Honor demands that since I did a top ten for the Van Hagar era I had to do one for the David Lee Roth era.
I went ahead and made a playlist rather than linking to each below. Here it is. (God do I hate Grammarly ads.) You can keep it handy and click where applicable/ desired, or you can go for the big prize, Brewster, and crank Van Halen I through 1984, over and over again in your stereo of choice. Repeat as necessary.
Limiting myself to only ten songs of the DLR era seemed a crime against nature, so here's the top fifteen. I avoided covers as a mild policy (mild meaning I made an exception for this rule almost immediately, below.)
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| Without further ado... |
15.
"Hang 'Em High"
It was a neck-and-neck finish right up to the end between this one and "Take Your Whiskey Home." What pushed this one ahead is mostly that middle 8. This song is, subject-matter-wise, kind of unlike anything else the band ever did. Unless it's some metaphor I've never unraveled for the usual hi-jinks.
14.
"Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now"
Here's my exception to the cover rule. Is it their best cover? Probably not, but it's the one I picked. I love that Mr. Van Halen, Sr. plays clarinet on this, and it's no surprise to discover Eddie sounds as masterful doing Django Reinhardt-type runs and strumming as he does doing everything else.
My wife and I are watching The Wire. Her first time, my third or fourth. This would make a good, totally-confusing accompaniment to one of the end-of-the-season montages. I'm thinking of the Marlo one at the end of s5, I guess. I keep joking that everytime one of the characters is driving and we see the "rap music playing" subtitle that the funniest thing ever would be if each of those scenes had Aerosmith and Run DMC's "Walk This Way" playing over those parts. You should try this; it's hilarious. I hope some enterprising young junior high kid out there gets on this and uploads such a thing to YouTube. ("Just give me a kiss!")
I say this for the same reason I am writing this: the therapeutic value of finding your own laughter, particularly in the face of absurd and unambiguously-suck-ass circumstances like the ones we find ourselves in, or of cranking Van Halen, cannot be discounted.
13.
"D.O.A."
This riff is awesome. They simply do not make the Eddie Van Halen model anymore. That factory shut down, probably for good. This isn't as unprecedented as it sounds; they don't make the W.A. Mozart or Glenn Miller or Frank Sinatra models anymore, either. Time and place. We're just lucky to have seen it/ lived it. Crank it!
Captured forever in every Van Halen song of this period, like forty million year old flies preserved in amber, is some endless SoCal late-70s/early-80s house party, where kids are sneaking in more and more booze, the host's house is getting trashed, and kids are skateboarding in the empty swimming pool.
12.
"Beautiful Girls"
I was not listening to much Van Halen during my years at the University of Rhode Island 1992-1994. This was pretty much my Phish/ The Beatles/ Jane's Addiction phase. (Also Sinatra - so it goes.) And yet: all memories of the years I spent in Kingston, RI (particualrly that first party-drenched year of 1992-1993) seem accompanied by this song. Not sure when or how that happened, but apparently it is the official song to all mental recollections of this era in my life. As a friend reminded me, too, it was the original soundtrack to this politically incorrect but nevertheless harmless and still-funny fake commercial for Schmidt's Gay from back when SNL wasn't just yet another blunt narrative instrument. I'd forgotten about that - definitely funnier with the Van Halen.
Beyond that, it's a great song, full of sunshine, that expresses an essential truth. And even if you find yourself alone on some world bereft of beautiful people, it still works as an ironic reminder of the ridiculousness of your surroundings.
11.
"Romeo Delight"
This one comes charging out of the gate. If the whole song kept up the energy of that opening breakout, it'd probably be my favorite Van Halen tune all around. But it kind of falters in some of the other sections. Nevertheless, another in the essential Van Halen arsenal. (And another about sneaking whiskey into the party. Outside of sex, it always seems to come down to sneaking booze in to the party with Van Halen.
I like when David Lee Roth drawls "I know the law, friend." Woe be to the defendant with David Lee Roth as his or her lawyer.)
10.
"Top Jimmy"
This song - named after, I believe, their coke contact at some New York club - has such a lovely intro. I love when people get unexpected sounds out of a guitar, whether they're Sonic Youth, Yes, or Van Halen, or whomever. Van Halen's whole discography (up to a certain point in the nineties) is like a museum for this phenomenon.
