• AllMyVinyl #71
• Band: Van Halen
• Album Title: Diver Down
• Release Date: 14 Apr 1982
• Date purchased: 31 Jul 2021
• Location purchased: Amazon
• Color of vinyl: black
• Number of discs: 1
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]

Doing the dishes … moppin’ up that floor!

This is an album that most Van Halen fans tend to ignore, or outright dislike.  That’s an opinion that puzzled me.  Now to some extent I get why most don’t care for it.  Of the 12 songs, five of them were covers. If you look at the two albums on either side of this (Fair Warning & 1984), it has a decidedly lighter tone.  It’s not nearly as serious as either of those albums. I’d say definitely of the Roth era, and probably their entire recorded catalog.  It’s of course Van Halen Mk I at its core, but the tone is very different.  Thing is I loved that tone.  That it *IS* lighter is a draw to me – the same exact reason it turns some people off.  So be it.

I don’t recall buying this on vinyl back in the day – I likely would have bought this on cassette tape, although this was still in my prime vinyl years still.  If I did, it certainly didn’t survive to this day, so I’m going with cassette, as I was still five years away from my first CD player at this point.  Said cassette tape also doesn’t survive to 2024, so I was without a physical copy of this album until I picked it up on vinyl again in the summer of 2021.  At this point I was a little over a year into vinyl again, and I’d keep my eyes peeled for a good deal.  Found one, so this became a thing again in July 2021.  I’m also 95% sure this was the first Van Halen record I ever bought back in the day.

As I said, I’ve always liked the fun light feel of this album and one of my favorite songs by VH is on this (and it’s a cover).  I’ll get into the why of it soon, but another memory I wanted to bring up was the video for Pretty Woman.  When VH released that, it was banned by MTV, and I never saw it for the longest time.  Back then in 1982, if they banned something, you really didn’t see it.  Not like low where if someone tried that, it would leak out, get on Youtube, and they’d end up likely releasing it anyway.   An old friend of mine (Hey Al) managed to find it somewhere, because I have a memory of going to his house to see it for the first time.  It was probably on some cable TV channel, as Al had cable then and I didn’t.  Now it’s no big deal with all these artists shaking their asses in the camera, some of them completely nude (hello Britney & , far worse stuff than VH did in 1982, but at the time – “the man” didn’t want you to see this.  I will say I can see the start of the Roth sense of humor in music videos here. It’s not as defined, but what he did with videos on VH’s 1984 and his first two solo releases (EP & album) seemed to get its start in this video.

As for the tunes…

Where Have all the Good Times Gone – VH hits the Kinks again, but not nearly as popularly as the other Kinks song they covered on the first VH record.  There’s a couple of guitar sounds on this I really like.  The first can be described as the guitar laughing – the kind of thing that Steve Vai & Joe Satriani did – make the guitar sound like a human voice.  The other is what I call “the single note” – it comes up about half a dozen times in the song at various parts.  My memory has the “single note” being extricated and available by itself, but that’s not the case.  Still, it is a cool effect (the first one happens at exactly 0:30 of the song – and another at 1:04).  When that note comes up I would air guitar the single note.  Still do – did it now when the song was on today.  ha.

Hang ’em High – This one is faster than the last, and sounds most like a VH song that would come from another album (which isn’t a shock when you realize it came from the 1976 Gene Simmons demos).  Good quick song – my fav kind, 3 and a half minutes that doesn’t go slow.  There’s a small guitar sound on this song that sounds like something from Hot for Teacher on the next album – but that could just be me.  Rather liked this one.

Cathedral / Secrets – Lumping these two, as one is an intro to the other.  At first I thought Cathedral was an organ or something else, but it’s Eddie – doing some weird effect stuff with the guitar.  If you didn’t tell me that, I probably wouldn’t have guessed it.  It leads into Secrets, which has a super flowing nice guitar riff.  Not in your face, not too understated either.  Just right there, goes long with Dave’s vocals quite well.  Nice marriage there.  Really easy going sound that’s quite pleasant but still being unmistakably Van Halen.

Intruder / Pretty Woman – Same as last time, only this time the instrumental has a function.  From what I can gather it exists  because the music video they shot for Pretty Woman was like 3 mins too long and they didn’t want to cut anything from the video, so they wrote this to go with it.  Intruder is a kind of a weird exercise in odd guitar sounds and effects.  It definitely sounds like Eddie on guitar, but it’s not straight up playing.  Always liked it.  As for Pretty Woman, it’s a pretty good metal cover for the old Roy Orbison track.  Amusing thing is I never heard the Orbison original before this.  Van Halen’s version was my intro to this.  It still remains my preferred version, although I’ve come to appreciate the Orbison original in the time that’s gone by.

Dancing in the Street – Another cover, only this time it’s one that I oddly associate with someone else, and that’s not the 1964 original by Martha & the Vandellas.  The version I think of first here is the version recorded by Mick Jagger & David Bowie.  But I know it’s been recorded by a ton of other people too (Mamas & Papas, Grateful Dead, The Kinks…).  The Van Halen version is by no means bad at all, but isn’t my preferred version of the track.  Having said that, Eddie’s guitar intro to the song I quite like.

Little Guitars – This technically has a 42 second intro called “Little Guitars (intro)”, but listing them as separate songs feels like one of those record company cheats to make you think there’s more on there than there is.  The intro is a different sound for Eddie – not his usual screaming guitar, a more acoustic thing.  It leads into a thing that IS about Eddie’s electric guitar, but it’s not a face melter, it’s definitely Eddie, and definitely that Van Halen, sound but contained a bit so it’s more melodic than usual, perhaps?  Kind of hard to put my finger on it fully, but I love the beat to this song, especially when the vocals kick in – specifically the use of “Señorita”.  A great marriage of all the guys in Van Halen.  Song is very underrated.  I’m also going to self burn here – when it was new I thought the lyrics that say “Catch as catch, catch as catch can” were actually “Etch a Sketch”.  Anyone else?  :)

Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now) – And we get to my favorite song on this album.  I fucking LOVE this thing.  I know it’s a cover, but I don’t care.  One of my top Van Halen songs.  Eddie & Alex’s father Jan plays clarinet on this song, so we’re at peak “Van Halen” on this track.  I love the story, love the music – just spectacular as hell.  I can’t help be put in in a good mood when I listen to this song.  Adore this completely.  I almost always find myself singing along to it – even if I don’t intend to.  Love the “Yeah” at the absolute end of the track.

The Full Bug – Anther song that sounds like it would come from one of the first couple of Van Halen albums – it’s got that traditional Van Halen bombast – the full band is in gear here.  Definitely not the “lighter” tone of most of this album.  It also goes way back to a 1977 VH demo called “Bottom Line”, which would explain it sounding like something of that era. Great track, and I suspect if it was on another VH album it would have gotten more attention.

Happy Trails – A complete acapella song – technically a cover of an old Roy Rogers song from his 1952 television show, it encapsulated for me the entire lighter feel of this album and given the material that is on this album closes out the album quite perfectly.  It also goes way back as it was supposedly recorded in 1977 when they were doing demos for a record deal.

From what I’ve read this album was recorded super fast in the earliest days after the end of the Fair Warning tour.  It was supposed to be just a single (Pretty Woman), but the record label pushed them to do a whole album, so this happened.  Pulled in three tracks from the past, recorded a bunch of covers – not a TON of “new” work for this, so it definitely explains the tonal change in this album as a collective whole.  But that WORKS for me.  I repeated a few of the songs when I listened to the vinyl today.  It’s one I really enjoyed and was glad I picked it up on vinyl – despite being able to listen to it at any time on Apple Music.

Yah!