Various Artists "'80s Metal Tribute To Van Halen (US, Deadline Music, CLP 1639-2)"

'80s Metal Tribute To Van Halen is a tribute album, released in 2006.

Tracklist:

1. Paul DiAnno  –  Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love 3:50
2. Jack Russell, Dweezil Zappa, Marco Mendoza & Eric Singer  –  Unchained 3:23
3. Mark Slaughter, Doug Aldrich, Tim Bogert & Frankie Banali  –  I'm The One 3:39
4. Jani Lane, George Lynch, Tony Franklin & Gregg Bissonette  –  Panama 3:25
5. Colby, Gilby Clarke, Frankie Wilsey & Fred Coury  –  Ice Cream Man 3:26
6. Fee Waybill, Brad Gillis, Tim Bogert & Frankie Banali  –  Atomic Punk 3:37
7. John Corabi, Bruce Kulick, Tony Franklin & Gregg Bissonette  –  Hot For Teacher 4:43
8. Stephen Pearcy, Jake E. Lee, Tim Bogert & Frankie Banali  –  Runnin' With The Devil 3:42
9. Joe Lynn Turner, Reb Beach, Marco Mendoza & Gregg Bissonette  –  Dance The Night Away 3:21
10. Enuff Z'nuff : Donnie Vie, Johnny Monaco, Chip Z'nuff & Ricky Parent  –  Yankee Rose 4:21
11. Jeff Scott Soto, Blues Saraceno, Tony Franklin & Eric Singer  –  So This Is Love? 3:12
12. Doug Pinnick, Yngwie Malmsteen, Billy Sheehan & Vinnie Colaiuta  –  Light Up The Sky 3:48

Van Halen "Van Halen III (Germany, Warner Bros. Records, 9 46662-2)"

Van Halen III is the eleventh studio album by American rock band Van Halen, released on March 17, 1998, by Warner Bros. Records. Produced by Mike Post and Eddie Van Halen, it was the band's first studio album in three years after Balance (1995), the band's only studio album to feature vocalist Gary Cherone, and the last to feature bassist Michael Anthony, who only appears on three of the album's songs while the rest of the bass parts are played by Eddie Van Halen; his son Wolfgang replaced Anthony on subsequent tours and recordings. Eddie Van Halen's extensive involvement in the album's production, instrumentation and writing have led some, including Anthony, to consider Van Halen III more of a solo project than a collective band effort. Clocking in at over 65 minutes, Van Halen III is their longest album.

The album reached No. 4 in the United States and achieved Gold status, but was a relative commercial disappointment for the band, whose previous four albums had all been chart-topping, multi-platinum sellers, though the lead single "Without You" performed well on radio. Critical and fan reaction was also largely negative, with criticism directed at its songwriting, production, band performances and length. The lukewarm reception prematurely halted work on a follow-up album with Cherone, who departed soon after. Van Halen III was the band's last studio album for fourteen years until their 2012 comeback A Different Kind of Truth.

The album's title refers to Van Halen's third recorded line-up, and to the band's first two album titles, Van Halen and Van Halen II. Vocalist Sammy Hagar left the group in 1996, and was briefly replaced by original frontman David Lee Roth. Eventually, Roth departed and was replaced by Cherone who had performed with the group Extreme before their amicable breakup.

None of its material is featured on The Best of Both Worlds, the band's 2004 compilation.

As a producer, Eddie brought his friend Mike Post. The album's final track, "How Many Say I", was an unusual acoustic piano ballad featuring Eddie on lead vocals, and Cherone on backing vocals: Eddie declared he was forced into singing, and added harmonies so he would not perform alone.

Van Halen III makes minimal use of Michael Anthony on bass guitar. Anthony only played bass on "Without You", "One I Want" & "Fire in the Hole"; Eddie Van Halen recorded bass for the rest of the album tracks that feature bass. After Michael Anthony's departure from Van Halen, he confirmed that Eddie Van Halen dictated to him how to play bass on this record. Anthony also said by the time of making this album, Eddie was playing the bass more as well as drums. "I don't know if Eddie was basically making a solo record, which is what Van Halen III seemed like to me." In recent years, it has been revealed that Alex Van Halen was absent from sessions on the album due to personal problems at the time and did not play on any tracks.

A track entitled "That's Why I Love You" was dropped at the last minute in favor of "Josephina", with "Fire in the Hole" featuring on the Lethal Weapon 4 film soundtrack.

"I would have preferred to tour with them and then put out a record," Cherone told KNAC. "It would have been a better idea to establish myself first and then hit the studio with the band… There were some great ideas and some little gems but it was not a great record. I had fun but at times it was like being a stranger in a strange land."

The album cover is a still picture from stock footage of Frank "Cannonball" Richards, a vaudeville and sideshow performer known for his act of getting shot in the gut with a cannonball.

Van Halen III debuted on the Billboard 200 at number 4, with 191,000 copies sold. The album has sold over 800,000 copies as of 2022. The album's only significant radio hit was "Without You", which reached No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart on the March 7, 1998, issue of Billboard, and remained there for six weeks. Other songs receiving airplay on rock radio were "Fire in the Hole" and "One I Want".

