Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, David Lee Roth and Michael Anthony were four upstarts from Pasadena when Warner Brothers head Mo Ostin and in-house producer Ted Templeman caught their show at the Starwood Club in LA. Soon, employees at record stores everywhere would hear a certain hammer-on pattern over and over again...

Michael Anthony says:

“Even though we had gigged steadily for a couple of years, we didn’t have a ton of material, so we basically just took our live show and all the songs we knew and went for it. The whole album took a couple of weeks.

“Ted Templeman wanted to make a big, powerful guitar record, and he had all he needed in what Eddie was doing. He fell in love with Ed’s playing. Eruption wasn’t written out or anything. Eddie was just noodling around before a session, but once Ted heard it he said, ’Stop everything. Ed, we’re rolling tape on that.’

“As confident and full of ourselves as we came across on that record, the truth is, we were all pretty scared. I remember we put our headphones on and kind of looked at each other like, ‘Wow, we’re really doing this. Hope we don’t mess up!'”