The stories fans and industry people told about records, about sessions, about artists that inflated ordinary events into legends before the facts had been established. Don Carver had heard too many of those stories. He had learned to push back on all of them loudly in the moment before they calcified into something that was harder to correct later.
On the afternoon of October 14th, he was doing his pushback in front of a room that included three junior staffers, a sales representative from Warner Brothers, and a 19-year-old named Kevin Marsh who had walked into the station with a cassette tape and a story that Don Carver did not believe for a single second.
Kevin Marsh was not in the music industry. He was a student at Cal State Northridge who worked part-time at a record store in the Valley, and he had come to KMET that afternoon because he had obtained something that he believed was genuine and significant, and he wanted someone in a position of authority to confirm it.
The tape he was carrying contained recordings from what he described as a Van Halen session, material that had not been released, that was not scheduled for release for at least 3 more weeks, and that he had received from a friend who worked at a recording facility in Hollywood where Van Halen had recently been tracking. Don Carver listened to approximately 45 seconds of the tape.
Then, he stopped the playback and looked at Kevin Marsh with the expression of a man who had seen this particular situation before. “Where did you say you got this?” Carver asked. Kevin explained again. A friend, a recording facility, a session that had happened in the last 2 weeks. “This album doesn’t come out for 3 weeks, kid.” Carver said.
“You’re lying.” He said it without particular cruelty, but without any softening, either. The flat, certain tone of someone who has made a decision and is not interested in reconsidering it. “Pre-release tapes don’t leave the facility. That’s not how this works. Whatever this is, it’s not what you’re saying it is.
” Kevin Marsh started to respond. Carver talked over him. “Look.” Carver said. “I’m not saying you made this tape. I’m saying someone gave you a story along with it, and the story is wrong. This is either a demo, or it’s a bootleg from a show, or it’s something somebody recorded in a rehearsal space and decided to pass off as unreleased studio material.
It happens constantly. I’ve been doing this for 4 years, and I’ve seen it every month. People come in with tapes and stories, and they believe the stories because they want to believe them.” The Warner Brothers sales representative, whose name was Linda Chew, had been quiet through this exchange. She had heard the tape, too.
She was not certain Carver was right, but she was not certain enough to say so in front of him, in his station, in front of his staff. Kevin Marsh stood with the cassette in his hand, and the particular expression of someone who knows they are telling the truth and cannot find the mechanism to prove it. That was when the hotline rang.
The KMET hotline was a dedicated line that didn’t go through the main switchboard. It was the number given to labels, to managers, to the handful of artists who had a direct relationship with the station. It rang maybe twice a week. It almost never rang in the middle of an afternoon meeting. One of the junior staffers picked it up, listened for a moment, and then held the receiver out toward Don Carver with an expression that was difficult to read.
“It’s for you.” The staffer said. “He says his name is Eddie Van Halen.” The room processed this information in the particular way rooms process information that doesn’t fit any available category. >> [snorts] >> Don Carver looked at the receiver. He looked at Kevin Marsh. He looked at the receiver again. He took the phone.
“This is Don Carver.” he said. The voice on the other end was unhurried. It didn’t sound angry. It sounded like someone who had been told something and had decided, without making a production of it, to make a phone call. “Hey.” The voice said. “I heard you’ve got a tape over there.” Carver said nothing for a moment.
“The kid who brought it in.” The voice continued. “His name is Kevin, right? He got it from a guy named Pete who works at Amigo Studios. Pete was at the session last week. The tape is real. It’s from the session. I just wanted to let you know that before you sent him home.” Don Carver stood with the phone against his ear and looked at the cassette in Kevin Marsh’s hand and said, with the careful precision of a man recalibrating everything he had said in the last 10 minutes, “Can I ask how you knew he was here?”
“Pete called me.” Eddie said. “He said the kid was going to bring it in. I figured I’d wait and see if you needed confirmation.” There was a brief pause. “Sounds like you did.” What Eddie Van Halen was doing in October 1979 was finishing work on Van Halen II, the band’s second album, which had been recorded at Amigo Studios in North Hollywood over a compressed window that reflected the band’s preference for working fast and capturing energy over technical perfection.
The first album had been recorded in a similar manner. Basic tracks laid down quickly, Eddie’s guitar parts done with the directness that startled the engineers used to the meticulous layering of other rock acts. Ted Templeman, who produced both records, had learned early that with Van Halen, the goal was not to refine until everything was perfect, but to catch the moment when everything was alive.
The tape Kevin Marsh had brought to KMET contained rough mixes from three tracks, not the final versions, not the mastered album cuts, but the working mixes that Templeman used to evaluate performances before committing to the final sequence. They were different from what would be released, but not dramatically so.
The guitar tones were the same, the performances were the same. Anyone who had heard the first Van Halen album would have recognized the band immediately. Don Carver had heard the first Van Halen album. He had put three songs from it into KMET’s rotation in 1978, which was not something he did with debut albums without good reason.
