Brothers

5150 (pronounced fifty-one-fifty) is the home recording studio that Eddie Van Halen built in 1983. He had befriended legendary musician Frank Zappa, who also had a home studio, and decided that he needed one as well. For Eddie, having his own studio ensured that he could spend as much time and creative freedom as he wanted to explore musically. The band’s best-selling album, 1984, and all of the albums that followed were recorded there.

This is the term that Alex and Eddie used to describe the darker tonal quality that they always wanted to achieve with their music. Alex Van Halen explains that it was “just our shorthand for a kind of earthy heaviness that we were into—a rich, toney sound”—“think wood, not metal” (156). He also states that the brown sound was present in Led Zeppelin’s music.

A cover, or remake, is a version of a song previously recorded by another artist. Cover songs were a source of friction for Van Halen—while David Lee Roth loved doing them, the Van Halen brothers did not. Overall, the band covered many songs on their first five albums, all with Roth as the singer, including “You Really Got Me,” “Dancing in the Street,” “Oh, Pretty Woman,” “Ice Cream Man,” and “Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now).