Van Halen

Built at every stage around Eddie Van Halen's prodigious talent and wildly inventive guitar technique, Van Halen rewrote the rules for hard rock. They did this first in the early '80s with a celebratory, party-ready pop metal sound perfected by lead vocalist David Lee Roth's over-the-top performance style, and pivoted slowly to a milder, more accessible (and subsequently more commercially viable) approach, especially when Roth left the band shortly after the release of their era-defining hit album 1984 and was replaced by Sammy Hagar. Between 1985 and 1996, with Hagar on lead ...