Van Halen's '1984': Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music,
and more. We are your two here, suit frontmen of hagiography.
You're virtuosic guitarists of verification. Your rhythm section of perfectly

(00:29):
competent rhythm sections. I'm Alex Hegel and.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
I'm Jordan Broun. Talk. That's very good. That's a good one.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Thank you and Jordan. Today we're talking about what is
surely the second most important work of art called nineteen
eighty four in history.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
We're talking about George Orwell's nineteen eighty four. Ah No,
we are talking about the van Halen album of the
same name. Vastly superior as far as I'm concerned, Sorry, nerd,
what of the human experience that cannot be encapsulated in jump?
Do I need to concern myself with certainly more quotable?

(01:10):
That's right, we are talking about van Halen's nineteen eighty four,
which turned forty in January.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
How about that? That's insane.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
That's forty still sounds brand new baby Jordan. I know
neither of us are particularly into eighties metal, but I
confess that I have a real soft spot for Van Halen.
They had an amazing logo, you know, they had a
cool VF flying wing thing. They had Eddie. You know,
I think it was in one of theh ones extravaganzas.

(01:38):
I want to say, greatest artists of hard rock. And
I forget who it was actually who said this about
Eddie van Halen, but it's a sound. But I've always
remembered where they said he is one of the only
guitarists to invent a new vocabulary on the instrument. And
what they were saying was that all your big dinosaur
rock guitar gods like clapt In, Pay and the rest,

(02:02):
poor Jeff beck Oh always a bridesmid and all of
their wand pale imitators like Joe Perry and the rest,
they were all just stealing the blues, whereas Eddie Van
Halen came in with this neo classical sensibility. And I'm
sure there's some boomer rock guitars out there who's gonna

(02:23):
wag their finger and say Ingveay Molmstein did it first
or somebody else did some kind of neoclassical informed virduos
like shred First. But you know, I think that for
this style of guitar playing in the popular imagination, eruption
is like ground zero for this stuff, right, Like it
was just like the new thing you had to aspire to, right,

(02:45):
and that is so insanely rare in the art form,
you know, in any art form, right It's like Jackson
Pollock or roth Go or somebody, Like how does somebody
just comes along in a field that I mean, the
electric guitar was like what fifty years old at that point.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Well, if you want to go by rock and roll rules, yeah,
funny yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Just nope, wipes the slate clean. And it's just like
here is this new vocabulary, a new language that you
have to come across. You know, even Brian May who
has like an incredibly distinct voice on his instrument, Like
you can hear a lot of blues in there, and
you can hear like English music hall. You know, what
are you hearing in Eddie van Halen's like in his
solos and with the tapping and everything, like Philip Glass

(03:30):
like I you know, piano, it's piano because he was
like a piano kid problegy.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Yeah, raised on Mozart and Bach, right, but like.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yeah, so like the fact that that I don't know,
it's insane. I could wax philosophical about Eddie van Halen
for a long time. And then also David Lee Roth,
one of the most hilarious human beings who ever existed,
just like the perfect combination of like Louis Prima style
idiocy and like you know, Freddie mercury power posing regal omenship.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, and there were others in this band. I'm also told.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
Wait, I'm just I'm getting something in my ear right now.
There are two more.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yeah, Actually, Michael Anthony is he's a great basis. And
if you I mean people, there are people who stay
that that Eddie van Halen, because let me tell you,
I read a lot of weird forums when I was
writing this. There are people who maintained that eddievan Halen
played all the bass on Van Halen records after he
set up his own studio because it was just faster
for him.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
But there's some really impressive stuff on some of those.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Early van Halen base lines, like everybody wants some even
just keeping up with Eddie like on stuff like Hot
for Teacher, man, like, that's fast and it sounds garbage
enough recording wise to have not been recorded by Eddie,
but apparently there's debate on that. I also listen to
a lot of isolated parts for this record. I've probably

(04:49):
heard Hot for Teacher broken down to its constituent parts
more than almost anything else I've ever listened to.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
Was this because you're trying to get David Lee Roth's
vocal ticks down or in the drum.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Part on the drump part, Yeah, I know, I mean
we'll get into let me see, We'll see if I
can say if I could bring that back later on. No,
but Van Halen always seemed to be in on the joke.
You know. It's one thing that I really loved about them,
And even Eddie, who I think, despite his kind of

(05:25):
soft spokenness and occasionally acts of emotional terrorism and possibly
physical terrorism as well, just seemed to be so genial
and just like grinning through these insane feats of redefining
the modern guitar. It's just like he's just like.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
This is fun for me.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
You know, this is gonna make all of you insane
for the next fifty years. But I'm just having a ball.
And I had a guy who I played in a
garage rock band with in central Pennsylvania who said, you
know what, it's always a good day when you're listening
to Van Halen. It's just like, yeah, man, it's just
cracking beers, top down, it's sunny. We're in Pasadena for

(06:05):
some reason, the weed is weak and the nights are warm. Brother,
beautiful sentiment.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
That's up there with your college professor defending disco by
saying everybody deserves to dance. These are beautiful. You have
some really for first dark as your psyche can be.
You've got some really beautiful little gems that that that.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
Yeah, yeah, you know what about Wait hang on, I
found a soundboard here. I have a clip for that.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
I'll tell you all about it, tell me all about it.
You know. I got to agree with you. The thing
that I love about.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
It was a mistake.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
No, it wasn't. You know. We were talking earlier today.
I said this, and I mean it. I love Van
Halen through your eyes, and you you described it in
the perfect way. It's the same feeling that I get
while watching the Beatles running through a field in a
hard Day's night. That's what I feel when I'm watching
clips of van Halen. For the most part, on stage,

(07:14):
they just look like they're having a ball. And then
you want to be a part of it. You want
to be any part of it, ideally on stage with
them or if nothing else, you know, in the audience
enjoying it. And so I I do love that. But
I will say this is sort of the only thing
that I like about van Halen.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
I sent you so much to listen to.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
Yeah, and I told you I did, didn't I deep cuts.
I listened to some of it when pressed. I mean,
you described it as the perfect blend of idiocy and virtuosity,
and I think that's certainly true.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
I just.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
It's like Tommy Lee Jones to Jim Carrey. I just
can't sanction their buffoonery. You know, Lord knows, I've put
up with Jimmy Buffett and god knows what else we've
talked about over the course of this show. That is
pretty indefensible. But for one of the first times, I'm
kind of taking the anti approach for this episode, van
Halen's music made me hate the eighties and the eighties well, yes, yeah,

(08:21):
But the fact that this was like what seemed to
come out ahead made me think, oh, this is just
a wasteland of lunkhead guitar anthems. And I pretty much
felt that until I heard like Disintegration by the Cure.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
Well, I mean, I don't really think you can begrudge
them their bastard sons. You know, I think a lot
of hair metal throughout the eighties really just took all
the like idiotic toxic masculinity that you get from you know,
David Lee Roth's whole deal and like the empty virtuosity
parts of the guitar and just you know that curdled

(08:55):
into this that I hate from the eighties, the like
sunset strip stuff. But DAVIDI Ross like musical tastes are
hilarious to me because he has covered the Beach Boys,
He has covered the aforementioned Louis Prima, you know, they
did happy Trails on stage. Like he truly comes from
a generation prior to the garbage that we associate with

(09:15):
the eighties, and the band was in place by like
the late nineteen seventies. You know, they're while we associate Well,
this is certainly their biggest album, and Jump is like
all their biggest hits and stuff like they've been a
band for a long time before this, and so I
really do think they get slotted more alongside some of
your idiot seventies lunkhead stuff instead of your eighties idiot

(09:37):
lunkhead stuff, you know. I mean they their first demos
were produced by Gene Simmons, right.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
That's right, David Lee Roth. I mean he has a
show of his background. I think his uncle was the
guy who owned or at least managed the Cafe Wall
on Granwich Village, which was where, you know, initially a
coffee shop where John Bayaz and Bob Dylan and Lenny
Bruce and Pete Seeger and all those people played, and
then Jimi Hendrix a little later on too. So I

(10:03):
mean he definitely has ties to that, almost like Catskills esque.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Exactly like a worst belt comic who became a heavy
metal front man. It's hilarious, not a pitch that.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
You immediately right now, you're right, you're right.

Speaker 2 (10:19):
His backflips come on. But I mean, yeah, he's exhausting,
and so much of it collapsed into just like rancorish
music industry greed, and that's just depressing. But we'll always
have nineteen eighty four, I'll always have Panama.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
I will say, the one song that I do sort
of have a soft spot for is a Jump as
done by mister Paul Anka, who, by the way, is
my new friend and colleague, producing his talk show Our
Way with Paul Anka and Skip Bronson for iHeartMedia, and
it premieres tomorrow, February seven, or today when you're listening

(11:01):
to this wherever you get your favorite shows, get that
plug in there.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Thank you nice?

Speaker 1 (11:07):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Well, aside from the obvious plethora of hits that nineteen
eighty four produced, Jump Panama Hot for Teacher, I'll wait,
it is an important album in the canon because it
was the group's last in their Imperial era before David
Lee Roth quit or was fired.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
What are your thoughts on that, dude?

