Van Halen: Get Up

November 22, 2025

Here’s an odd thing. Lately, I’ve had Van Halen stuck in my head. Andd it’s not the classic Van Halen, it’s the later lineup featuring Sammy Hagar (known affectionately/derisively as Van Hagar).

It’s a bit of nostalgia, which… if you’ve followed this blog for any amount of time, you can see I’m prone to. But this particularly moment is quite vivid for me. I’m not sure why, but I have a very clear recollection of how I was first introduced to Van Halen (and which subsequently led me down a path of following guitarists and heavy metal bands).

I remember being given a copy of the album 5150 by David Crook. I think this was in middle school. The album was dubbed on a cassette – specifically a Memorex transparent cassette.

A fun story: back then, I didn’t have an actual alarm clock (I may have gotten one later, in high school). I wanted to do something fancy, like have a song play when I woke up… so I jerry rigged something together with the tools available to a kid in the late 80’s.

I used a plug-in timer (the kind that you use to turn on lamps), and plugged in my audiocassette player. I set up the cassette to the moment right before Get Up started and stopped the machine. I adjusted the timer as best I could, and pushed the “play” button down.

There were alarm clocks that would turn on the radio at a set time. But for me, I wanted a custom song to play. So this was as close as I could get. It wasn’t very accurate (at all), but it worked… in theory.

And so today, many many years after that fateful day where my friend David Crook gave me a tape… I find myself thinking once more about Van Halen. And listening to a few songs I haven’t heard in a long while. All with the help of a button button that’s much easier to click today, than it was back then.