On a spring night in 2004, Andrew Bennett was awakened by his cellphone at 3:00 a.m. “It’s Ed,” said the man on the other end of the call. “Ed who?” Asked Bennett. “Eddie...Van...Halen,” came the reply. “What are you doing right now?” “Oh nothing,” said Bennett.
As he recalls 16 years later, “I didn’t think telling a rock star I was dead asleep was the coolest thing to say.” Van Halen insisted that Bennett, who was 27 at the time and a respected music video director and filmmaker, make the 30-minute drive to 5150, the music studio he had built on a hill behind his house in Los Angeles’ Coldwater Canyon neighborhood.