True Stories Behind Popular Van Halen Songs

Van Halen achieved just about everything a musical act could in the 20th century. The band sold 80 million records, was inducted into the historically controversial Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and won at the MTV Video Music Awards and Grammy Awards. The group also suffered many tragedies, cycled through several members it would like the world to forget about, and managed one of the most successful member replacements ever when Sammy Hagar replaced original lead singer David Lee Roth. Indeed, the charismatic rascal's televised antics elevated Van Halen to superstardom before MTV stopped playing music videos.

But what truly made Van Halen the most successful and important hard rock band of its generation, if not all time, was the songs. The supremely talented Eddie Van Halen played the guitar like nobody before or after him could. Coupled with the propulsive drumming of his brother, Alex Van Halen, and the bass and harmonies of Michael Anthony, Van Halen's tunes were as catchy and hooky as they were loud, cathartic, and energetic. Here then are the stories, inspirations, and making-of tales behind many of Van Halen's biggest and most beloved songs.

The second track on Van Halen's first, self-titled album released in 1978 isn't really a song. Clocking in at under two minutes, "Eruption" is pure musical acrobatics. Apart from an opening drum fill, it consists entirely of Eddie Van Halen, all alone, demonstrating his two-handed tapping guitar technique and other tricks that allowed him to play with unmatched speed and ferocity.

"Eruption" was an outgrowth of a feature of early Van Halen shows in the late 1970s. Concerts would come to a halt so Eddie could show off his preternatural skills for a few minutes. As a warmup during the making of the first Van Halen LP, he messed around with a variation of these segments. "I showed up at the recording studio early one day and started to warm up because I had a gig on the weekend and I wanted to practice my solo guitar spot," he told Guitar World in 1996. "Our producer, Ted Templeman, happened to walk by and he asked, 'What's that? Let's put it on tape!' So I took one pass at it, and they put it on the record." Eddie so rushed through the sudden, spontaneous album addition that he failed to play it correctly. "There's a mistake at the top end of it," he said. "To this day, whenever I hear it I always think, 'Man, I could've played it better."

Van Halen's recording history begins with its 1978 self-titled album. The lead-off track, "Runnin' with the Devil," starts out with a long, droning blare of what seems to be ambient traffic noise that gets louder and distorted before cutting out. That sound came from a device handcrafted by guitarist Eddie Van Halen. He took the horns out of his band members' automobiles, which included a Volvo, Mercedes, a Volkswagen, and an Opel, and then wired them to each other and put it in a box. Electrified by car batteries and triggered with a foot pedal, Eddie used the object during its early concerts in the 1970s. 

It's also how they concocted the effect on its demo recording, presided over by the band's early champion, Gene Simmons of Kiss. The bit appeared as a bridge between the songs "House of Pain" and "Runnin' with the Devil." During sessions for the first Van Halen album, producer Ted Templeman recorded the blare, slowed down the tape, and put it at the top of the opening track.

A loud, hard-charging, and guitar effect-heavy cut from Van Halen's debut 1978 album, "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" helped establish the band's quintessential hard rock laced with a pop sensibility. Also buried in the mix are some punk elements, like a simple and repetitive guitar riff, casually dark lyrics, and a Ramones-esque "Hey! Hey! Hey!" Eddie Van Halen initially conceived it as a punk-adjacent song, but as a joke to send up the genre that he didn't quite understand or appreciate.

"'Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love' was originally supposed to be a punk rock parody," he told Guitar World. "It was a stupid thing to us, just two chords. It didn't end up sounding punk, but that was the intention." Eddie wrote the song by himself over the span of one day in 1977 in the band's rehearsal spot, the basement of singer David Lee Roth's parents' house. He thought so little of "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" that he waited six months to share it with the rest of Van Halen.

A track on Van Halen's 1980 album "Women and Children First," "Everybody Wants Some!!" was never a single. Yet it still made its way into the cultural consciousness by way of soundtracking a clay-animated sequence in the 1985 movie "Better Off Dead" and serving as the title of the early 1980s-set Richard Linklater film "Everybody Wants Some!!" One of the most notable parts of the song occurs in the breakdown, when singer David Lee Roth rambles about stockings and shoes.