Speaker 2 (11:23):
You have a Eddie was blackout drunk for like twenty years,
and David Lee Roth never let the truth get in
the way of a good story, as the saying goes
so hard to actually unless you're finding like I'm sure
there's like an eight hundred page Van Halen biography that

(11:44):
I have not read where someone really drilled down into
what actually happened. But I have not read it, so
and I'm told that there were other guys too. There
was a guy who sells tequila. There was a third guy.
Other songs came out to my knowledge.

Speaker 1 (12:00):
So you're not a Sammy Hagar guy.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
I imagine nothing against Sammy Hagar, but my opinion of
him can be summed up in the scene from Airheads,
the Brendan Fraser Steve Bushemi Adam Sandler movie where they
play l a metal band or grunge band who takes
over radio station and it's who is it? It's Egon
from Ghostbusters. Harold Ramis, Yes, it's Harold Ramis plays an

(12:23):
A and R guy who's trying to negotiate them at
the door and they're they're quizzing him, and Brendan Fraser goes,
what side did you take? In the big Van Hale
and David le Roth split and the guy goes Sammy Hagar,
and Jill Eric in the back goes he's a cop,
and then you know Ramis as the rejoinder, he goes

(12:44):
strictly a judgment call. They had a lot of great hits.
They had a lot of great hits with with Sammy
Hagar anyway, So from a guitar God's blasphemous transition to synths,
to what I believe maybe the definitive list of automobile
mules connected to this album, to the aborted David Lee
Roth's starring movie that scotched the band's ability to capitalize

(13:07):
on nineteen eighty four success. Here's everything you didn't know
about Van Halen's nineteen eighty four Yow Wow Wow, who.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
Ah did I did al Pacino in sense of a woman?
And then you play you should go to be up
with that? Two different flavors of woohoo, the two genders.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
In nineteen eighty three, Jordan, can you guess where Van
Halen was?

Speaker 1 (13:36):
Maybe at a crossroads.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
Hey, we're at a crossroads. Their previous full length, nineteen
eighty one's Fair Warning, had stalled some of the momentum
that they'd achieved with their previous three records nineteen seventy
eight Van Hill Had One, nineteen seventy nine's Van Halen two,
and nineteen eighty's Women and Children First. This band released
five albums, one a year from nineteen seventy eight to
nineteen eighty two. That is like Spotify, like will force

(13:59):
you to record that much? Now? But they were just
going in and banging them out like in a two
weeks time. But the pace took the proverbially heavy toll.
Diver Down nineteen eighty four's immediate predecessor was heavy on
the instrumentals and cover songs, which led the group and
fans to heavily disavow it as a proper release.

Speaker 1 (14:17):
In fact, the.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
Band had been wanting to take a break since Fair Warning,
but they had released their cover of Roy Orbison's Oh
Pretty Woman and it had become a hit, so they
rushed out Diver Down as a stopgap solution. Now, Eddie
van Hanlel was dissatisfied by the concessions that he felt
he'd make to Roth and the band's longtime producer Ted
Templeman over their cover song choices, which obviously leaned towards

(14:39):
the first era of like pop rock and the golden
age of Hollywood question Mark and b Eddie's growing affinity
for synths and keyboards and electric sounds electronic sounds. Despite
the group's commercial success with covers like The Kinks, You
Really Got Me and Pretty Woman, Eddie would later say

(15:00):
I would rather bomb with my own music than be
the world's biggest cover band m I.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
Went to a quick spotlight on the background of the
Van Halen brothers because they had a really interesting early life.
They were born in the Netherlands to a Dutch father
and an Indonesian mother before moving to the United States
as children, and their early years were not easy. To
put it mildly, the family lived in one room together
after arriving in Pasadena, and they'd scour dumpsters for scrap

(15:28):
metal to sell as a family. Jesus. They couldn't speak
English when they moved to the United States, and this
fostered a very strong sense of US versus outsiders among
two brothers.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
God like the least serious.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
But it's a very metal language.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
Though, No it's not.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
No, it's not, am I getting it. Mike Wier's getting
crossed with like Scandinavian.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
Yeah, the Nordic ones have some metal to them, but
Dutch is not a serious language. Apologies to the Dutch.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
I's gonna say, Dutch fans out there tweet at us.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
Using Einstein Vegan Vegan you heard Dutch spoken.

Speaker 1 (16:07):
I mean to me that you were doing the Swedish
chef right there, I think.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
But just just just you know, just listen.

Speaker 1 (16:15):
I mean the only Dutch that I can really conjure
up is gold Member and Austin Powers.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
Uh yeah, it's good stuff.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
Hello Alamau, Welcome by head Echo Linguist canal Eco Linguist Kim.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
And imagine being a dispossessed young child in the hard
streets of Pasadena, scouring for scrap metal to put food
on your plate and to talk like.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
That commn bien venue Vinco.

Speaker 2 (16:53):
Oh, it's fine because they're white and they I know,
racial stuff like Foltz. We can totally make lot of them.
It's the victimless crime.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
And you know what Eddie and Alex's dad, Jan I
believe is how he said he was a Dutch resistance
fighter who was captured by the Nazis and forced to
toward Germany playing in a band. So it all fits.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
Yeah, that's cool for him.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
Their musical heritage is steeped in all that, being forced
to perform for Nazis under presumably penalty of death. So
that says that says an awful lot. Yeah. So yeah.
Once he moved to the United States, he was a
jazz musician and he started his sons, Alex and Eddie
van Halen on piano at a very young age, with

(17:39):
the intent of molding them into concert pianists. I played
a long time, Eddie told Guitar Player Magazine, got all
my musical theory and stuff from playing piano. We used
to have this old Russian teacher that was a super
concert pianist. He couldn't speak a word of English. He
would just sit there with a ruler, ready to slap
my face if I made a mistake. Uh yeah, seriously,

(18:02):
did you even have any professors or teachers like that,
like whiplash style?

Speaker 3 (18:08):
No.

Speaker 2 (18:08):
I had a guy who would, uh flick me with
his bow if I like right bass like none? Yeah,
like an upright bass bow like none, rapping the knuckles style,
but nothing truly abusive.

Speaker 1 (18:22):
I thought about that boss who uh who thought I
had management potential but thought I was too soft. So
he had me sit next to him on his side
of the desk as he called people in the fire
of them, just to show me what it was like.
Tough of me, up, I tell you about that.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah that's weird. Yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:38):
Well, thankfully for Eddie, he got good enough at piano
to win a few competitions across Los Angeles as a pianist,
but he was soon bitten by the rock and roll
bug and abandoned piano in favor of guitar. Like so
many musicians of a certain era, like Paul McCartney, initially
played the trumpet. Did you know that?

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Yeah, he would an instrument where you'd have to be
as loud obnoxious as possible.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
He put it down because he was like, wait, I
can't sing with this in my mouth, which is in
astute observation. That's why, that's why no one else had
thought of that. So yes, Eddie mostly, at least for
the next decade or so, a band in piano in
favor of guitar. He did, however, attempt to introduce the

(19:24):
keyboard in the Van Halen Sounds, starting with Women and
Children first running a World, it'ser electric piano through a
phaser pedal and a marshal stack for the track, and
the cradle will rock. The instrument was so disguised that
you could be forgiven for assuming it was an electric guitar,
which until this moment I always thought that's what it was.
But you know, they weren't really in a hurry to

(19:45):
disabuse anybody of this notion, because the electric guitar was
part of the band's image that David Lee Roth and
not Ted temple It was Ted Templeton, fuck, I've got
my templements.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Then Temperton co wrote temple Rod Templeton co wrote Thriller. Uh.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Ted Templeman is.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
Van Halen's longtime producer, and temple Tin is an animated
rat is the rat?

Speaker 1 (20:11):
Okay from from from Paul Lynn. Huh No, Charlotte twab
that's your second that's your second impression, animated night.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
You're you're gonna overtake me in the stack?

Speaker 1 (20:23):
Well, I trust me, you're gonna You're gonna hit that
davidly Roth button enough times tonight for for all of us.
So yes, guitar, Oh yes, So the guitar was very
important to the mythology and the image of Van Halen

(20:48):
for a long time.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
I think that's where Dimebag got it. For Pantera. They
were just like, we don't it's it's a four piece.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
You know, Wow, that's interesting. Huh. But yeah, I just
to go back to Eddie and Alex's dad, Jan van
Halen for a moment. He's just a really interesting guy.
In addition to being a you know, Nazi resistance leader
in Holland during World War Two. He was a professional musician.
He also played clarinet and saxophone, and he actually plays

(21:15):
the clarinet part on the diver down track Big Bad
Bill Bid Willis Sweet William Now. Yeah, and I didn't
realize this. Eddie and Alex played in a band with
their dad. They played like weddings of bar mitzvahs and stuff,
and it was during this period that the boys bonded
with their dad through drinking. According to the band's one

(21:35):
time manager, nol E. Monk, this was not a case
of a dad sharing a beer with his grown boys.
To quote mister Monk, I'm talking about a guy getting
faced with his teenage boys and the hope that the
camaraderie of drinking would encourage honesty and transparency in the
relationship men.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
The Dutch, I don't know if that's true. Are they
harder drinkers and their compatriots in that part of the world.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
I mean, you're you're, you're you're going head to head
with the Germans Austrian Yeah, they can't be. They've yeah,
permanent m it's the Irish, permanent.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
Last place nation. Sorry, guys, well you got Amsterdam.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
Oh well, yeah, yeah too. So I just want to
contrast this for a moment with Diamond Dave David Lee
Ross's background.

