Roth’s bon vivant personality often led him to these kinds of songs, whether it was ‘Ice Cream Man’ or ‘Just a Gigolo’, but never had the band gone so far into honest-to-god ragtime jazz than on ‘Big Bad Bill’. ‘Little Guitars’ starts with another Eddie solo, this time on nylon-string acoustic, before lifting into a staidum-ready rocker that the band could pull off in their sleep.ĭiver Down takes its most bizarre turn on ‘Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)’, a music hall/vaudeville track featuring the Van Halens father Jan on clarinet. The version of ‘Dancing in the Streets’ that eventually wound up on Diver Down has plenty of riffage and guitar fireworks to satiate Van Halen’s preferences, but it plays as yet another creative sidestep, especially considering its reliance on synthesisers. “Dave came up with the idea of, ‘Hey, why don’t we start off the new year with just putting out a single?’ He wanted to do ‘Dancing in the Streets.’ He gave me the original Martha Reeves & the Vandellas tape, and I listened to it and said, ‘I can’t get a handle on anything out of this song.’ I couldn’t figure out a riff, and you know the way I like to play: I always like to do a riff, as opposed to just hitting barre chords and strumming.” Roth’s original idea was to record ‘Dancing in the Streets’ as a single to buy the band more time to get more original material together for their next record, but Eddie initially baulked at the idea. We gotta have that record.’ We said, ‘Wait a minute, we just did that to keep us out there, so that people know we’re still alive.’ But they just kept pressuring, so we jumped right back in without any rest or time to recuperate from the tour, and started recording.” is going, ‘You got a hit single on your hands. It started climbing the charts, so all of a sudden Warner Bros. “We went to Sunset Sound in L.A., recorded it, and it came out right after the first of the year. “I said, ‘Look, if you want to do a cover tune, why don’t we do ‘Pretty Woman’? It took one day,” Van Halen recalled to Guitar Player magazine in 1982.
Side one ends with the band landing another hit single with a cover, this time with Roy Orbison‘s ‘(Oh) Pretty Woman’, but Eddie indicated that the cover was a clear sign of the band’s fatigue from working endlessly over the previous years. Another instrumental, ‘Intruder’, follows in the tracklisting, the second of three on the album. ‘Secrets’ is perhaps the softest song from the entire David Lee Roth era, with no distortion or cannon-blast drums in its three and a half minutes. What really holds Diver Down back is the lack of thoroughly inspired material. ‘Cathedral’ is almost the anti-‘Eruption’: playing with volume and dynamics rather than sheer brute force, ‘Cathedral’ embraces softer symphonic tones that would help point the band in a more electronic direction for their future material. Following that was ‘Cathedral’, an instrumental that fits squarely within Eddie Van Halen’s pantheon of brilliant show-off tracks that he packed onto each album. ‘Hang ‘Em High’ originated from a demo that had been kicking around the band’s archives since before they recorded their debut album in 1978.
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