Here’s a entertaining recollection of what it was like to discover, and then to meet, Van Halen back in 1978. Written by Jeffrey Liles from the Dallas Observer.

Echoes & Reverberations: Van Halen’s “Almost Infamous”

It was the spring of 1978 and rock music was in big trouble. The Village People’s “YMCA” was sharing space on the Billboard charts with the Bee Gees and Andy Gibb. The Rolling Stones had (gasp!) gone disco with their single “Miss You,” and Styx was encouraging us to come sail away in their twisted tsunami of spandex and hairspray. At the same time — and still very much under the radar, mind you — weird stories about bizarre new punk rock bands like The Clash, Sex Pistols and The Ramones were starting to show up in magazines like Creem and Circus.

As the proud adolescent owner of a beat-up old Gibson SG guitar, I was
ready to make some noise and take on the world. The only problem was that
all of my heroes had either shamelessly sold out, or settled into a
comfortable heroin hibernation. Led Zeppelin had lost their swagger, I was
already sick of Rush and Yes and all that falsetto prog-rock, and, of
course, I fucking hated disco music and everything it stood for.

I needed new ammunition.

Then, a revelation: in April of that year I walked into Disc Records in
Valley View Mall and saw a stack of free seven-inch singles on the
counter. The record bore a Warner Brothers label with a generic sleeve;
the artist was somebody named Van Halen.

The A-side was a cover of The Kinks’ classic song “You Really Got Me”; the
flipside a track called “Atomic Punk.” Who knows? Maybe this was a
“gimmick” song by a guy like Van Morrison who put out a record to make fun
of punk rock, and they figured giving it away free was the only way anyone
was going to hear it.

I collected seven-inch singles like other kids collected baseball cards,
so I slipped a copy of it into my backpack and didn’t give it a second
thought. It wasn’t until I got home and put the record on my turntable
that I realized my initial impression was way off base.

Just ten seconds into “You Really Got Me,” and I knew that we were dealing
with uncharted territory. That was the loudest I had ever heard a guitar
mixed in relation to the rest of the instrumentation on a record. It
sounded like the guy was playing through a dozen Marshall stacks. The solo
was a kinetic blitzkrieg of random harmonics and static electricity.

Unfathomable realization, wrapping one’s head around the unthinkable:
“God, this guy is even better than Jimmy Page!”

Then I flipped the single over and heard the intro to “Atomic Punk.” The
guitarist was doing something that was totally different: instead of
hammering the strings up and down, he created a unique dissonant melodic
figure by scraping the pick sideways across the top of the strings, while
simultaneously running the signal through a distortion pedal and phase
shifter at the same time.

I had never heard anything like this in my life.

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