Speaker 4 (22:25):
I found the simple life wants so simple.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
No, that's David's life story.

Speaker 1 (22:40):
Day's father was a wealthy eye surgeon who bankrolled a
hyperactive son's ambition to be a rock star, including a
top of the line PA, which made him very popular
with the local bands when he was growing up.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
I believe that was also white. How how Ozzy got
into Black Sabbath.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
And Bill Wyman got into the Rolling Stones. In the
Rolling Stones, right, he had a maybe it's.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
Whyman, I'm thinking of yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:03):
And how the original Beatles drummer Pete Best got into
the Beatles too, He just had a drum kit. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
Ozzie was responding to a or the band was responding
to a nineteen sixty nine flyer. It said, Ozzy Zig
needs gig, has own PA. Amazing.

Speaker 3 (23:26):
Apparently David Lee.

Speaker 1 (23:27):
Roth wasn't a good singer when he first started out, Like.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah, he's not a he's not super melodic. He just
kind of shouts and hollers around and gets by on personality.
But you know, by the time these records are being cut.
Like he's really honed in on what that limited instrument
can do, you know, Like his isolated vocal tracks are

(23:51):
just not only hilarious as we've ascertained, but like he's
got a hell of away with phrasing and even though
everything's kind of in that sort of basic pentatonic blues
shouting stuff, like he makes it work. Man, di'mond Dave.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
Well, okay, we've got David Lee Ross's limited instrument. Let's
talk about Eddie van Halen's extremely expansive instrument.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
Yeah, he was perhaps because of a lifetime spent or
a childhood spent toiling in the scrap yards, Eddie was
an inveterate tinker. Wow, I never thought of that. I
wonder if Yeah, I mean, much like Brian May, he
like cobbled together his first guitar out of scraps And.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
Is that the Frankenstrats. No, that's not the frank Constrats.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
He's had like seven Frankenstrats as far as but I
think the first one that he made, like the original
U was like a cobbled together thing, and that's the
one that people have been chasing the like tone of
for decades because of supposedly how he wound the pickups
or how he wired it, or like the exact mythical

(24:57):
production year of the tubes that his Marshall lampad like
it's really insane but eighty Also, as you got money,
started to invest in cooler and weirder new keys. Fair
warnings hear about it later was written on piano. He
used an electro harmonic synth on the track Sunday Afternoon
in the Park, which whips. It sounds like John Carpenter,

(25:21):
pull that up for you. I think I sent this
to you and you did not listen to it.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
Apparently I know I did. I did listen to this one.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
I no, no, I.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
I did higel I did? I really did.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
It's so great. It's like, yeah, when you delve into
these weird B sides, you're just like, were you guys on?
And the answer is cocaine and schlitz and vodka. That's

(25:55):
so good it belongs in like an Italian zombie movie.
One of the final straws, though, was he wrote a
riff on the mini Moog synthesizer and that was interpolated
or somehow became diver Downs dancing in the Streets, which
is not one of their better covers, and he was

(26:16):
extremely upset about that. He said, Ted and Dave were
happy and I wasn't so. In late nineteen eighty three,
Eddie had begun a two front defense of his love
of keys and his need to ascertain creative control in
the band, which manifested in fifty one fifty home studio
he built with engineer Don Landy.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
The name is famously taken from the California Police Code
for an involuntary hold an immensely disturbed person subtle. We know,
we know a lot about that from working at page
six of People.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah Yeah, famously exercised on Brittany and Amanda millions, right yeah,
So away from the naysayings of Roth and Templeman, Eddie
could craft synth based songs from the ground up, and
that was basically all he was able to do, because

(27:06):
no one would know this except for weirdos. But building
a studio sucks, and especially back then when you were
installing a tape machine and wiring all the patch bays
in through those old ass consoles. So nineteen eighty four
actually took the longest of any of the band's records.
To track three months, as compared to varying timeframes of

(27:31):
five days. I think for their debut in two weeks,
and all those were done at Sunset Sound. I'm pretty
sure with Templeman so on the album, Eddie mostly played
an Oberheim OBXa synthesizer. He also had an ob eight synth.
Nerds go nuts googling that the title track on nineteen

(27:54):
eighty four is called from forty three minutes of Eddie
just noodling around with his engineer Don Landy recording him
and then just cut it together and uh yeah. Doing
that as a lead into jump could be seen as
like a power move, a kind of assertion, like, hey,

(28:14):
we're doing synths on this one.

Speaker 1 (28:16):
You said that the engineer was recording him secretly all
those forty three minutes. Why was he Why was he
being recorded? See?

Speaker 2 (28:24):
I mean I guess, I guess he was just dicking
around and the tape was running. Would be in my bet,
but my god, that is a lot of synth noodling.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
That's what they used to do with the Beatles too,
is that they would the people who ran Abbey Road
would tell the engineers and tape operators like, yeah, don't
listen when they call, you know, call out for takes
and stuff. Just leave the tape running the whole time
because it's the Beatles and there could be gold on there.
Probably knew that someday there'd be the anthology collection.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
I was saying, Boy, did they milk that one?

Speaker 3 (28:55):
Dry?

Speaker 1 (28:56):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
The main synth rift to Jump was actually written as
early as nineteen eighty one and rejected by the other
members of the band. According to a Rolling Stone interview,
Eddie said the reaction was, we don't need that. Somewhat hilariously,
Daryl Hall has claimed that Eddie Van Halen told him
personally the synth part from Jump was copied from the

(29:19):
piano part of Kiss on My List, charitably adding, I
don't have a problem with that.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
That's really funny. I was assigned to write they call
them pre bits, premature obituary for Daryl Hall, so I
was working on that earlier today.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
Is he on his way out?

Speaker 3 (29:35):
No?

Speaker 1 (29:35):
But they just you know, they never know, and I
forgot that kind of completing the circle here, Michael Jackson
approached him and apologized for jack and the riff from
No Can Do I can't go for that. For Billy
Jean so Darrell Starrell Hall claiming that two massive songs

(29:58):
were jacked from him.

Speaker 2 (29:59):
Yeah, well, supposedly Daryl Hall was also tapped for the
lead vocalist position in Van Halen after DLR Diamond Dave exited.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
Who said that? Did Daryl Hall say that?

Speaker 5 (30:11):
Or no?

Speaker 2 (30:14):
I can't remember, but yes, almost.

Speaker 1 (30:16):
Certainly, not like that rumor that Michael Bolton was considered
to take over for I think Ozzie in Black Sabbath,
there's a rumor and then he debunked that years later.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah, I mean, I feel like that stuff is not
actually as far off as a lot of people think
it might be. I mean, we have the Metallica doc
where they just like when they were trying to find
a bass player, they just cycled through everybody in LA
who could play bass. So it's kind of not that
far afield to think that they were just like waving
checks in front of anybody that they thought had a

(30:48):
good voice or whatever. But Michael Bolton is funny David.
In that same Rolling Stone feature, Eddie says that he
still has the original tape of that demo, on which
you can can hear his then wife Valerie Bertinelli yelling
shut up. Oh, and the van Halen brothers wanted to

(31:08):
call their band rat Salad with an E on the
end of it, which is a reference to a Black
Sabbath song. And it was Diamond Dave who convinced them
that their name sounded classier.

Speaker 1 (31:22):
We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more too much information in just a moment.
David Roth really didn't like keyboards in general, but especially
the part on jump. He apparently wailed, you're a guitar hero,

(31:47):
nobody wants to see you playing keyboards. In his nineteen
ninety eight autobiography Crazy from the Heat, he characterized van
Halen's music in this period as quote morose, but Eddie
dug in his heel, saying, if I want to play
tuba or Bavarian cheese whistle, I'll do it. What is

(32:13):
that a Bavarian? No?

Speaker 2 (32:15):
That's maybe my favorite part of the isolated vocal track
from Running with the Devil that David Lee Roth brought
a slide whistle into the vocal booth with him so
that he could play it in between his vocal interjections.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
Do you think that he was just calling Eddie van
Halen's bluff? And was like, all right, well, maybe yeah play.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
There's a number of incredible Pool quotes from that Rolling
Stone feature that I would like to surface at this time.
David Lee Roth, upon being asked if he could assess
a Bruce Springsteen show as quote the most awesome thing
he's ever seen. Honey, I can go to White Castle
and look in the bag and say, this is the
most awesome thing I've ever seen. Pete Townsend on Eddie

(32:54):
van Halen. That incredible virtuosity, combined with that beautiful grin
allows me to forgive him for letting David Lee Roth
stand in front of him. Eddie on rejecting the usual
trappings of being a teenage boy in California to study
the guitar. I just basically locked myself in a room
for four or five years and said to myself, Hey,

(33:15):
this guitar is never going to me in the ass
what I put into it, it gives me back.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
How literally do you think we were talking here? He's
just very concerned.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
About maybe bassist Michael Anthony on the first time he
ever saw David Lee Roth perform. I just went Jesus Christ,
get this guy away from me. David Lee Roth responded
to the adage that money can't buy happiness. Maybe not,
but I could buy a boat big enough to sail
up right next to it. Alex van Halen at a

(33:47):
backstage party, I wish I had more than one Dick
David Lee Roth's point in summation of the life of
a touring musician. After cloud dancing for two hours, what
then you get lonely? The world is not made of
New York cities or Los Angeles' and Dallas is. It's
made of tunea fish Wyoming and lone ranger Oklahoma. Iways

(34:07):
make the joke. Yeah you're lonely, You're lonely in your
lear jet, but it does happen. You feel like you're
chasing the ice cream truck through the rain.

