His are big lace-up leather boots to fill, and not since Bon Scott guzzled his way out of AC/DC and through the Pearly Gates has a major electrical powerhouse faced a crisis this dire. No matter how honed the axeman, a band still needs an MC. So when it was announced that Van Halen had completed its talent search and the new voice was Sammy "I Can't Hack 55" Hagar, the response – even among hardened DLR detractors – tended more toward a bewildered "Huh? Montrose? What?" than resounding hosannas, huzzahs and what-a-good-idea's.

Part of Eddie Van Halen's cheeky genius, though, lies in his ability to think in terms of both complex orchestration and rock banalities; perhaps after all those years of David Lee Roth's show-stealing shenanigans, Eddie simply wanted a voice he could work with, an unironic counterpoint to the symphonic breadth of his musical ideas. Or maybe he wanted to demonstrate the expendability of David Lee Roth's overwhelming personality in pursuit of a purer Van Halen vision. Then again, maybe he just wanted to lay down the ultimo bitchin' Van Halen platter for the kids to shake to all summer long.

The cover art shows Atlas grimacing under the weight not of the world but of the metal universe itself. On the back cover, the heavens crack like Humpty Dumpty, the new Van Halen emerging serene in the green mists of sonic triumph. Eddie can still split the atom with his axe, and he knows it. It's a Van Halen world with or without David Lee Roth, and 5150 shoots off all the bombastic fireworks of a band at the peak of its powers. The Van Halen brothers are back in business.

Like the Wunderkind scientist that he is, Eddie built this monster in his own back yard. The name of the album is also the name of the studio he constructed with longtime pal and engineer Donn Landee. They got the moniker from the police code for an escaped mental patient. Adopting this number and its attendant attitude allows Eddie to pursue, with feckless uniformity of purpose, any and all musical ideas foaming in his brain.

Where David Lee Roth always kept a kind of smirking distance from his material, Sammy Hagar plunges right into the center of the action. When the needle dips onto 5150, the first humongous sound is the foul-textured yowl of Hagar burping out the words "Hu