Fair Warning: Behind Van Halen’s Dark And Stormy Classic

On a professional level, Eddie was uneasy with the influence that Roth and Templeman, the man responsible for producing the band’s first three hit records, had over Van Halen’s creative direction. Templeman strongly discouraged overdubs, pushing for the same live sensibility that characterised those original records. Writing in his memoir, Runnin’ With The Devil, the band’s then manager, Noel Monk, recalled that both singer and producer “wanted Van Halen to continue along the well-worn path that had proven highly successful thus far”. Eddie’s solution was to take the reins himself.

“I was starting to get more involved. And it shows. Especially on Fair Warning,” he told The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan in 1996, in an interview for Guitar World. “But what I had to do to get involved was very strange. We’d work during the day, and I wasn’t very happy with the way things were going or the way people were approaching the whole recording process. I would sneak back into the studio at 4am with Don Landee, the engineer, and completely re-record all the solos and overdubs the way I wanted them.”

“Their hardest, most muscular album”

The tactic paid off. Released on 29 April 1981, Fair Warning was unlike anything fans had seen from Van Halen. Opening with a hard fade into one of Eddie’s most visionary guitar solos, before dropping into fan-favourite Mean Street, it’s instantly clear the band are working outside of the glamorous rock’n’roll excesses they’d become known for. With Roth singing of a downtrodden, dog-eat-dog neighbourhood; Eddie’s gritty guitar tone; and the 4/4 rhythm held down by the rhythm section of Michael Anthony (bass) and Alex Van Halen (drums), it sees the group working up something that, for the first time on record, sounds like heavy metal.

Dirty Movies carries Mean Street’s narrative forward, telling the story of a prom queen turned porn star whose career trajectory shocks her hometown. In one particularly effective moment, Roth delivers the sleazy line “Oh wow, take it off, take it all off” beneath Anthony’s punchy bass and Alex’s reverb-soaked snare and kick. Picking the chorus back up – “Pictures on the silver screen/Greatest thing you’ve ever seen” – the song, now overdubbed with catcalls and scattered applause, takes on a different hue.

Beneath its grim subject matter, Dirty Movies reveals Eddie’s ability to weave lyrical guitar lines around Roth’s words, perfectly melding the two together. The same cohesion surfaces on Hear About It Later, which features some of the group’s tightest, most sophisticated songwriting as they move seamlessly between verse, pre-chorus, chorus, and bridge, before dropping the bottom out to clear the stage for Eddie’s solo… Speaking of which, Sinner’s Swing! delivers a blistering lead break, recalling the same explosive power of I’m The One, from the group’s self-titled debut album.

Weathering the storm

If there is a standout, commercially viable song on Fair Warning, it’s Unchained – one of two numbers, along with Hear About It Later, that were originally written on keyboard before being transposed to guitar. The anthemic chorus, “Change, nothing stays the same/Unchained, yeah, you hit the ground running,” captures the spirit of the album in perfect three-part harmony, while Ted Templeman’s fourth-wall interjection during the breakdown adds a little light humour to a record that doesn’t generally let up.

The slowest-selling album of Van Halen’s David Lee Roth era, Fair Warning was their “hardest and most muscular album”, Noel Monk later reflected, adding, “and for that reason it remains a favourite among the band’s hardcore fans”. However, he also admitted that they had to get creative with its sales, resorting to an unwritten backdoor system that relied on expensive intermediaries called “payola brokers”. With the band’s blessing, the group’s manager spent over $200,000 of their own money to boost the album’s radio play. The cost was worth it. Fair Warning weathered the storm and went platinum by the end of the year,

Is Eddie Van Halen the only guitarist to rival Jimi Hendrix? Find out here.