Speaker 1 (34:16):
WHOA Okay. I was about to make fun of all
that until that kicker gut punch yeah from Diamond Dave Baby,
what's cloud dancing?

Speaker 2 (34:26):
I think he just means being on stage.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
It was actually a vowed synth enemy, producer Ted Templeman,
who convinced David Lee Roth to give the whole synth
thing a shot. Roth supposedly was then driven around in
the back seat of his nineteen fifty one Mercury Custom
convertible by Roady Larry Holster. As he repeatedly listened to
the instrumental track hired by news footage of a suicidal

(35:01):
man standing on the ledge of a building, Roth reasoned
that someone in the crowd must have thought at one point,
go ahead and jump, a thought that really could have
only occurred to David Lee Roth, the son of a
wealthy doctor who really had a lot of impatience and
just really a lot of trouble controlling, is it? Yeah,

(35:27):
so go ahead and jump that that thought, that intrusive
thought apparently morphed into being a co on for taking
a chance on someone with lines allegedly cribbed from strippers
that Roth overheard. How I mean, oh not, how I
understand how he would have been around strippers. Yeah, I okay, The.

Speaker 2 (35:48):
Lyrics don't scan with a ton of depth to that song.

Speaker 1 (35:51):
Yeah, David Lee Roth recorded the vocals to Jump in
a single afternoon, and then the song was off to
the proverbial race, and davidly Roth was probably off to
the literal races. He strikes me as a guy who
uh gambler, who goes and visits the horses every now
and then my favorite.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
One of my other favorite bits of them around this
time is that he traveled with two little people as
part of his personal entourage, who wore security T shirts
just for the visual gag uh.

Speaker 1 (36:21):
When it came time to make a video for Jump,
the band didn't go in anywhere near as high concept
as the video they did for Hot for Teacher, which
we'll talk about later. Rather, David Lee Roth wanted to
focus on his karate kicks and flips, which, as you
note here in the script, are quite impressive, and they are,
but all that footage didn't end up being used until
it came time to make the video for Panama. So instead,

(36:44):
for Jump, hey, that's.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
So much song rules.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
So instead, the band shot a candid performance video and
handheld sixteen millimeters cameras at the Complex Small Theater in
Hollywood Santa Monica Boulevard. Director Pete Angelis said in I
Want My MTV, The Uncensored History of the Music Video Revolution.
Rather than doing something bigger than life, which is how
Van Halem was perceived, we wanted something very personal. Let's

(37:16):
see if we can get Edward to smile. Of course,
that's all it took. Of course, we also had to
appease Dave, who wanted the Throwers karate kicks into the equation.
I think we spent less money making Jump than we
did on having pizzas delivered to the set of Hot
for Teacher.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah it's a cute video, though, Yeah it is. Jump,
of course, went on to be the band's loan number
one hit, where it stayed for five weeks and has
since become an immortal staple at bars, cover band nights,
and sporting events, including soccer clubs in France and Italy
and the NHL's Winnipeg Jets. So truly an international anthem

(37:54):
for all of us, although it did lose the Grammy
that year to Prince's Purple Rain, which is fair. The
album's next track, Panama, also became one of the band's
defining hints. Roth has said, and like any good classic
raw quote machine, anything, any quote of his should be
taken with a salt shaker that a journalist at one
point grilled him about why he only wrote lyrics about partying, sex,

(38:17):
and cars and diamond Dave subsequently realized he hadn't yet
written a song about a car, so he set out
to write that wrong.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
He leaves the interview, He rips his head, thumps off,
leaves the radio studio. Whoever's doing the interview.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Would not surprise me at all. True to form, the
lyrics are basically just a series of double entendres about
cars and women, and the name of the song, though confusingly,
is of course not a reference to the country or
the palindrome. A man a plan Panama a canal. I
think I did that wrong.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
I think it's a man of Panama.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
No, it's a man of planed canal, A man of plan.

Speaker 1 (39:06):
Two things can be true at the same time. Handle.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
Yeah, I'm not gonna pursue this. If you were a
loved one. Note how that talent trum ghosts please get
in touch with.

Speaker 1 (39:13):
Us, tweeted us and a man We've.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
Got Canal Panama. It is about one of two memorable
cars in Roth's life, a drag racer he once saw
named Panama Express, or a nineteen sixty nine Opal Cadet
station wagon that was once mounted on a wall of
his home featuring a prop deer smashing through a windshield.
This was part of an art installation properly titled My

(39:37):
First Deer. Despite this confusion, there is a documented car
associated with the song. For Panama, Eddie drove his nineteen
seventy two Lamborghini Mura s around Los Angeles to find
just the right RPM for the record. It was eighty
thousand that the car sounded best at, and then he
just backed it up to their home studio and placed

(39:58):
microphones at its exhaust pipe to capture the sound heard
on the bridge of the song. He did tell a
Guitar World in twenty fourteen that when the guys once
asked me to write something with an ac DC beat,
that ended up being Panama. It doesn't really sound that
much like ac DC, but that was my interpretation of it.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
Was this the era? What were we talking about? I
was thriller when they were like trying dozens of different
doors to get the doors squeak. Oh yeah, god, this era.

Speaker 5 (40:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
I mean, I'm gonna I'm gonna just make you listen
to this because because I got you here and this
payback for Titanic.

Speaker 1 (40:44):
Love.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
That Wambi bar amazing. You know. It's like they said
about Jimmy Page, it is virtuosity hammered. It's like there's
just so much in there that is just like a
guy with just complete master of this instrument, just winging
it because he can.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
It's like I could be better, but I don't feel
like it.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
Yeah. I had seventeen Schlitzes today. Oh yeah, the brown sound.
How much do you want me to actually go into this?

Speaker 1 (41:16):
All I can think of is that South Buck episode
with the brown note.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
That the brown note. No, you know, there's actual, like,
there is actual theory behind the idea of the brown note,
which is that certain frequencies, like low enough frequencies, can
affect your bowels. Yeah, but just the body. I mean,
there's there's a UK proto punk band called Throbbing Gristle
who had a bunch of like old army gear that

(41:42):
were like signal generators and just weird kind of frequency
generators that they ran through amps and just like to
create this wall of sound and it would make people
throw up at gigs.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
Well, yeah, there's I mean, there's like beta waves or
beta frequencies are something that people listen to to fall asleep.
And then there's solfeggio frequencies I think you can find
on like YouTube too that supposedly, I don't remember exactly
what they do either relax you or make you poop
which one on the same for me, I don't know

(42:15):
about Yeah, I mean the brown sound is.

Speaker 2 (42:20):
It's it's it's interesting because we think of the like
of sort of that that again his bastard sons in
the hair Metal of like having this really like sharp
you know, cranked tone and everything. But like those guitar
tracks are almost muddy, you know, they are so dark,
And part of it is because he was using a

(42:41):
transformer that basically start he would crank his amp but
run it at lower power. So it's this idea of
really saturated tubes that weren't ultimately loud enough to have
them distort in a particular way, as I understand it.
And then you know, just these different things that he'd

(43:05):
done to his guitar supposedly the again, his marshal was
like a real one of a kind one. People people
get into this idea of certain tubes and certain eras
that were used in these hundredwad marshals of being really
you know, have the mojo certain things. Yeah, his nineteenth

(43:28):
on the first Van Halen record, his sound was a
fifty nine Fender strat and then he just started gutting
like Charvel stratocaster copies, and then he rewired a DiMarzio pickup,
and he also dipped his pickups in paraffin to reduce

(43:48):
feedback noise.

Speaker 1 (43:50):
So they put on on pans for like nonstick, like
almost pre teflon.

Speaker 2 (43:57):
I don't know about that, but yeah, I mean it's
which you would use to like seal like I'm pretty
sure in it. The little paper boat that they make
that floats down the gutter and gets the one kid
killed is made with paraffin wax. But yeah, I mean
that was not an approved method of wiring guitar pickups.
You know, it really did just up some of them.

(44:18):
But you know, when you coat a magnetic coil in wax,
it is going to produce a less fight fidelic high
fidelity sound. What was I trying to say?

Speaker 1 (44:29):
That clear?

Speaker 2 (44:31):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (44:31):
That ironically the word you're searching for is clear.

Speaker 2 (44:38):
That's my that's my exit music whatever I'm struggling this episode. Yeah,
And some of the other things that he did was,
you know, when he died, there was people were surfacing
up right when he died, people were surfacing the patents
that he held. He held a bunch of of US
patent trademarks for different like guitar gear things. One of

(44:59):
them was this, like, it looks like a like a.

Speaker 3 (45:03):
Girdle.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
It's like a plexiglass thing that mounts to your waist
and locks your guitar perpendicular to your body without a strap,
so that he could tap on it two handed. But
like the patent image that is drawn is like of
like a coloring book like stick figure drawing line drawing
of Eddie Van Halen tapping on the guitar with all

(45:25):
of the different parts labeled. It's really amazing.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
I'm sorry, I'm looking this uff ering.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
Oh you found the picture.

Speaker 1 (45:33):
I mean, you're right. It looks like it looks like
a connect the dots like coloring book thing.

