Mike Mettler

It was April 2010, and I was sitting across from Tom Petty in the living room of his home in Malibu, California, where we had just spent a few hours talking about his journey west from Gainesville, Florida in the mid-1970s to the recording of June 2010's Mojo for a Sound & Vision cover feature that would appear later that summer.

The first time any of us dropped the needle on “Eruption,” the onomatopoeic 1:42 instrumental that served as the literally explosive second track on Van Halen’s self-titled February 1978 debut album, we knew instantly that rock & roll had turned yet another corner. During the pop-music malaise of the late-1970s, wherein the razor-edge ethos of punk and seemingly endless days/nights of disco had already upset the bloated rock applecart, Eddie Van Halen shifted the narrative back to the value of the virtuoso musician in ways not seen in almost a decade.