He had listened to the tape Kevin brought in and heard something that sounded consistent with Van Halen’s recorded work, and he had still decided it was fake because the story attached to it violated his model of how pre-release material moved through the industry. His model was not wrong. Pre-release tapes did not usually leave facilities.
Engineers who worked on major label sessions were under contractual obligations that made what Pete had done a fireable offense and potentially a legal matter. The normal thing, the professional thing, the thing that happened 95% of the time, was that material stayed inside the facility until the label released it through official channels.
Pete had not done the normal thing. Pete had given the tape to Kevin because Kevin was a genuine fan who had been talking about Van Halen in the studio parking lot one afternoon with the specific, detailed enthusiasm of someone who had listened to the first album so many times he could describe every guitar part from memory.
Pete had made a decision that was professionally inadvisable and humanly understandable. And now, Kevin was standing in a radio station with a phone call being made on his behalf by the guitarist on the tape. Don Carver put the phone down after another minute. He looked at Kevin Marsh. He looked at the cassette.
“Play it again.” he said to the staffer by the tape deck. His voice had not changed much, but something in it had shifted. The certainty was gone, replaced by something more careful and more honest. From the beginning, they played the tape again. This time, no one talked over it. The junior staffers The Warner Brothers representative, Linda Chew, took out a notepad.
Don Carver stood with his arms crossed and listened to the rough mixes of three songs that would appear on Van Halen II, which would be released on March 23rd, 1979, and would enter the Billboard 200 at number six, driven in part by early radio play in Southern California markets that had heard the music before anyone else.
He’d almost sent Kevin Marsh home with the tape. He thought about that afterward more than once. Not with guilt, exactly. His caution was professional, and his caution was usually right. But occasionally, in the specific case of October 14th, 1979, his caution had been wrong. The story had been true. The kid with the cassette had been exactly who he said he was, with exactly what he said he had.
And the only reason Don Carver knew that was because a guitarist in North Hollywood had heard through a studio engineer that a fan was going to a radio station and had decided to make a phone call. Eddie Van Halen did not call to protect his music. The rough mixes being played on a radio station were a minor label issue at most and almost certainly Ted Templeman or someone at Warner Brothers would have handled it if it had become a real problem.
Eddie called because Pete had told him a kid was going to take the tape somewhere and try to convince someone it was real and Eddie could imagine how that conversation would go. He had had versions of that conversation himself in different contexts in the early days before anyone knew who Van Halen was. The experience of knowing something to be true and watching someone with more authority dismiss it without examining it carefully.
He had made the call because it cost him almost nothing and it mattered to Kevin Marsh. Kevin Marsh did not become a music industry figure. He finished his degree at Cal State Northridge, worked in the record store for another two years and eventually moved into software. But for the rest of his life, he carried the memory of an afternoon in October 1979 when a program director at KMET told him he was lying and then a phone rang and the person on the other end of it was the guitarist whose music he had been carrying across the valley in a cassette
case. He never told many people the story. When he did, most of them didn’t quite believe it. He understood that. He had been in the room when Don Carver didn’t believe it and the only thing that had changed Carver’s mind was the voice on the hotline. Without that call, Kevin would have walked out of KMET with the tape and the story and no confirmation and the story would have been the kind of thing people politely didn’t argue about and quietly didn’t believe.
The tape itself was played twice on KMET that week, not as a major event, not with any fanfare, but worked into the regular rotation as preview material with a brief mention that it came from the upcoming record. Several listeners called in. A few record stores in the valley reported customers asking about the Van Halen album before it was officially available.
When Van Halen II came out in late March, it sold faster in Southern California than in almost any other market in the country. Don Carver would later say, in the careful way of someone who had learned something and wanted to be accurate about what he had learned, that the Van Halen situation had adjusted something in how he evaluated the gap between the stories people told and the facts he could verify.
He had been right to be skeptical. He had been wrong in the specific case. The difference between those two things was a phone call he hadn’t expected from someone he hadn’t anticipated on a line that almost never rang in the middle of the afternoon. In the music industry, as in most industries, the gatekeepers are usually right. The stories are usually wrong.
The tapes are usually not what people say they are. The rules exist because the rules reflect what happens most of the time. But the thing about most of the time is that it is not all of the time. And on October 14th, 1979, in a studio on Melrose Avenue, a kid with a cassette tape and a true story walked into the wrong room at the right moment and a phone rang before anyone could make a mistake that couldn’t be taken back.
The reel-to-reel was still turning in the corner when Don Carver picked up that phone. It kept turning while Eddie talked. It kept turning while the room went quiet. Some machines just keep going, indifferent to what’s happening around them, recording or not recording depending on what someone has decided, turning and turning while the people in the room figure out what they believe and what they got wrong and what they owe each other now that the truth has had a chance to catch up.
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