Speaker 3 (45:38):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
Okay, yeah, that's that's definitely worth seeking out folks. Oh
my god. So the Panama video, a video for My
Least Favorite song, as we mentioned earlier, reused footage that
had originally been shot for the Jump video, but the
live stuff was taken from the second of the band's
to night at the Philadelphia Spectrum in March nineteen eighty four.

(46:00):
Also features Ross. Aforementioned nineteen fifty one Mercury eight convertible,
which sold for as you write, an astonishingly low thirty
thousand dollars out of Southeby's auction in twenty thirteen. Yeah,
that's a somebody. I almost feel like the Samyhagar fans
must have mobilized there or something.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
I mean, when you think about these custom jobs, man,
more than that went into it. Yeah, assuredly. You know,
we used to be a proper country.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
Yeah. This car was a custom job by the legendary
car customizer George Barris, whose CV includes the Munster Coach
and Dragula for the Monster's TV show, the nineteen sixty
six Batmobile for the Batman TV series. He created cars
for the Beverly Hillbillies, MANNIX night Rider, and the show
My Mother of the Car, which is that weird show

(46:47):
about the cops elderly mother who dies and gets reincarnated
as a car. If I believe that is correct. Yeah.
I also made custom golf carts for Bob Hope, Bing
Crosby and Margaret Glenn Campbell and Elton John Wow customized
golf cart and adding to this just absolutely Bonker's resume.

(47:09):
George Barris also helped contribute designs to NASA for their
Mars rovers, basing them on the suspension and tires he
created for the Moonscape vehicle, which had been a popular
plastic model in the sixties. That's weird that he didn't
design the lunar rover. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
I my only from what I gleaned from that, it
was that he was designing a model for like a
plastic toy model, and then they as they were doing research,
it must have come up in like, you know, lunar
module design and they were like, Hey, that suspension looks
actually quite practical. Can you send us that?

Speaker 1 (47:45):
And he did. Possibly the funniest thing about the Panama
video is that has started a battle with MTV, who
had a staunch stance against product placement. They were very
unhappy about Michael Anthony's bass guitar, which was shaped like
a bottle of Jack Daniels. Hilariously, he also had one
that was shaped like a bottle of Tabasco sauce.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
Hi, which I would I would rock.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
Yeah. I was gonna say, if you could, if you
could have a base that was shaped like a condiment,
what would it be?

Speaker 2 (48:14):
Oh? Probably as basic as it is. Tabasco is a
close second, very versatile sauce Worchester sauce.

Speaker 1 (48:25):
You have to say that because you're New England. Yeah,
in an angle file.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
Yeah, would you? I would imagine HP or something for you.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
That's so funny. I was just with my brother and
my brother's partner the other day and they'd never had
HP sauce was on the menu and I was describing
HP sauce And I was supposed to go uh to
trivia with them tonight and I'm taping this instead. So
when they listen, Hi, guys, I told you I wasn't lying.
But getting back to the story, MTV obviously couldn't turn

(48:57):
down a video from one of the biggest rock bands
in the world of the time, so they allow the
goofy bass to stay. And this might have been early enough.
What an MTV launch eighty one August of eighty one.
Never mind, I was going to say early on in
the MTV's run, they couldn't afford to turn down videos, videos,
and they were just that's why all those weird I mean,
that's probably one of the crucial factors of the rise

(49:20):
of the new wave movement in the early eighties is
that all these weird already British bands are the only
bands that had videos.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
That they already repurposed from, like Top of the Pops
and stuff, right, like a lot of that live footage.
Gotta be honest, I'm not particularly well versed in al Wait,
which is the third single off nineteen eighty four. It's
a another synth heavy song, almost completely based around the
instrument Michael Anthony even plays his baseline on the synthesizer.
The most interesting thing about this song is that, like
everything else in the nineteen eighties, it couldn't escape Michael McDonald.

(49:50):
This soft spoken beard falsetto Combo had had a pre
existing relationship with Van Halen producer Ted Templeman not to
be confused with Thriller co writer Rod Temperton or The
Rat Templeton. Ted Templeman, once again not to be confused
with Rod Temperton, who co wrote Thriller or Templeton the

(50:13):
Rat from Charlotte's Web, had worked with the Doobie Brothers
during McDonald's tenure with the band, and produced McDonald's first
solo album, nineteen eighty two, If That's what it takes.
Roth was struggling to come up with a vocal melody
and lyrics for al Wait and Templeman called McDonald in
is a singer, McDonald told Ultimate Classic Rock. Ted Templeman

(50:34):
called me up and said, hey, these guys have a
track and they need some lyrics.

Speaker 1 (50:38):
You gotta say you gotta tell a story like Michael McDonald. Wire.

Speaker 3 (50:41):
These guys have a track and they need some lyrics.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
So I mentioned you could do it, and they said fine,
why don't you come on down. He sent me the
track and I got some ideas going so i'd have
something when I got to the studio. McDonald, however, recalled
that the experience quote wasn't exciting, was an exile. I
met David Lee Roth at Ted's office. That was an
interesting experience. He kind of liked what I had going.

(51:08):
So we sat there in the office with a demo
playing on a cassette recorder, singing lines and melodies. We've
actually obtained footage from that, and I like to play
it for you.

Speaker 3 (51:22):
Oh that's good.

Speaker 1 (51:27):
I'm all gonna tell you what's.

Speaker 3 (51:31):
Great stuff, David. But maybe we checked that one back
for notes.

Speaker 1 (51:36):
I told you I told you my Michael McDonald's story, right,
Oh when he was cool to you? Yeah, yeah, he
was really cool to me. Yeah, it was when he
rejoined the Doobie Brothers and like the head Doobie was
grumpy that.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
Day and Jeff Skunk Baxter.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
Tom I think it was Tom. Yeah, fine, he was
in a pissy mood and he was just like wilfully
misunderstanding my questions and getting really snippy with me and
trying to make me look an idiot. And then finally
Michael McDonald came in and defended me and was like,
come on, Tom, there'll be an ass. You know what
he meant. And then he came over to me and
uh and spent a lecture time with me afterwards, and

(52:12):
clearly in an attempt to make sure I wasn't feeling bad.
So yeah, Mike McDonald, he his he doesn't just have
the voice of an angel, he is an angel.

Speaker 3 (52:22):
Jordan's how are you doing? Just checking out my bad mate?
Wasn't rude to you? He wants some ask.

Speaker 1 (52:41):
If you see that great se TV bit with Rick
moranis when he's Michael McDonald's.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
Every single background session.

Speaker 1 (52:49):
Yeah, that's so good. Friend of the pod. Ryan showed
me that. Thank you, Ryan. Well, even after that magical
afternoon with Michael McDonald and David Roth, Roth and Templeman
didn't want to include the song whose name escapes me.
I'll wait, that's what it is. Yes, I didn't want
to include all wait on the album, and Ednie an

(53:09):
engineer Don Landy how to battle them over it. Even
though the song reached number thirteen on the Billboard Hot
one hundred, Michael McDonald's credit on the song has dipped
in and out of official releases by the band. Michael
McDonald told Ultimate Classic Rock, I guess they thought I
was Santa Claus because I had to go chasing them
a little bit on that one. He kind of does
look like Santa Claus. To be honest.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
It's funny because he does Santa.

Speaker 1 (53:34):
It's probably one of the most played things I've ever written,
just because it's van Halen. That album sold three or
four million copies right away, which is a really big
deal at the time.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
There are so many great Van Halen songs.

Speaker 1 (53:47):
How many are there? I actually don't have one of him.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Reading a number, but for me and you as well
and the listeners out there, for Teacher perfectly distills the
band's blend of virtuosity, horniness and goofiness. Jory, what do
you think about Hoffer teacher, Do you hate that one too?

Speaker 1 (54:09):
I do? Is that the one that's song? I don't
feel tardy? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
The song's opening bass drum cacophony is actually four bass drums.
While I'm sharing the interviewing years, some annoying wounder kind
has figured out how to play it. Alex Van Hailsen's actual,
like live part doesn't kick in until he starts the
regular beat. Eddie's parts, including his solo, made this song
actually harder. As he explained to Guitar World, the song's
tempo also jumps up like it's really wild. How they

(54:37):
were just doing this live and Eddie was just like
gesturing to everyone to follow him. Of that guitar solo,
he said, I winged that one. If you listen to it,
the timing changes in the middle of nowhere. We were
in a room playing together, and I just kind of
winked at the guys and said, okay, we're changing now.
Because I don't count. I just follow my feelings. I
tend to do a lot of things in threes and
five instead of fours. The live room at fifty one

(55:01):
to fifty. The studio where they're doing this wasn't particularly
large and so a lot of the drum sound on
the record is actually Simmons electronic drum kit, not acoustic drums.
Wild to be probably the reason some of the reasons
that you hate it in particularly the intro to Hot
for Teacher, gave rise to the rumor that the percussion
sounds at the top of this track are a car
or a motorcycle reving its engine, and that is not true.

(55:33):
So someone people have theorized that that was like an engine,
like a Harley engine or something trying to start. But
it's overdubbed electronic based drums.

Speaker 1 (55:42):
Naturally. When producer Ted Templeman asked about the singer's vision
for the track, David Lee Roth told him, in this one,
we're all pretending to be in the classroom genius sunnyctorial vision.
This is according to Ian Christie's two thousand and seventh
book Everybody Want Some the band Halen Saga. So to

(56:04):
fulfill this creative vision of David Lee Roth, they dragged
a bunch of random crap into Eddie's five to one
five zero studio to recreate the raucous atmospheric parts you
hear in the song.