Roth came up with the entire bit on the spot during a recording session. "They were rewinding tape in the studio and our producer at the time, Ted Templeman said, 'Dave, are you ready to do the middle part?'"  he recalled on "The Howard Stern Show." "And I said, 'Sure.'" But Roth wasn't actually ready to go, because he hadn't written any lyrics for that section, as he'd promised he would. With a microphone in front of him and tape rolling, he looked around for last-minute inspiration, and through a glass window into another part of the studio, he saw a small group of female Van Halen fans. He had a conversation with them (though microphones only picked up one side), as he commented on what they were wearing. "Where'd you get that s***? / Oh, that / I like, I like the little way the line runs up the back of those stockings / I've always liked those kind of high heels, too," Roth says.

Eddie Van Halen composed the music for the "1984" song "Jump" in 1981, but Van Halen singer David Lee Roth wasn't interested in the synthesizer-based piece. "Dave said that I was a guitar hero and I shouldn't be playing keyboards," Eddie told Guitar World. But in 1983, the musician played a new demo of the song for its preferred producer, Ted Templeman. "I heard it and it just killed me," Templeman said in "The Billboard Book of Number One Hits." "And everybody at Warners flipped out and we went in and cut the track the same way," he later added.

With the band's label so pleased, its inclusion on "1984" was a foregone conclusion, as long as a persuaded Roth wrote some lyrics. To get the creative juices flowing, he asked the band's roadie, Larry, to drive him around Hollywood Hills in a 1951 Mercury Lowrider. While Roth took in the sights, he thought about a news report he'd seen earlier that week about a man standing outside the window of a skyscraper, contemplating suicide. Roth put himself into the mind of an onlooker. "There's always somebody who yells, 'Go ahead and jump!'" Roth told Musician (via "Who Wrote the Book of Love?"). He asked Larry if he liked the idea, and he did, so the singer wrote some lyrics not about dying by suicide but embracing opportunity. "Jump" went on to be Van Halen's only No. 1 hit.

A Top 20 hit single off of Van Halen's multi-million-selling juggernaut "1984," "Panama" was born in part out of a self-imposed challenge from singer David Lee Roth. In the early 1980s, a reporter quipped to Roth that the musician was only capable of handling songs about sex, booze, and cars. He took offense only in that he'd never written a song about cars, so he set out to do so. Roth initially thought about a drag race vehicle nicknamed "the Panama Express" and populated his lyrics with automotive terms and imagery. Many of those can be construed as having a double meaning and serving as allusions to sexual themes, particularly during a spoken bridge when Roth discusses fiddling below his waist in order to grasp the knob that moves his seat into the reclining position. He may have successfully written about cars, but he also proved that dismissive reporter correct.

The sounds of a real car were used in "Panama," and those came from Eddie Van Halen's Lamborghini Countach — techs connected microphones to the exhaust pipes. As for the many guitar licks used throughout the song, Eddie Van Halen couldn't explain. "I have no memory of coming up with any of those riffs," he told Billboard in 2015. "Even the stuff I wrote for the last record, I don't remember. It just comes to me. I never sit down and decide to write a song."

Doobie Brothers lead singer Michael McDonald has one of the most recognizable voices in music, but in the '70s and '80s, he quietly worked behind the scenes as a songwriter. McDonald helped compose Kenny Loggins' soft rock hit "This Is It" as well as a sexually charged song for inclusion on Van Halen's classic hard rock LP "1984." While recording for that album, the group grew stymied with a hypnotic, synth-driven dance-rock tune. Van Halen had finished all the music for the song but couldn't come up with any words. With the band's blessing, producer Ted Templeman called in McDonald, having just produced his 1982 album "If That's What It Takes." "He sent me the track, and I got some ideas going so I'd have something when I got to the studio," McDonald told Ultimate Classic Rock.

When he arrived, McDonald and singer David Lee Roth improvised some ideas and hooks while a demo of the song played. That was enough for McDonald to generate some lyrics about a man who develops an obsession with a woman after seeing her picture in a magazine. With his contribution, "I'll Wait" merited inclusion on "1984," and it became a No. 13 pop hit.

