress" leading into the rousing chorus. The song was a live favorite for the band.

In the middle of Unchained, David Lee Roth makes fun of an executive that walked into the studio while they were recording it ("that suit is YOU..."). Roth would add commentary on a separate track while the band played the instrumental parts, and his comments were sometimes added to the mix ("Everybody Wants Some!!" is an example). The voice that says, "Come on, Dave, gimme a break," is their producer, Ted Templeman.

When Van Halen released their album 1984, they crossed over to the pop realm, but Fair Warning, released in 1981 (the same year Eddie Van Halen married Valerie Bertinelli), was very much a rock album. No singles were released from the album, but "Unchained" got lots of airplay on Album Oriented Rock (AOR) stations, which were prevalent at the time, and it endured as a setlist staple.

Van Halen made a video for this song, but the band barely cooperated as they had no interest in the medium. MTV had recently launched, so Van Halen's label hired the director Bruce Gowers to shoot one of their concerts and turn it into a video. He shot the concert, but the band provided no additional lighting on stage. Gowers handed the footage off to Robert Lombard, who owned a production company and pieced together the clip. The band loved the results and decided to make more videos. Their next one, which they had Lombard direct, was for their cover of "(Oh) Pretty Woman."

Wolfgang Van Halen (Eddie's son and member of the band starting in 2007), says this is the definitive song from the David Lee Roth era of the band. "'Unchained' is pretty f--kin' awesome," he said.

Where Have All the Good Times Gone was written by Ray Davies and first recorded by his band, The Kinks, in 1965. Van Halen did a lot of Kinks material in their early years; David Lee Roth had a Kinks compilation album, so they learned a bunch of their songs and played them at club shows and soundchecks when they were just starting out. The first Van Halen single was a Kinks cover: "You Really Got Me" in 1978.

In a 1982 interview with Creem, David Lee Roth explained why they chose Where Have All the Good Times Gone to cover. "The message implied there, whether it might be superficial to some people or not, exists these days more than ever because, what with so many businessmen on stage playing business music. Where have all the good times gone? I'm serious. It happened to punk rock a lot, it happened to new wave, it happened to reggae and heavy metal and on and on – a lot of business people just want to make a buck, and they're becoming craftsmen more than songwriters."

Where Have All the Good Times Gone is one of five cover songs on the Diver Down album. Van Halen released an album every year between 1978-1982, and by this time, they needed a creative break. Recording covers meant they did not have to write as many songs.

The tour to support Diver Down was called the "Hide Your Sheep Tour."