Speaker 2 (56:16):
You're like throwing bottles around and stuff. I love it,
just hooting and hollering.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
Weirdly considering such an all time lunkhead anthem. You say.
The song only peaked at number fifty six on the
Billboard Charts, But the video is another story. The band
shot the classroom segment in my beloved John Marshall High
School in LA, making its fourth or possibly fifth appearance
on the podcast. Was that the high school in both

(56:43):
Greece and Britney spears maybe one more time video. That's correct,
and there's definitely something else. You're right many other yeahah, yeah,
yea yeah. Over eighty people auditioned to be in the
HAPA teacher video and two separate women ended up playing teachers.
There were just so many they just, you know what,
give them.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
Too hard for everybody?

Speaker 1 (57:02):
Yeah, yeah, there's no rule that says you can't be
hot for two teachers. The two women are Donna Rupert, which,
to be fair, is if I had to miss Rupert,
I don't know the name. The name kind of.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
Well, I don't mean to get to I don't mean
to get to uh cartoon wolf eyes here, But have
you seen Donna Rupert?

Speaker 1 (57:25):
I mean, I'm yeah, I assume I'm sure.

Speaker 2 (57:29):
I must have at one point, I don't trust you anymore.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
Well, she was the nineteen eighty one Miss Canada Paget
runner up, so I assume very much. So I assume.
And then there was also Lilian Mueller, a Norwegian model
who plays the physical education teacher. I'm going to read
this directly from the script he wrote, because I can't
improve upon it in any way. Devoted music video Horned

(57:54):
dogs may also recognize Mueller from Rod Stewart's do you
Think I'm Sexy? Video? So Where's That?

Speaker 2 (58:03):
One of the child actors hired to play the roles
of Lil van Halen in the clip, Yano Aneya, who
had appeared in a Christmas story and some commercials, were
called to Louder Sound. The shoot took four days. I
got there on the first day at nine thirty in
the morning and I told my mom I need to
go meet the band that is my priority. Smart Kid.
So I found their trailer and knocked on the door.

(58:23):
Alex van Halen answered and he looked at me and went,
what's up, kid, And I went, I'm part of the cast.
I'm playing Michael Anthony Junior. I just wanted to see
if I could hang out with you guys, and he
went come on in and was like, hey, man, why
don't you go to the back and grab us a
couple of beers. So I walked back there and David
lee Roth was there. He looked at me and went,
who for you? Why is there a kidnack trailer? And

(58:44):
Alex was like, don't worry about it, man, he's part
of the cast. He's hanging out with us. They had
an ice chest in the back with nothing but coke
and Schlitz smalt liquor beer. So I grabbed two of
them and went up to the front and Alex challenged
me to a shotgun. I'm like, I'm thirteen years old,
it's ten twenty in the morning, and I'm drinking a
Schlitz beer with Alex van Halen. This is awesome. Yeah right,

(59:06):
It continued for him. The thing that stuck with me
the most was the part where the teacher was dancing
on the table and all the kids were looking at
her legs. The director was shouting grab her legs. I
looked at my mom, Should I actually do that? Is
that okay? And my mom was like, do your job, son.
That's a truly professional stage mother later, Eddie showed him

(59:27):
how to play the intro to running with the Devil,
making it all in all a pretty good four days.
I'd have to say. The voice of the nerd in
the clip was actually your beloved Phil Hartman, noted previously
notched music industry experience as a graphic designer for the
likes of Crosby Stills, Nash, Poco, and America. You know,

(59:49):
he dropped out of college where he was studying graphic
design and illustration to roady for a rock band.

Speaker 1 (59:57):
Yeah, that's actually really weird. I was watching a vice
as this web series it's called something like the Tragic
Side of Comedy or something, and I was watching one
on They've Got I think they have two seasons now.
I was watching one on Chris Farley. I was watching
one on Phil Hartman. He had a whole life like
he was usually he was forty or something when he
got cast on SNL. He had a whole life before that.
Really interesting guy. And then of course is the pee

(01:00:18):
Rmin stuff too. He co created the pe Wee Herman character.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
Right ooh, as you meditate on that, we'll be right
back with more too much information after these messages. So

(01:00:43):
one of my favorite nerdy YouTube channels is this guy
Ken Tamplin, and he does this as many people do,
like voice teacher reacts to isolated vocal tracks or whatever
on YouTube. And I've read a lot about David Lee
Roth's particular like overtone is like whistle scream, which is
like almost throat singing, right, because it's not just the

(01:01:06):
fundamental note that he's singing, but it's like that whistle
tone is not actually what people call the whistle register.
It's literally like a thing that unhealthy vocal chords do.
So let's let's go to Let's check the tape where
it Ken explains this. Wow, there's that infamous stream.

Speaker 1 (01:01:28):
Listen. It's a vocal feedback.

Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
Now that is.

Speaker 5 (01:01:32):
Caused when the chords lose good separation. Vocal cords shouldn't okay,
and they can't get that separation. All of a sudden,
it does a whistle kind of whistle regular register where
it breaks up in the harmonic structure of what should
have been a complete Hey, it breaks up and it's
several notes three notes. Now I can do that after

(01:01:53):
I've sung way too much and hurt my voice in
my false set of regis or in my chest register
and my false sidle register and get that sound. But
it is not a healthy sound. It sounds cool, but
it's not a healthy sound.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Okay, he punches it back in.

Speaker 1 (01:02:09):
What course we were we doing? Oh my god?

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
Okay, anyway, so that's sorry? What well, it's you know,
it's really insane with it. And this is what having
knowing that he is able to do that is the
precision with which he can fire that off at like
the tail end of a regular vocal phrase. I'm all

(01:02:35):
gonna tell you what, because it's crazy. He goes on
this whole like vocal ad lib right, diango too one
more time and then in the same breath fires off
that like that's nuts.

Speaker 1 (01:02:51):
Even if you.

Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
Say he doesn't have a good technically good voice or whatever,
I defy anyone to try and replicate that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:58):
What is he saying is, damn, lady, I'm only gonna
tell you.

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
I'm probably gonna tell you one more time. I ain't
fooling with you.

Speaker 1 (01:03:07):
Where is the okay? Play that now? Where's the eye?
Ain't full of with you? I can't hear it. I'm
all gonna tell you what it's.

Speaker 2 (01:03:19):
It's I'm lying to you.

Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
My mistake, Tim, I regrets the error. Regrets there.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
My favorite one, though, is the one I sent you earlier,
which I don't think you listened to.

Speaker 1 (01:03:31):
I did, Yes, which one to you?

Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
I'm only going to tell you one time. That's from
Everybody Wants Some? Uh, let me pull that up on Twitter. God,
I just made Jordan's life. This is payback for Titanic.
I know, edit, it's for tomorrow morning. That one was me.
We should do a blindfold test. You can tell the

(01:03:58):
TM I'm blind full test? Is it Ali their diving date?

Speaker 1 (01:04:01):
Wait, I'm gonna okay, I'm gonna shut my eyes. I'm
really gonna try now. No, oh oh okay.

Speaker 2 (01:04:11):
The quality is the quality is isle?

Speaker 6 (01:04:15):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Yeah? One fifty four in the song Everybody Wants Some?
I believe this whole vocal was ad libbed. Not that

(01:04:38):
part I'm actually talking about. I'm actually talking about his
separate part.

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
Yeah, ladder, look you for move me?

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
Yeah, this is like Sibee's water torture man, this is
what the fi Uh. They play you like one second,
they play you like one second of an immaculate Beach
Boys harmony, and then they pull it back and it's
just David Lee Roth isolated vocal takes and I'm grinning
it through the one way mirror. Do you want to new?

(01:05:18):
Do you want to do another one about the Beatles?
Jordan didn't. That one was me anyway? Talk to us
about the Hartford Teacher a sort of details.

Speaker 1 (01:05:31):
Oh what before we go? We were talking on one
episode and I'm trying remember who was it was Kate
Bush or what about somebody who has really.

Speaker 4 (01:05:41):
Well?

Speaker 2 (01:05:41):
And yeah, a bunch of acoustic scientists analyzed his like
the waveforms of his voice and determined that he kind
of I think he was able to do it, but
with a sub harmonic just like the way that his
singing technique evolved naturally that he was producing actually two
distinct tones. But yeah, I mean it's the same I
in theory, it's the same principle. When you're talking about

(01:06:03):
the way that Ken Tamplon from Ken Tamplan's Vocal Academy
was talking about dividing the actual harmonic structure of a
note into its fundamental and one of its over or
under or sub tones, like, it's still the same principle.
It's crazy, dude, It's just so cool what the voice
can do. And then you wreck it and you can't
do that anymore, like like Robert plant Man, world's greatest

(01:06:27):
voice for like a very short amount of time. Fools,
they were all fools. They didn't take their voice seriously,
says the man who's talking himself, horse going.

Speaker 1 (01:06:40):
I was talking about Julian Andrews the other day and
about her whole like bo vocal surgery.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
That's a nightmare, dude, surgeon. And they're like, yeah, we
made it way worse.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
Yeah, you're gonna sing like Randy Newman from now on.

Speaker 2 (01:06:53):
I'll take my check now, doctor Jordan, tell us about
tell us more about how for teacher? Now?