I love the rest of it, too, but that intro - and when it comes back in later - hypnotizes me.
9.
"The Full Bug"
Awesome riff, fantastic energy. Honestly, there's nothing for me to type up.
As I write these words, my two girls are camped in front of the TV in the room next to mine singing along - for the hundredth or thousandth time, I don't know - to their YouTube playlist of Descendants song. (That's Disney, not Milo Goes to College.) "When I say All, you say Day! ALL DAY! ALL! DAY!") They love this crap. My son, on the other hand, awaits his turn for the millionth playing of "Everybody Poops" by the GoNoodle weirdos, or "Wie Sir Die Roboter" by Kraftwerk, which he freaking loves. Over and over. (Two of my three children went through a huge Kraftwerk phase in this two-to-three-year-old range; someone needs to study this.)
I'm just saying, it makes sense why I'm cranking so much Van Halen. Beyond just for its own sake.
8.
"I'm the One"
This is the one I, like a lot of people I bet, always remember as "Show Your Love." Even nowadays, after you'd figure I'd have learned this by now, when looking at my notes for this post (yes, I took notes - which seems a very un-Van-Halen-thing to do) I had to cross out "Show Your Love" from my list of songs to include.
How many times have I heard this song? Going back to when I'd cut lawns with this in my headphones (at a blistering volume so I could hear it over the lawnmower) and I had a Van Halen mix tape with this as song #2 (right after "And the Cradle Will Rock") - I mean, shoot, that summer alone, fifty times at least. Multiply times however many in the thirty years since.
Still rocks!
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| This guy definitely agrees. |
7.
"Ain't Talkin' 'bout Love"
Like anyone else out there, probably, I'm sick of this song. It's just one of those ubiquitous classic rock radio songs. But I have to give it its due as pretty much a classic tune. I try to listen to it with fresh ears and can think of little to improve.
I have an enduring joke I try to make happen with this song, by the way. It never works and won't work now, but hey, here it is. You remember those rumors about how "In the Air Tonight" was about a real-life drowning that Phil Collins saw? So disturbed, he wrote the song, got the guy who let the girl drown on the beach to come to his concert, then brought him to the concert to expose his crime to the world? I doubt this urban legend is as well-distributed these days as it once was, but it used to. Anyway, I always picture David Lee Roth doing something similar at a concert during the middle 8 where it gets dramatic. ("You know I lost a lot of friends there, baby...")
But what would he be talking about? That's where the joke gets murky. The best I've ever come up with is: he was at The Edge's house, once, hanging out with U2, and he was on his back deck, and they were looking down at the rocks crashing into the surf or something, which I imagine is the view from any successful rocker's backyard, and the Edge told him a Large Marge-type tale of all the people who stood there, looking down, and fell to their deaths, and the experience scarred DLR.
True story. That happened.
6.
"Sunday Afternoon in the Park"
Holy smokes this song is cool. Fair Warning is a bit of an anomaly for Van Halen records. It's also a tad overrated by VH fans, in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy it - listened to it in all its thirty-one-minute glory just yesterday as a matter of fact - but there's a certain type of VH fan who carries on and on about how it's their Sgt. Pepper's or something. It isn't. It's not bad, but it's not their best album. (Of the DLR era, that'd either be 1984 or the first one or Women and Children First. Fight me.)
My old band did a song called "Saturday Afternoon in the Park" which was about what happens in that park (wait for it) the day before. (Spoiler alert: just a bunch of nonsense.) The song's not at that link, just while we're here.
5.
"Jump"
Here's another one people might be sick of, I don't know. You have to include it, though, or the Van Halen Police will come take you away.
A well-deserved classic of both rock radio and the 80s. It's a breath of mental fresh air. I still crack up at some of DLR's frontman-tourette's, like when he says "AAAA-OOH! (Who said that?) Baby, how you been..." My old band (again!) had a song called "Rock Balls," where I did my best DLR impression during the chorus, just call-and-response-ing random nonsense. Sammy does a good impersonation (maybe even a better one) of this approach on "Source of Infection" later in the band's career.
