The Albums of My Life: 5150 by Van Halen

Here's a new series I'm going to be pursuing here on the Dispatches! The idea is pretty simple: these are just essays about albums that have been particularly meaningful throughout my life, for one reason or another. We'll be covering music of all genres...and we're starting with my first ever hard rock album, 1986's amazing and wonderful 5150, by Van Halen.

I won't go into the whole history of Van Halen here; that's been done to death and by now the story of how Van Halen rose out of the Southern California club-rock scene to being one of the most prominent arena-rock bands of the 1980s, producing six amazing (well, mostly amazing, sorry, Diver Down) albums with front man David Lee Roth, guitar genius Edward Van Halen, drummer genius Alex Van Halen, and bassist Michael Anthony. The story is well known how Dave and the rest had a falling out, leading to Dave's departure for a solo career and his replacement with Sammy Hagar putting aside his solo career to join the band. I'm not here to relitigate any of that, even if the question seems to be an eternal one at this point:

"Van Halen, or Van Hagar?"

My answer is always "Both"...though if I really, honestly go by which incarnation I actually listen to the most...yes, it's Van Hagar. But why wouldn't it be? My personal connection to 5150 is too strong.

I didn't really start liking rock music until the early 80s. As a pretty geeky kid, I started out liking filmscores, so that's what I ended up buying mostly when I would use my allowance on music. Like many 80s kids, my main entry point to pop and rock (beyond the radio, which was rarely tuned to that stuff because my father mostly hated it and he declared Control Of The Radio because he was always driving) was MTV. But it took me a while, specifically, because we lived in a small town and the cable lines didn't come down our road until 1985 or so. My MTV exposure was almost entirely by osmosis when I would hang out at a friend's house, until we finally got access to MTV ourselves. That was a game-changer as I started watching music videos, those wonderful little short films made to accompany songs. (I stop here to reflect on how MTV recently shut down its music-only channels, ending an era that began in my youth. I guess streaming killed the video star, huh?) Van Halen, in the ending days of David Lee Roth's era, was well-represented...but still I didn't buy any of the albums. That came a couple of years later, when a kid in High School Band with me started teaching me about Van Halen...just as the new album, with the new singer, came out.

5150 wasn't my first pop album...but it was my first hard rock album. And it blew my mind, right from the very first track, which opens with our new singer, Sammy Hagar, being the first thing you hear: a stylized, dramatic "Hello, baby!" which immediately gives way to Eddie's guitar fireworks and then the rest of the band kicking in for the rest of the song "Good Enough", which isn't a great song, but it's a good, hard-driving rock number to launch the new album and the new era of the band.

5150 has its share of good rock songs--"Get Up" is a good old-fashioned speed-rock number, and the title song "5150" is classic upbeat side-two Van Halen--but the album is perhaps notable for the shift away from the hard rock of the DLR era to a more pop-driven sound. "Why Can't This Be Love" is as pop as it gets, and 5150 contains Van Halen's first straight-up rock ballad, "Love Walks In", which is still one of my favorite hard-rock-anthem-ballads, even with its trippy lyrics. But the album contains two songs that mean a great deal to me personally.

First is "Dreams", which may be the most cheerfully aspirational song I know. Or maybe it's aspirationally cheerful? All I know is that from the very first time I heard it, "Dreams" instantly became one of those songs that I know I can cue up anytime, for any reason, and it will immediately lift me out of a bad mood. It's a song that contains so much sheer optimism that I just can't help feeling better after I hear it:

We'll get higher and higher,
straight up we'll climb!
We'll get higher and higher,
leave it all behind!

Some years ago I wrote a script which I used to exorcise some personal demons, and in that script, I indicated that "Dreams" would play over the end credits. (No, this script will never been seen or read by anyone, so don't ask! It was purely a personal project.)

The other song on 5150 that has deep personal meaning for me is "Best of Both Worlds". Where "Dreams" is a blend of pop and rock, with a lot of synth carrying the tune, "Best of Both Worlds" is pretty much pure guitar-driven rock all the way through, with one of the best hooks in rock that I know. I knew the song pretty well by the time my sophomore year of high school started in 1986, but it wasn't a favorite yet. Then, my grandmother on my father's side died, just a few days into the school year.

Her passing was the first real family death I ever experienced, and the day it happened threw me for a loop. I really had no idea how to process it, and I spent a lot of the afternoon and that evening just...moping, I suppose. But later on I turned on MTV, and they had that year's Video Music Awards on...and they were promising that they were going to cut to Van Halen at a live performance. (I would learn many years later that they were just dropping in footage previously taped, but that didn't matter. Still doesn't, really.) Sure enough, after a while they went to Van Halen live in concert in New Haven, CT...and the song featured was the live version of "Best of Both Worlds".

I think that tends to be how it works, doesn't it? There's always something, maybe it's a song or maybe it's a movie or maybe it's a book, that presents itself in one of life's very difficult moments. It doesn't make it all better, it doesn't take away the pain, but it says to you, "It's OK. This is part of life, and life continues. You can still find happiness and joy in the moments here and there, even when things seem like they're at their worst." That's what Van Halen and "Best of Both Worlds" and 5150 did for me.

See you around the galaxy!
--K.

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