Speaker 1 (01:07:05):
You never ask well. One of the most hilarious parts
of the video, as far as I'm concerned at least,
is when the rest of the band struggles to keep
up with a routine choreographed by Vincent Atterson, who also
worked extensively with Madonna and Michael Jackson. The guys dubbed
their costumes Dave and the Pips. That's a Gladys Night reference.

(01:07:27):
The car of the music video was built by Tom McMullen,
the owner of Street Roder magazine, in nineteen eighty two,
and he used a fiberglass Ford Sayton Paton's style body.
What is a phaton.

Speaker 2 (01:07:42):
It's like a old coop dragster coop kind of thing.
They were mad in the thirties and then they got
real popular with the California like rat Rods guy.

Speaker 1 (01:07:52):
Oh okay, nicknamed Tom's Tub two. It was on loan
for the video and reportedly Tom McMullan was not be
about the scene where it peels out at the end.
The car lived at the Peterson Automotive Museum in la
which is very cool, until it was sold for what
I consider a poultry twenty three thousand dollars by the

(01:08:13):
museum in August twenty twenty three, so recently. So that's
not some important that together that was on.

Speaker 2 (01:08:20):
That was on. Bring a trailer that was on, like
the car auction site. My dad watches like just these
custom things going by for like what a podcast costs.

Speaker 1 (01:08:31):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:08:32):
But then my contract to negotiations, I want I want
an automotive as iconic or less than sub two.

Speaker 1 (01:08:42):
No, less iconic, then we can we can go higher.

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
Oh okay, okay, no, yeah, that's my that's my See,
this is why you're telling me how to negotiate I
don't know this stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
Well.

Speaker 1 (01:08:53):
Speaking of auctions, both guitars in the Hapa Teacher music video,
the little one played by Eddie's mini me and his
actual guitar, both went up for auction in recent years.
The one that the kid played. His name is Brian Hitchcock,
appeared to have been given to him by the people
making the music video, because it was autographed by Eddie
and signed Thanks Brian, Thanks spelled with an.

Speaker 2 (01:09:15):
X because it's cooler. It makes me sad that he
sold it. But you know you got fifty thousand.

Speaker 1 (01:09:20):
Grand, thousand grand. Jesus my least favorite candy bar.

Speaker 2 (01:09:35):
Play me all.

Speaker 1 (01:09:37):
It is fifty thousand. It is fifty thousand grand. Technically
five million maybe, yeah, fifty times a thousand.

Speaker 2 (01:09:46):
I don't know anything about money, Like I pissed a
lot of it away. I've got a couple since, got
a couple of cars. Not ask me to do math
live on this show. There's a zero in there.

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
I probably so it's sold for you two thousand dollars
in December twenty twenty so recently, and it was also
accompanied by the kid's costume from the video, the white
T shirt that says no bozos and a pair of
Sergio Valente jeans and an Ola Cassini denim vest. The
costume alone should be fifty thousand dollars. This iconic music

(01:10:18):
video one of the biggest music videos of the eighties,
which is the decade when the music video was the
biggest it's ever going to be. I can't believe that.
Thank you. Someone had to say it, and I did.

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
You're right to say it.

Speaker 1 (01:10:30):
Meanwhile, Eddie van Halen's guitar on the clip, a custom
job by Paul Unkert of Kramer Guitars, sold for Okay,
this is the sounds more right three point nine million
dollars when it was auctioned by Sotheby's in April twenty
twenty three. Unkert was believed to have completed the guitar
in nineteen eighty two and delivered it to Van Halen
the following January, at which point it became Eddie's main

(01:10:53):
instrument during nineteen eighty three and nineteen eighty four. The
unnamed buyer at the auction also received the white gloves
and strait jacket that Eddie wore for the video. He's
in a strait jacket at half a teacher.

Speaker 2 (01:11:05):
Yeah, they do like a fast times originally Yeah, again,
and I think Alex van Halen became a guynecologist, Eddie
was hospitalized, Michael became a sumer wrestler, and Diamond Dave
is a talk show host.

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
Terrifying Glimpse into the Future for three out of four, Alex,
tell us about your favorite story, Eddie.

Speaker 2 (01:11:31):
Yeah, I mean this is just so cute. You know.
As we mentioned earlier, dine Bag Daryl was a big
of Pantera, was a big Eddie fan, and they got
to be friends over the years. And when dine Bag
Darrel was shot and killed on stage in two thousand
and four, Eddie showed up his funeral and told Dimebag's

(01:11:52):
partner an original deserves an original, and he put his
black and yellow striped guitar into Dime's casket, which was
a kiss casket, and then proceeded to give one of
the most drunken and rambling speeches with Zach Wilde it's
really a thing of joy.

Speaker 1 (01:12:14):
Well that's really touching. But Heigel, how did Haffer Teacher
cast its longest shadow?

Speaker 2 (01:12:18):
I'm so glad you asked hat for Teacher may have
cast its longest shadow in the halls of the American legislature.
While most people know Tipper Gore's parents Music Resource Center
movement was sparked in nineteen eighty four by listening to
Princess Darling. Nikki Gore apparently backed up her horror of
that musical experience by watching a couple hours of MTV,
during which she came across videos that included Hot for

(01:12:39):
Teacher and Motley Cruz Looks that Kill. The images frightened
my children, she said, or was quoted as saying, they
frightened me. The graphic sex and the violence were too
much for us to handle. This led to you the
curious morning in September of nineteen eighty five when Florida
Senator Paula Hawkins treated her fellow taxpayer funded servants of
the American people to showings of Hot for Teacher and

(01:13:02):
We're not going to take it. By Twisted's sister, one
criticism of the rock industry is the way it portrays
values in rock videos, which are viewed by the kids.
Auxgen's introduced the clips by saying, I am not sure
how many of my colleagues get much opportunity to watch
any of the music video shows now available on cable
and free TV. I brought along two videos from which
to choose, which I believe are representative of the kind

(01:13:22):
of presentations which caused the problem. The first is by
the group Van Halen, so that is all enshrined somewhere
in the Congressional archives. One thing that may have gone unnoticed, however,
in the congressional parsing of Hot for Teacher, was revealed
many years later by the videos director Pete Angelis in
Greg Pratto's twenty eleven book The aforementioned When MTV ruled

(01:13:43):
the world the early years of the music video. One
thing I remember about that video that a lot of
people don't know or maybe didn't see, is when Dave
turns into the television show host at the end. We
had an idea. I thought, you know, there hasn't been
a really substantial urine stain on MTV ever when you
really think about it. So let's pour a lot of
water on Dave's crotch. Let's make it look like he

(01:14:05):
really just pissed himself, and then let's see if anyone
sees it. When we hand the video into the record
company MTV, and nobody did. I know this sounds absolutely pathetic.
To say, but we probably pulled off the first and
most substantial urine stain in the history of television, So
we've got that going for us. Oh sorry, though, one

(01:14:26):
other thing I found. In twenty thirteen, a fifty seven
year old Florida man sued Michigan's Oakland University for suspending
him after he turned in an essay inspired by Hotford
teacher that graphically described his professor. Are you kidding me?
Joseph Corlett wrote incursive in the composition entry submitted with
the lawsuit, I should drop right now the class. There
is no way I'll concentrate in class, especially with that

(01:14:48):
sexy little mole on her upper lip, beckoning with every
accented word and that smile. Corlette said he wrote the
essay after his professor for English three eighty advanced critical
writing of Mitzefeld assured him that no topics were restricted
in the free writing assignment and that she wanted to
quote the raw stuff, according to the lawsuit. In an

(01:15:09):
ABC news piece describing Corlett's loss in court, one, another
excerpt from the essay described Mitzelfeld as tall, blonde, stacked
skirt heels, fingernails, smart, articulate, smile key Rist rendered phonetically
as k ee iphen ris t. I'll never learn a thing,

(01:15:31):
corlettz prose continued, I'll search for something unattractive about her.
No luck. Yet, a judge ruled that this work was
not covered under his First Amendment rights. Thoughts on that, Jordan, I.

Speaker 1 (01:15:47):
Can't remember where I saw this, but recently there was
some other college professor who had a student it was
a creative writing class, and wrote a student that was
a barely disguised a story about a student who was
very clearly him seducing a teacher who was very clearly
her a barely disguised way. Makes me sad. Yes, I

(01:16:20):
have a horrible feeling that these are gonna bleed into
every other episodes.

Speaker 2 (01:16:25):
I mean, I have found the soundboard.

Speaker 1 (01:16:27):
Now it's gonna be a different soundboard forever. It's gonna
be Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it's not a Tuma and all that.

Speaker 2 (01:16:37):
And oh maybe I don't know who's got other good
ad libs. I bet a Stevie Wonder soundboard would be
pretty good.

Speaker 1 (01:16:49):
Well, you look for that, and I'll read this section
nineteen eighty four's framed artwork the album cover of a cherub,
technically termed a putto in art history circles, which, as
you write, sounds like a slur and it does. A
cherub smoking A putto smoking a cigarette was art directed
by Richard Cerini and music video director Pete Angelis and

(01:17:12):
painted by graphic artist Amargo Naha, whose other credits include
Seals and Croft's Unborn Child, which she did while she
was still in college, Stevie Wonder, Hey, Stevie Wonder, a
Secret Life of Plants cover, as well as covers for
Toto and Rick James. Incidentally, the label and the band
had asked Nahas to paint an image of four chrome

(01:17:33):
women dancing, but she turned them down. Have Some sources
have said that this was because painting for chrome women
was really hard and kind of a pain in the ass,
But Naha's husband persisted in showing her portfolio and the
band came across this cherub painting and asked for that instead.
The model for that painting was her friend's son, Carter Helm.