Another one of those I like: from DLR's "Just a Gigolo" where he's yelling all of that indecipherable gibberish at the end and the band is singing it back at him. "Loop de loo! (loop de loo!) Gottazeewash! (gottazeewash!) Over there! (over there!") Man, that "over there!" cracks me up, like he's directing the band's attention to something happening in the studio or something.
Anyway, might as well jump.
4.
"Panama"
I thought this one would be number one, prior to ranking these. I've always referred to it as my favorite VH tune. How about that? The covid has taught me something new.
Anyone who came of age in the MTV era has indelible memories of not just this tune but probably any of their videos from 1984 or Dave's solo stuff. It was just such a part of the cable-television-oxygen back in the day.
What a great tune, though. Some of my favorite rock guitar ever in this tune. As well as in:
3.
"Ice Cream Man"
This tends to be most people I talk to's favorite VH song. Easy to see why. Fun stuff, very sing-along-y, and that freakin' roller-coaster-picking-you-up-and-sweeping-along effect of Eddie's guitar once it breaks in. The band, in some respects, peaked early: never sounded better than on this track. Unless it's:
2.
"Hot for the Teacher"
To quote Dave from near the song's ending "Oh My God....!"
I do love "Ice Cream Man," don't get me wrong. But I feel the "Van Halen"ness of that one is surpassed ever so slightly by the VH-ness of this one. Alex and Eddie mesh together in this one better than just about anywhere in their catalog (and when they mesh, it always rocks) and DLR's David-Lee-Roth-ness is appropriately sleazy.
In many ways I don't think I've ever gotten over the first time this song really clicked for me. I've liked it from the first - who wouldn't? - but there was a time in the early 90s when I heard it at the right party, I guess, or under the right mix of party accouterments, and that break back into the riff after the first verse hit my head like an electrical storm. Is anything cooler than that? Holy moley. To quote the later singer for the band, it gives me some of that unh-huh unh-HNNNNH-unh! Which is the VH equivalent of "je ne sais quoi" I guess.
1.
"Everybody Wants Some"
And here we go. Like I said, the emergence of this one as my favorite VH song has been something of a surprise, but not really: I've always loved it. This is one of those I cannot simply listen to at a normal volume, as my family has discovered everytime it's been on. Which lately has been a lot.
Anyone who first heard it - and I'm one of them - in Better Off Dead probably has visions of hamburgers playing metal guitar and John Cusack as some kind of mad scientist (a scene which, according to some, forever split Cusack from Savage Steve Holland, despite their collaborating again on One Crazy Summer). Understandable, but now I've got a new association: mainly my son's crazy dancing when he hears it. Rock and roll - as I mentioned when covering "Best of Both Worlds" from the Van Hagar post - affects him very deeply. ("Like Chris Farley on cocaine," says his mother. And she's very accurately describing the scene in our kitchen from a few nights ago, watching him whirl around.) It's tough to describe except it involves headbanging, holding up both hands in V-salutes, twirling around, spinning himself around on the floor, etc.
So, I have a new reason to love it, above, but beyond that, holy crap, this song would be a more enlightened America's theme song. I don't know what it is, even, but I want it when I hear it, and I want to punch a damn communist in the face to get it, and to make sure everyone can get it. A good test of someone's economic literacy is to play this and see if they feel compelled to Marxist word salad. If so, keep cranking it until you can't hear them anymore or drive them back to Ho Chi Minh City.
Was this one of the songs they blasted at the embassy to drive Noriega out, now that I think about? Or to get Revolutionary Guard officers to spill their secrets? It should've been. Every enemy (or in the case of Noriega, re-captured asset) of America will fall before "Everybody Wants Some." In a perfect world, it would be screamed from the rooftops to let the heavens know the afterworld has received another present from Uncle Sam.
All right, maybe not! Your mileage may vary. One thing that does not: the perfection of this song. In whatever Voyager aircraft we send to the stars that exclusively showcases the hair metal of our third rock from the sun, this one should be cranked above all others.
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I think that might be all I have to say on this topic. I don't see one of these materializing for the Gary Cherone era. Keep on rockin' in the free world, my friends; don't let the bastards grind you down.
