Given Van Halen's track record over the past 13 years, one would suspect it had been following some brilliantly devised master plan.
Just as Led Zeppelin ruled heavy metal in the 1970s, Van Halen was the genre's dominant act in the '80s, both in popularity and in influence on other hard-rock bands. From "Van Halen," its 1978 debut release, to "OU812," its last album of the '80s, the band scored eight consecutive million-sellers. A legion of guitarists sprang up to wail and screech in an echo of Eddie Van Halen. Scores of singers donned the tattered pants and copied the insouciant bad-boy antics of the band's original vocalist, David Lee Roth.
The '90s aren't starting badly for Van Halen, either. The recently issued "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" made its debut on the Billboard album charts at No. 1 (a more common feat this year than in the past because of changes in how the chart rankings are calculated). Perhaps a more telling measure of Van Halen's continuing appeal has been its drawing power at the box office during a summer of slack sales for most other touring acts.
Most bands would have been at least momentarily fazed by the loss of a front man as mediagenic as Roth, who left for a solo career in 1985. He departed shortly after the album "1984" and its signature hit, "Jump," had taken Van Halen from metal dominance to new prominence in the pop mainstream. Roth-less, Van Halen was far from clue-less. With veteran rocker Sammy Hagar taking over as its singer, the band solidified its standing as a top mainstream rock attraction with two No. 1 albums, "5150" and "OU812."
Ask Eddie Van Halen about the musical method that underlies all this success, and he'll tell you that the method is to have no method.
"We really generally don't think," Van Halen, 36, said in a recent phone interview from a Detroit tour stop. "There's no preplanned anything to what we do, and people have a hard time swallowing that. There's no master plan. There really ain't."
Or, as bassist Michael Anthony put it in a separate interview, "We throw it up against the wall, and when it sticks, that's it."
For a band supposedly flying by the seat of its pants (if Roth and his self-ventilating jeans were still around, one could say it was flying without the seat of its pants), Van Halen seems to have made a fairly astute move to a heavier sound on "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge." The two previous post-Roth albums had emphasized more of the heraldic synthesizers that buoyed "Jump," as well as a polished, sleek backing vocal sound. Although he hardly fell into abnegation on the guitar (as one of his influences, Eric Clapton, did for a long time during the mid-'70s to late-'80s), Eddie Van Halen had toned down his act somewhat.
Now, just when bands such as Metallica and Guns N' Roses are making musical and commercial thunder by playing it loud and rude, Van Halen is back with an extremely heavy-sounding album in which keyboards surface on just one song and guitar solos squiggle out from every cranny, like night crawlers after a downpour.
Keeping up with the competition? Eyeing the marketplace? Following a plan?
Repeateth Edward: no preplanned anything.
Rather than doing it by design, he said, Van Halen returned to metal-grade density spontaneously, keyed by a change in recording methods and studio collaborators.
As work began on the album, he said: "We all had the same thing in mind. 'Let's get the sound we have live, playing together in a room.' Donn Landee (who engineered all the previous Van Halen albums) would isolate (instruments) to the point where it didn't sound like we were in a room playing together--which isn't bad, it's just a different approach.
"We started working with Andy Johns in May of last year." Johns is an Englishman whose engineering and production credits include the likes of Free, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. Johns' knob-twiddling produced a sound that was "big and bad," Van Halen said. "And when something is sounding big and bad, it inspires you to play a certain way."
Alex Van Halen, the band's drummer and, at 37, older brother of Eddie, said that Van Halen's play-it-as-it-lays approach precludes any concern about being supplanted atop the metal heap by such rising contenders as Metallica and Guns N' Roses.
"If you start looking around at other forms of music as competition, if you perceive that as a threat, the first inclination would be to write a song similar to that so you can beat somebody else at their own game," Alex said. "The moment you do that, you're not playing what you want to play.
"There's room for everybody," he continued. "From very early on, people are conditioned to be competitive. That's why it's tough just to groove. The less you try, the easier it flows."
According to Alex, going through boyhood upheavals acclimated the Van Halen brothers to operating in an uncharted way.