(01:17:54):
Nahas recalled the CBS in twenty twenty that quote, I
took a picture of him and took candy cigaret, which
he proceeded to eat every single one after a brief tantrum.
Of course, she also styled his hair. Front cover was
censored in the UK at the time of the album's release,
with a sticker that blocked out the cigarettes and the
cherub's aunt.

Speaker 2 (01:18:13):
Gotta Love the UK. You Don't No, I Sure Don't
nineteen eighty four peak to number two on the Billboard
two hundred, ironically being kept from the top spot by
Michael Jackson's Thriller, which features Eddie van Halen soloing on
beat It. It remained in that spot for five consecutive
weeks and was certified diamond sales in excess of ten
million copies by the rub A. Nineteen ninety nine Jump

(01:18:35):
also garnered the band their first Grammy nomination, which, as
we mentioned, they lost to Prince and they wouldn't actually
win a statue until nineteen ninety two. One of the
most amazing things to come out of the release cycle
for nineteen eighty four, though, was the band's promotional contest
with MTV, dubbed the Lost Weekend with Van Halen. Fans
mailed over one million postcards to MTV in hopes of winning.
After the channel aired a promo with David Lee Roth

(01:18:58):
promising you won't know where you are, you won't know
what's going to happen, and when you come back, you're
not gonna have any memory of it. The contest was
won by twenty year old Kurt Jeffreys, a department stored
loading dock employee from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, who submitted eight postcards.
He was flown to Detroit joined the band along with
a buddy named Tom Winnick, but prior to deciding on Tom,

(01:19:20):
he was deluged with offers from people vying for the
second slot, with temptations ranging from the sexual to the financial,
allegedly up to the tune of five thousand dollars. Flown
out to Detroit by the band, the pair drank heavily
and hung out backstage with the guys before being a
before Kurt was dressed in a lost weekend shirt and
brought on stage, where a sheet cake was smashed into

(01:19:41):
his face and he was doused with champagne. Apparently, the
night then ended for him at four am, when MTV
staff dragged him back to his hotel and dumped him
in his bathtub. On the second night, Kirk Palell's Tom
was found quote locked in a small closet wearing a bra,
and the evening's proposed limo ride with David Lee Roth
was railed when the backstage party devolved into a food fight.

(01:20:02):
As Kurt told a fan magazine, it was the best
time of my life, but sadly it was not the
best time for van Halen. Nineteen eighty four marked the
beginning of the end for Van Halen. Davidly Roth was
pursuing a movie career and put together an EP called
Crazy from the Heat, which indulged in his love of
pop covers and featured both Carl Wilson and Christopher Cross

(01:20:24):
backing him on his version of California Girls.

Speaker 1 (01:20:26):
Oh. He died twenty six years ago today. Carl, my
favorite peach.

Speaker 2 (01:20:31):
Boy, surely never achieved, never achieving the same highs as
singing back up for Damulously Roth. David Lee Roth, around
this time, wrote a movie, also titled Crazy from the Heat,
loosely based on his own life, and pitched it to
CBS Films. According to a nineteen eighty six article by
Metal Edge, CBS gave Roth something like ten million dollars

(01:20:52):
to write, produce, and code direct the movie, with the
aforementioned music video director Pete Angelis. While Roth had supposedly
hoped that Van Halen would contribute to the soundtrack, I
also read in that article that Nio Rogers of Chic
was tapped for the soundtrack, which is a collaboration I
would die to listen to. In his nineteen ninety seven autobiography,
also titled Crazy from the Heat, Roth explains that he

(01:21:15):
had a signed production contract with CBS. Storybirds were completed,
costumes were finished before the whole thing fell through, and
CBS pulled the plug to save money during its efforts
to save itself from a hostile takeover by Ted Turner.
Roth promptly turned around and sued them for twenty five million,
which he lost, although he did end up getting his
three point five million dollar director's feedback. The full script

(01:21:36):
for the film was leaked online in twenty eighteen. If
that's your bag, Baby Anyway, Roth and Eddie's creative dueling
visions ultimately culminated with Roth's exit from the band. He
was replaced by a sunburned and genial tequila salesman by
the name of Sammy Hagar. Hilariously, during the recording of
songs for the film Twister, escalating tensions between Hagar and

(01:21:58):
the Van Halen brothers oiled over, and Sammy Hagar subsequently
departed the band on Father's Day nineteen ninety six.

Speaker 1 (01:22:04):
I would like to say something. That Twister soundtrack is
what brought Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks back together.

Speaker 2 (01:22:10):
It's true, folks.

Speaker 1 (01:22:12):
It's funny because it's true.

Speaker 2 (01:22:14):
There was then a third singer. I'm told this guy
from Extreme Yeah, Gary Sharon, I knew his name. I
just wanted to. I just want to short shrift him.
Did Extreme do? Extreme did more than words?

Speaker 1 (01:22:27):
Right? Yees?

Speaker 2 (01:22:28):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:22:28):
Then words?

Speaker 2 (01:22:30):
That song sucks. All of these creative struggles culminated in
the logical endpoint of Eddie replacing the only other person
who was left in the band at that point with
another of his blood relatives. He installed his fourteen year
old son Wolfgang on bass, foisting Michael Anthony from the
position he had occupied for decades. Uh. We talked about

(01:22:52):
this a little bit before. I think I think Eddie
Van Halen to like a certain ext and I know
he got cleaned and became like a really lovely, genuine,
like sweet person. You can see that in a lot
of the post clips. When he has his teeth and
weight back, and by all accounts really was a very

(01:23:12):
lovely man. But he was also a horrific alcoholic for
many years and made a lot of really cutthroat decisions.
I think, like the first time that he renegotiated for
royalties with their record label to put out like a
best of he like renegotiated David Lee Roth's royalty rate
to some like percentage mark, much lower than the rest

(01:23:34):
of the band, and then did the exact same thing
to Michael Anthony when Michael Anthony was like when he
was going to replace him, he was like, Yeah, I'm
going to like buy you out of your stake in
this band and cut down your royalty rate and then
like that's it, and subsequently hired his fourteen year old
son to play base. Yeah, Eddie struggled a lot with
alcoholddiction and made some moves that seemed dickish in retrospect,

(01:23:59):
but you know, he did eventually get clean, patched up
his relationship with his family, not anyone else in the
band though, And of course he passed away in October
of twenty twenty, which is a sad end to one
of America's most fascinating musical voices. I did not write
an outro for this Jordan, do you have any thoughts?
Have I ruined this band for you? Further? No follow

(01:24:21):
up question? Was that possible?

Speaker 3 (01:24:23):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:24:23):
I mean one of the things that I like about
doing this show is that when I go into one
of these episodes not liking the topic, I usually come
away with an appreciation for it. And I think I
did here.

Speaker 2 (01:24:32):
What about the Dutch still mixed on them?

Speaker 1 (01:24:36):
We do an episode on What's a Dutch Thing?

Speaker 2 (01:24:38):
Fan?

Speaker 1 (01:24:39):
Go? We can do an episode on Starry Night. Actually,
that would kind of be a kind of an awesome episode.

Speaker 2 (01:24:45):
I actually thought about pitching Twister again because learning that
Twister sabotage. The second iteration of van Halen adding to
the Fleetwood Mac thing is like one of the funniest
things I've ever heard.

Speaker 1 (01:24:57):
Like a curve next week?

Speaker 2 (01:24:59):
What a cursed artifact? Okay, Well, if I failed to
impress on you the importance or significance of van Halen
on an artistic sense, all I can say is, we
got a couple episodes left on my contract, buddy, and
there's yet time. Oh there is time. So much all

(01:25:28):
run in I think I just like the idea of
you collapsing a public square like Nietzsche and the horse,
and you're just muttering, he wouldn't stop running with the devil,
wouldn't stop running with the devil. And with that Jordan
was committed. They start old, which I just fade the

(01:25:54):
David Lee raw thing into Samuel Barber's adagio for strings.
So let's see if I can do that live. We'll
uh live uh lit live, mashup action. Let me well,
just Paul, you know, I'm a bit of a fan
to myself, a bit of a sound artist. I don't
know if you knew that about me, Jordan, but uh,
let's see what I can see what working with see
what magic I can produce.

Speaker 4 (01:26:30):
Damn, my baby, I'm a gonna tell you what.

Speaker 3 (01:26:52):
You b m.

Speaker 6 (01:26:55):
Whoa wow, I'll tell you all about it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:12):
Sounds like it was in key. It really is amazing
how I'm watching your breakdown in real time and your
genial facade has yet to Crack's here I can see
the blood vessel, including in your brain.

Speaker 1 (01:27:34):
You're just stating.

Speaker 2 (01:27:35):
Slowly, thank you for listening. Everyone. I'm Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:27:42):
Yusiam and I was Jordan Roun talk YUSIM I'll catch
you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (01:28:02):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.

Speaker 1 (01:28:05):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (01:28:08):
The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtog
and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:28:12):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Van Halen's '1984': Everything You Didn't Know

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Van Halen's '1984': Everything You Didn't Know

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