Working alongside producer Ted Templeman, Landee describes the demo session for the album. "They cut 28 songs in about two hours," he tells Songwriter 101. "That's when we knew we had a band that could play."

On the first week of January 1978, Van Halen convened inside Sunset Sound's Studio 1. In order to capture the raw energy of the group's club work, Landee and Templeman decided on a no-overdubs approach.

"They'd barely had any studio experience," remembers Landee. "It was obvious that in time they would become proficient at making records, but at that point, we really wanted to get them before they really knew what they were doing - just have them come in and play and then get them out."