It All Started With 5150

In 1986, I was a 14-year-old kid at my bedroom desk, radio on, pretending to do homework.

Then somebody knocked.

I got up and opened the door. Nobody there. The knocking kept going.

I sat back down, confused. Then it clicked.

It wasn't the door. It was the radio.

The opening of "Why Can't This Be Love."

That sound went straight through me. A punch to the soul. Goosebumps. Homework, gone. Whatever I'd cared about thirty seconds earlier didn't matter anymore.

I didn't know it yet, but I'd spend most of my life chasing that feeling.

I knew Van Halen. I'd heard "Jump." I'd seen "Panama" on MTV. But this hit different.

I didn't know the singer had changed. I didn't know there were sides to pick or fights to have about which version of the band was better. I showed up with no opinion.

Just a kid with the radio on.

And something coming out of it made me want to make things.

That guitar. Those squeals. The melody running underneath all of it. And Sammy, singing like he meant every single word.

Then came the rest of 5150. Love. Summer nights. Reaching for something you couldn't see yet. "Dreams" was on there, too, which feels almost unfairly on the nose now.

At 14, I needed every bit of it.

That album became mine, the way music does when it finds you at exactly the right age. It got me through hard times. It gave me somewhere to disappear. I learned "Love Walks In" on piano and impressed the babes. Or at least I thought I did.

But underneath the obsession, something else was happening.

I started wondering how you make something that does that to a person. How a sound out of a cheap radio could stop me cold and make the future feel bigger than it did five minutes earlier.

I wanted to make things that made people feel something.

So I went to school to produce music and video.

My first gig was photographing Van Halen.

Two tours.

Try explaining that to the kid at the bedroom desk.

The band I'd been daydreaming to was now in front of my camera. Later, Sammy gave me a song for my movie. Cabo Wabo sponsored my film festival. That record kept showing up in my life in ways a 14-year-old couldn't have planned.

And I kept going. Photos. Films. Brands. Thirty years of making things.

It's still the same job, really. Every video I direct and every brand I help comes back to that bedroom: make something that stops people cold. Most marketing never even tries.

Forty years later, 5150 is still my favorite album. I put it on and I'm that kid again, with everything ahead of me and no idea where to start.

I found my start in that record.

Then I went for it.

Sam, Mike, Ed and Al: thank you. You gave a kid something to dream about.

He built a life around it.

See the concert photography it led to, or read more about me.