“They started telling me about the backyard parties, fleshing out details. I thought, ‘This could be more than just a little article’”: How an unassuming college professor became one of the world’s leading authorities on Van Halen

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Most of their followers will probably have read Van Halen Rising and the autobiography of classic-era producer Ted Templeman. Both books were written by Greg Renoff, a college professor who used his research skills to uncover reams of new information on the band.

In 1984, they were at the peak of their powers, and the power of MTV took them up another level. Jump, their biggest hit to date, was all over the network. Renoff recalls: “I started watching MTV round the clock, trying to catch the video.” He got the single and was blown away by the B side, House of Pain, a song that went back to the band’s ‘70s club days.

“I never heard guitar playing like that before, how heavy Ed’s tone was, and how aggressive his playing was. That was a revelation for me,” Renoff says. He can still remember April 2, 1984, the day he first saw Van Halen perform, at the Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey.

“It was an unbelievable sensory experience,” he enthuses. “The whole vibe, the command they had over the audience – it was life-changing to see an absolute god of guitar live.”

Watch On Decades later, when he wanted to write about the band’s early days, originally he was thinking of a small piece for the Van Halen News Desk website. But it became clear he had a much bigger story to tell once he tracked down some people from that era via the site.

“They started telling me about the backyard parties, fleshing out details, and I think that was the spark where I thought, ‘This could be more than just a little article.’”

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Being a trained historian, he realized, “I could do the type of research that’s necessary.” He wanted to focus on Van Halen’s beginnings, “because people are usually more focused on what happens after somebody becomes famous.”

It was an unexplored area that generated fascinating results.

In the beginning, the Van Halen brothers played everywhere they could throughout Southern California, including small gigs in parks, backyard parties, and dive bars. At the time, they had to play the top 40.

“I always thought that was why they wrote pop-friendly hard rock songs,” Renoff says. “Roth pushed them towards that. ‘Hey, we need to stop playing Cream songs. We’re never going to get club gigs playing that – you can’t dance to it.’”

Anyone familiar with Van Halen history knows Cream were a big influence on the band, and Eric Clapton was Eddie Van Halen’s biggest influence as he was developing as a player.

Renoff continues: “At Gazzarri’s on the Strip they could play ZZ Top, but you were also supposed to play stuff like Kool and the Gang. They ended up writing pop songs that were dressed up in heavy metal with solos and screams.”

He discovered how much work the Van Halen brothers put in to their covers: “They could do songs riff for riff. Their level of dedication wasn’t just about learning a song from an album; they’d play the whole side of an album. And these were 16, 17 year old kids.”

Beyond his virtuosity, he cared deeply how the guitar sounded

He located Templeman and the late Donn Landee, the band engineer who produced them too. Both were press shy, but thankfully he got a lot of information from them that may never otherwise have come to light.

Two great events that he documented in Templeman’s biography were the night the producer discovered the band, and how Eruption wound up on the first album.

Templeman saw Van Halen at the Starwood, a legendary LA rock club. He told Renoff he was completely locked in on Ed’s guitar playing, and he knew he had to sign them to Warner Brothers.

Watch On “He talked about how it was like seeing Charlie Parker. Ed played jazz trumpet, he played drums; he was a jazz guy through and through. It was the virtuosity and the way that Ed approached the instrument.”

Templeman also spoke about hearing Eruption by accident. “What’s that?” he asked. “We gotta record that!”

The producer continued: “He really didn’t think it was anything. I don’t think more than 10 minutes went by from the moment I heard it to the time we recorded it. If I hadn’t walked by at that moment it wouldn’t have ended up on the album. Now it’s universally recognized as the greatest guitar solo of all time.”

Asked why we’re still talking about Eddie Van Halen and his band to this day, Renoff says: “There was such a leap forward in what was possible with the guitar. Beyond his virtuosity, he cared deeply how the guitar sounded. Eruption is still a bar for guitar mastery that people look to clear.”

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