Just before "1984" made Van Halen the biggest band on the planet, guitarist Eddie Van Halen contributed to the best-selling studio album of all time, Michael Jackson's "Thriller." It was set to include a hard rock song, "Beat It," and producer Quincy Jones knew that it needed an electric guitar solo. To make it happen, he called the most notable shredder of the era: Eddie Van Halen.

When Eddie fielded the phone call, he thought he was being pranked. "I went, 'What do you want, you f****** so-and-so!'" he told CNN. Jones reasonably convinced Eddie he was the real deal and asked him to "come down and play on Michael Jackson's new record." While the guitarist still thought there was a chance it was a gag, the next day, he went to the studio where "Thriller" was being made. When Jackson stepped out on other business, Jones played Eddie a rough version of "Beat It," and he delivered two guitar solos, on the spot, completely improvised. He was in and out of the studio in about 30 minutes.

Following the departure of lead singer David Lee Roth in 1985, Van Halen brought in new frontman Sammy Hagar. His arrival, along with Eddie Van Halen's increasing use of synthesizers, triggered a new era for the band, one more pop-oriented with less songs about partying and more about love and life's other great mysteries. The initial Van Halen album with Hagar at the helm: 1986's "5150," and its third single "Love Walks In" marked the first time the band scored with a ballad. A top 30 pop hit that reached No. 4 on the rock chart, it was a successful experiment.

On its surface, "Love Walks In" is about the big feelings that come with a new romance, but it's actually about Hagar's numerous empowering interactions with aliens. The singer claimed that when he was around 19 years old, he woke up while extraterrestrials were just finishing up  telepathically placing swaths of knowledge into his brain. "I could not move, eyes open, white room, they were still disconnecting — and when they did, it just went bang! Everything went back to normal, back to black. I was shaking," Hagar told Guitar magazine (via Face Off). Hagar could be considered a rock star who is also a weird person, and he says he's been contacted repeatedly by those otherworldly beings he believes are called the Nine. "Because they're from the Ninth Dimension," Hagar explained.

After more than two decades as one of the most acclaimed guitarists in modern music, Eddie Van Halen began to tire of his band's reputation as "America's premiere party band," as he told Fuzz (via VHLinks.com). "There's much more to me than that — I was classically trained," he later added. Before he ever picked up a guitar, Van Halen was a youthful piano prodigy, and he took up playing synthesizers in a big way in 1983. Just before he'd compose the key-based songs on Van Halen's "1984" album, Eddie Van Halen wrote a flowing and dramatic piano piece. "Nobody wanted anything to do with it," he said, and so it remained shelved, except for a portion that the guitarist used in the score for the 1984 movie "The Wild Life."

The instrumental piece became a complete song, "Right Now," and made it onto Van Halen's 1991 album "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge." Eddie Van Halen realized that a set of socially conscious lyrics and the need to act out to make a better world a reality written by the band's singer Sammy Hagar as a personal challenge made a perfect match. "I was tired of writing cheap sex songs," Hagar said in "I Want My MTV." "Eddie and I wanted to get serious and talk about world issues."

Van Halen's 1995 album "Balance" was the gloomiest thing the band had made in years, with numerous songs composed in ominous-sounding minor keys. "D minor. Everything's in D minor, the saddest of all keys," Eddie Van Halen confirmed to Guitar World. "But 'Can't Stop Lovin' You' is an awesome rock groove," he said elsewhere. That cheery power ballad went on to become Van Halen's final Top 40 pop hit, and it was only written and recorded at the behest of "Balance" producer Bruce Fairbairn. He felt that the album needed something sunny and optimistic to brighten up "Balance," and near the end of the sessions, he asked Eddie Van Halen to come up with something. At first, the guitarist considered searching his archives for an appropriate riff, nugget, or fragment that could be expanded into a full song, but then decided against that and wrote something new.

In lyrics and title, "Can't Stop Lovin' You" bears a resemblance to Ray Charles' 1962 hit "I Can't Stop Lovin' You." Singer Sammy Hagar calls out the similarity in the lyrics, remarking in the song's final chorus, "Hey, Ray, what you said is true, I can't stop lovin' you."