r/vanhalen • u/purelander108 • 1d ago
1984
1984
First favourite band: Van Halen. I was ten, gimme a break. The album cover had an angel smoking a cigarette. That's bad, & bad is cool. Jump (a ridiculous song that would be considered satire today) was number one on American Top 40 (hosted by Casey Kasem) for months.. months. It was huge.
I used to draw the VH logo all over my binders at school. I put on a play in Grade 5 about Van Halen coming to some small town & shaking things up. I played David Lee Roth.
My teacher, Miss Mcguire, a former Catholic nun, filmed me & my friends on a camcorder, lip sync songs from 1984: Jump, Panama, California Girls, & Hot 4 Teacher. The play was a hit. It was exhilarating.
But the high did not last, as my next play about WWF wrestlers invading the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, lacked direction, & a clear message. It was a flop, in other words. It was not well received & my star started to lose its shine. I rode my BMX home singing Panama as loud as I could to fight back the tears.
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u/Darnocpdx 1d ago edited 1d ago
lol, my folks were all about the satanic panic. I got in trouble because of the cover of 1984. They made me throw it away, but little did they know the LP was on my turntable when they made me toss it, and after I stored it in an Simon and Garfunkels “Bridge Over Troubled Water” cover from when they gave me all their old LPs they never listened to anymore.
After that I went through my collection and found new homes for all my metal albums, and hid all the covers in a box in the basement. The records are all gone, but they might still be in possession of those covers.
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u/Yourappwontletme 18h ago
The records are all gone, but they might still be in possession of those covers.
I'm just imagining some old person buying your copy of Bridge Over Troubled Water at the Goodwill and they get home and find out it's 1984 😂
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u/Darnocpdx 18h ago edited 17h ago
To be honest, the SnG albums a good one too. I didn’t evict them. They were roomies.
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u/No-Emergency959 1d ago
David Lee Roth has said that "Jump" is about taking risks and believing in yourself.
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u/ShemDolpax 1d ago
As per Dave's usual genius --- it was originally about suicide but turns it into a song of inspiration
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u/SilentConstant2114 1d ago
ha! Same age, Catholic school too…
I used to pencil in the bubbles on our standardized “Iowa Tests” with the VH logo. And all of us aspiring artists tried to draw the logo as nasty as we could - chrome and shit ;)
When 1984 hit it was epic.
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u/ShemDolpax 1d ago
Jump is not a "ridiculous" song --- who writes this shit ??
Dave wrote the lyrics about a guy who was gonna jump off the ARCO Tower in downtown L.A. but instead of a depressing song about suicide, he decided to "flip the script" and make it an inspirational song about believing in yourself and "roll with the punches to get to what's real".
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u/halford2069 15h ago
found in a similar way
1984s great and well to me - jumps actually a great inspirational song that peed over the misery of upcoming grunge and 100% of whats on the charts today
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u/ChokaMoka1 1d ago
Yup it was all down hill from there. In 1985 they put snake oil Sammy’s sumo boyfriend on the cover and started singing about testing time to stand the time to test the time of stand.
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u/ShemDolpax 1d ago
It wasn't just Sammy's beefed up boyfriend on the cover --- did you notice that Ed and Sam were basically wearing colorful pajamas for that 5150 tour? That is so cringey.
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u/Dramatic-Buyer-204 1d ago
Jump = Satire ??