Van Halen took a year off after the tour in support of OU812 and then needed another year away to put together a follow-up album. And even though the band had gotten a bit keyboard heavy on its recent records, Van Halen's first music of the '90s found them getting back to basics, with Eddie Van Halen showing he still had some distinct six-string tricks up his sleeve on the lead single from
The track - which opens the album - kicks off with the guitarist using a Makita 6012HD power drill he’d picked up in the studio and discovered was in the same key as the song. He scraped the tool over his guitar strings to start “Poundcake” and then sprinkled its sound throughout the song. (The drill was later painted red, white and black to match his guitar for the subsequent tour.)
But this wasn’t another Eddie Van Halen innovation. Much like the tapping technique he popularized earlier, the drill sound that kicks off Poundcake wasn't the first song to include it. It wasn't even the first song in 1991 to feature the tool: Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy (The Electric Drill Song), the opening track on Mr. Big’s
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, which came out in March, included guitarist Paul Gilbert and bassist Billy Sheehan dueling one another using electric drills on their instruments.
And there was more than just a drill on Poundcake. At the suggestion of producer Andy Johns, Eddie Van Halen embraced overdubs and even picked up a wah-wah pedal to round out the track's thickness - an element he said helped the song come together.
“I came up with a riff that didn’t really excite anyone until Andy suggested I use some electric 12-strings to flesh out the rhythm tracks, ” Eddie told
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. “It turned out to be just the thing the song needed. All of a sudden, the lyrics, the title and everything came into sharp focus. What you hear are two electric 12-strings doubled beneath my usual dirty guitar. It’s an odd sound. It wasn’t really planned.”
was not quite a group affair; getting all four members in the studio at the same time even became a challenge. The singer's wife was having mental-health issues that required his attention, pulling him in different directions between his personal and professional lives. It got to the point where “Poundcake” almost didn’t make the final track listing because Hagar had gotten so behind schedule.
“The songwriting was drawn out, I would get behind on the lyrics, because I wouldn’t have time to focus on it, ” Hagar said in a 2015 video
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“When I did the vocal on ['Poundcake'], I remember in the end screaming, ‘Wow … that’s my woman, uh-huh uh-huh-huh, ’ and Andy got the goose bumps. He’s looking behind the counter and he’s looking at me when I’m singing, he’s pointin’ to his arm and he’s got the furs all up. Just moments in the studio when you remember doing that to someone, it’s something that I judge everything off of; a vocal, a mix, a song – if it gives me the goose bumps, it’s done.”
“It really is kind of definitive of what the whole record is about, ” drummer Alex Van Halen told MTV about the song. Hagar noted in an interview that came with the CD single that the lyrical inspiration came from an actual pound cake recipe, which requires a pound of four different ingredients. He equated the simplicity of the formula to the band. “It is sort of a love song, just kind of a twisted love song with a sense of humor, but there’s a lot of honesty involved, ” Hagar later told the
In a special to promote the LP. “I happen to like a ‘down home’ woman, and I do love my baby’s pound cake.”
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“Poundcake” reestablished Van Halen as one of the biggest hard-rock bands of the new decade, just as they had been throughout the '80s. The song rocketed to No. 1 on
's Mainstream Rock chart, and the Andy Morahan-directed video became one of the most popular on MTV in 1991. “We spent around $400, 000 on that video, which had a ton of hot babes in it, ” Hagar said in his memoir
In September, Van Halen opened the MTV Video Music Awards by performing “Poundcake” in their first-ever live performance on U.S. television. Show host Arsenio Hall introduced the group by enthusiastically calling them “the greatest American rock 'n' roll band ever.”But who would have thought Van Halen would use a power drill to complement his fretboard ferocity during the song “Poundcake, ” which came off 1991’s
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feature, Helio Nascimento chimes in from Brazil to inquire about this remarkable development. Read the exchange between Nascimento and Van Halen below.
Nascimento: Eddie, I was always amazed by your talent for music in general and the way it naturally flows from you, and for me, one of the greatest examples of this gift is with the electric drill on “Poundcake.” Therefore, I’d like to know how exactly did that idea of using a drill as a guitar riff come? Did you hear the noise from it and figure out its note, and then build a riff with it? Thank you!
Thank you for your question and your compliment. The drill on the “Poundcake” was a complete fluke/creative accident. We were playing, and I always like to play in the control room because I hate wearing headphones. Ken Deanne, who was my maintenance tech for my studio at the time, happened to be replacing a piece of outboard gear behind me while we were playing. He left the drill laying right in front of me as he was going to grab a replacement piece of gear. As I am sure you know, a guitar pickup is very similar to a microphone. I happened to grab the drill, and by sheer luck it was in the same key as the song. So I asked Alex to start “Poundcake” again from the beginning, and I used the drill over the pickup and scraped it on the strings for the intro. I also used it for a second or two during the song’s solo. It’s just one of those funny unplanned things that happen every so often. Since it was on the record, I ended up using the same drill every time we played the song live. I hope that answers your question, Helio.
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