YOU GOT TO ROLL WITH PUNCHES TO GET TO WHAT'S REAL

In an exclusive extract from his touching new autobiography Brothers - a tribute to Eddie (see p.88 for the review) - Alex Van Halen recalls the recording of 1984.

- Alex Van Halen

Once 5150 was up and running, we started working all hours of the day and, of course, night. It was fun there! The whole vibe was relaxed, we didn’t run a clock. Most nights I’d stay there till three in the morning, and Donn and Ed would often keep going after I went home. (Remember: I was the one who didn’t do coke!) There was nobody there to tell us keyboards were a bad idea or that Van Halen is supposed to be heavy metal. It was really free, the way it was in our bands as kids, where we could just experiment and jam for as long as we wanted.

Ed and Donn [Landee, engineer] had become close friends but all three of us got along great and had a real mind meld going. We had the time and space to do whatever weird thing we wanted: Donn put little microphones all over Ed’s Lamborghini, for instance, because we thought we might use the sound of the engine idling – it ended up on Panama.

We were actually microdosing acid while we worked on the album that became MCMLXXXIV – that’s 1984! – to reach new places in our brains and our music. You know how everyone is saying now that psychedelics are so great for creativity?

Based on our extensive experiments, I can tell you there’s some truth to the rumor.

Ted [Templeman, producer] wasn’t thrilled with the situation: “It looked like a half-finished construction project on the inside. There were exposed two-by-fours and wires running everywhere. The patch bays weren’t color-coded yet, so only Donn could decipher the inputs and outputs.” Ted didn’t like that he had less control over the process, and he was bummed out about its being smaller than the studios where he was used to recording. “Whenever I was in there, it felt like I was working in the bathtub – everything was so confined.”