The Record Collector

I take requests, so it seems. "I've been waiting forever for a Van Halen spin!" one particular reader keeps complaining. So, OK … here goes.

I've got the six "Roth" Van Halen CDs in the Studio Albums 1978-1984 box set, and I guess they sound OK. But I've also got the 2015 vinyl reissues of Van Halen I and 1984, as well as the 2019 vinyl reissue of Van Halen II, and they sound much better than the CDs.

1984 follows Diver Down and Fair Warning, not the band's best efforts, especially compared to the three LPs that preceded them (I, II and Women And Children First). Van Halen really did blast out of the cannon's mouth like a scorching-serious ball of molten rock and roll fire, and those two middle albums that followed were, comparatively, something lesser. This isn't to say they are bad records. They're not. But they certainly aren't as exciting as those first three records and I think Eddie was bored after making them and wanted to liven things up a bit, so here we find him stretching out and even employing synthesizers, something considered to be almost sacrilege at the time. It was too commercial-sounding to be Van Halen, the naysayers said. It wasn't heavy enough. It was a sell-out. I've always thought this record underscored the musicality this band was capable of, and I think it works well. It also has to be placed in the context of its time. It was the 1980s, and this is what that decade sounded like. Actually, this record sounds better than most of what that decade sounded like, and I would like to have seen where Van Halen might have gone next had Roth's ego not exploded and caused him to think he was some kind of modern day Frank Sinatra. I've heard tales about how getting Roth's vocals nailed onto this record was a challenge, and while he did manage to deliver the goods in the end, it really was the end. It might have been a good album to leave on, but he really should have stayed put.

There's a spaciousness to this pressing that is absent on the CD. You hear it right out of the gate at the beginning of side one with the synth-wash of 1984, and it is even more pronounced on the next track, Jump, which sounds better here than I have ever before heard it. Lush is the word I'm going to use to describe what it sounds like. But I do wish the title track segued into Jump rather than fading out and ending first, leaving what I consider too-long of a dead space between the two songs. It would have helped establish a mood, whereas the existing break is a stick in the spokes. And that first song - which could have been called Slow Keyboard Eruption but wasn't - is only one minute and nine seconds in length, so it literally just gets going before it stops. Oh, well. It is what it is.

This reissue - and the Van Halen II reissue - are both mastered by Chris Bellman and sound particularly good, possibly because it's not all testosterone-soaked, balls-to-the-wall, needle-to-the-hilt rock and roll like the very first record was. And although Bellman - who doesn't take on projects he can't have a positive influence for the better on - did remaster that one too, it was just a needle pushing wall of (really impressive) noise to begin with, and there is only so much one can do with something that sounds like that. I never saw the point in redoing that first record, other than marketing and sales. The diehards will buy it. Again. But not me. I think it already sounds as good as it is ever going to sound, despite the fact that Mobile Fidelity is soon going to reissue it - and the other Van Halen albums, too, including this one - as 2-LP 45-rpm One Step pressings. I can't imagine 1984 sounding better than it does here, and to be honest I don't need it to. Also, a 2-LP 45-rpm pressing means I'd have to get up to flip the record twice as often. So - no thanks.

This is also the record on which Van Halen started to emphasize the playful side of their nature. Hot For Teacher is a tongue-in-cheek ode to youthful lust that just about every teenage male can relate to. I sure can! "Got it bad, got it bad, got it bad - I'm hot for teacher," Roth sings, and I really do know what that's like. My high school art teacher, in 1974. Miss MacInnes. I'm telling you, I really can relate to this song. And that's partly why this record works so well. It's relatable, and it's also a bit of naughty fun, something all teenage boys n' girls back then liked indubitably because it was so off limits, something our parents didn't like or identify with. I wonder if there was a spike in teenage pregnancies after this record was released.

Then there's the terrific love song I'll Wait, which yielded probably the sexiest music video in music video history. Like Jump, I'll Wait features Eddie on synthesizer, and I really do like how that instrument blends into the music under his touch. He doesn't allow himself to get carried away, as tempting as that might have seemed. He knew Van Halen was a guitar-driven band at its core, and on this LP, despite all the synth washing in and out, he delivers the required licks as only EVH can. Girl Gone Bad and Top Jimmy feature two of the best fretboard runs on the record.

Not too many people know that Top Jimmy was a real person - James Koneck - who acquired the nickname Top Jimmy while working at the Top Taco stand outside A&M Records, in Hollywood. Koneck also performed with a band called Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, and sometimes Roth would join them onstage and sing a couple of bluesy cover tunes. The two men first met at the Zero Zero Club, a punk rock dive where Koneck was bartending in the early '80s. I've read that Roth became a silent partner in the bar, as well as friends with Koneck.

The third song on this recording, Panama, is not - as most people believe - about a girl. It's also not about Panama the country. It's about a car. In an interview a while back on the Howard Stern Show, Roth explained how he wrote the the song after seeing a car named Panama Express race in Las Vegas and after being accused by a journalist of only singing about women, parties and fast cars. While he was certainly guilty on counts one and two, the journalist's accusation caused Roth to realize he'd never actually written a song about a fast car. So he decided to do just that, and there actually is a fast car featured in the song. When Roth says, "I can barely see the road from the heat comin' off," Eddie Van Halen can be heard revving his 1972 Lamborghini in the background. They backed the car up to the studio and affixed microphones to the exhaust pipe.

This is not a perfect record, but it's a perfectly fine record. It's also something of a miracle it even exists, given how Roth and Eddie were by then at each others throats for both real and imagined slights and differences. They later claimed never to have actually become friends - it was all business - and when you add money and unlimited access to drugs and booze …

There were other factors, too. In 1983, prior to the start of the recording sessions for this album, the band was paid $1.5 million to headline the US Festival in Pasadena, California, a paycheque that landed them in the Guinness Book Of World Records and no doubt swelled their already bursting egos. Roth - who had by far the biggest ego of anyone in the band - would eventually bail, convinced he could be even more successful on his own singing campy vaudeville-like songs about gigolos (or whatever that was all about). It's a shame the band couldn't resolve their differences and get it together enough to grow beyond this record and explore new directions and sounds. I think they were on to something new, and one can only imagine what they might have got up to. Not everyone liked this record when it came out, and many still don't. But I did, and still do. I thought it was refreshing then and I think it holds up all these many decades later. And how can you not like something that has a cover like that?