Reception for Van Halen III was mostly mixed to negative. Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic stated the album fails to break away from the formula that Van Halen had exhausted over 20 years and "suffers from the same problems as Hagar-era Van Halen – limp riffs, weak melodies, and plodding, colorless rhythms." Entertainment Weekly gave it a B grade rating, saying, "judging from the renewed intensity of Eddie’s guitar playing throughout much of III, having a merely competent, relatively ego-free singer seems to have reinvigorated his muse" but goes on to say "How Many Say I", a song Eddie sang lead vocals on, was "cringeworthy" and "unintentionally hilarious". Greg Kot from Rolling Stone gave it 2 stars out of 5 noting, "Cherone sounds disconcertingly like Hagar, full of spleen-busting bluster and incapable of understatement", and "When the band plays it heavy, it mires itself in a Seventies tar pit, with only the chorus of 'Without You' achieving any sort of pop resonance." Kot compliments Eddie's vocals saying, "'How Many Say I' finds the guitarist singing in a disarmingly appealing, nicotine-stained voice over a moody piano melody." Billboard reviewer Paul Verna summed up III as "a wasted opportunity to breathe life into a now-tired formula".

Track listing

All songs credited to Eddie Van Halen, Michael Anthony, Gary Cherone and Alex Van Halen.

1. "Neworld" (Instrumental) 1:45
2. "Without You" 6:30
3. "One I Want" 5:30
4. "From Afar" 5:24
5. "Dirty Water Dog" 5:27
6. "Once" 7:42
7. "Fire in the Hole" 5:31
8. "Josephina" 5:42
9. "Year to the Day" 8:34
10. "Primary" (Instrumental) 1:27
11. "Ballot or the Bullet" 5:42
12. "How Many Say I" 6:04

Total length: 65:22

Production:

Mike Post – piano on "Neworld", production

Florian Ammon – programming

Dan Chavkin – photography

Ian Dye – programming

The Edward – mixing, mastering

Erwin Musper – engineers

Robbes – mixing, mastering

Ed Rogers – programming

F. Scott Schafer – coloring

Eddy Schreyer – mastering

Stine Schyberg – art direction

Paul Wight – programming

Van Halen "1984 (Japan, Warner Bros. Records, WPCR-16384)"

1984 (stylized as MCMLXXXIV on the album's front cover) is the sixth studio album by American hard rock band Van Halen, released on January 9, 1984. This album and their debut are Van Halen's bestselling albums, each having sold more than 10 million copies. 1984 was the last Van Halen album to feature lead singer David Lee Roth until 2012's A Different Kind of Truth, and the final full-length album with all four original members. Roth left the band in 1985 due to increasing creative differences.

1984 was well received by music critics. Rolling Stone ranked the album number 81 on its list of the 100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s. Commercially, the album went on to reach number two on the Billboard 200 album chart and remained there for five weeks, behind Michael Jackson's Thriller (where Eddie Van Halen made a guest performance). 1984 produced four singles, including "Jump", Van Halen's only number one single on the Billboard Hot 100; the top-20 hits "Panama" and "I'll Wait"; and the MTV favorite "Hot for Teacher". The album was certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America in 1999.

Following the group's 1982 album, Diver Down, Eddie Van Halen was dissatisfied by the concessions he had made to Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth and producer Ted Templeman. Both discouraged Eddie from making keyboards a prominent instrument in the band's music. In 1983, Eddie built his own studio in his backyard, naming it 5150 (after the Los Angeles police code for "escaped mental patient"). At 5150, Eddie composed Van Halen's follow-up to Diver Down—without as much perceived "interference" from Roth or Templeman. The result was a compromise between the two creative factions in the band—a mixture of keyboard-heavy songs, and the intense rock for which the band had become known.

In Rolling Stone's retrospective review of 1984 in its 100 Best Albums of the Eighties list, producer Ted Templeman said, "It's real obvious to me [why 1984 won Van Halen a broader and larger audience.] Eddie Van Halen discovered the synthesizer."

"At the time, Eddie was in the process of building his own studio with Donn Landee, the band's longtime engineer (and later producer on 5150 and OU812). While boards and tape machines were being installed, the guitarist began fiddling around on synthesizers to pass the time. 'There were no presets,' says Templeman. 'He would just twist off until it sounded right.'"

The album's original release credits all songs to Edward Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, Michael Anthony and David Lee Roth. The labeling on the UK single release for "I'll Wait" (catalog #W9213) credited Michael McDonald as a co-writer, but he was not credited on the US version of the single (catalog #7-29307).

The ASCAP entry for "I'll Wait" lists Michael McDonald as co-writer with Roth and the Van Halens. Like many bands starting out on their career, Van Halen shared songwriting credit equally between all members (including guitar instrumentals, which were clearly composed only by Eddie), but subsequent claims would lend credibility to the view that all songs were entirely or predominantly written by Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth, with little input from Van Halen's rhythm section.

After the release of Best Of – Volume I (1996), Van Halen renegotiated their royalties with their label Warner Bros.. In 2004, Roth discovered that the rest of the band had renegotiated a more preferential royalty rate with Warner Bros. for all releases made during his time as lead singer, giving them a royalty rate five times greater than his. This was later rectified.

Songs from 1984 that appear on compilations after the royalty renegotiation and Roth's lawsuit were credited to Edward Van Halen, Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth, with Michael Anthony's name removed from the credits, as evident in the end song credits of the 2007 film Superbad. Anthony stated in 2012 he has no plans to dispute the songwriting credits removal.

The iconic cover was created by graphic artist Margo Nahas. It was not specifically commissioned; Nahas had been asked to create a cover that featured four chrome women dancing, but declined due to the creative difficulties. Her husband brought her portfolio to the band anyway, and from that material they chose the painting of a putto stealing cigarettes that was ultimately used. The model was Carter Helm, who was the child of one of Nahas' best friends, whom she photographed holding a candy cigarette.

The cover was censored in the UK at the time of the album's release. It featured a sticker that obscured the cigarette in the putto's hand and the pack of cigarettes.

The back cover features all four band members individually with 1984 in a green futuristic font.

The album's first two hit singles "Jump" and "I'll Wait", features prominent use of synthesizers, as well as the album's intro track, 1984, a one-minute instrumental.Eddie Van Halen played an Oberheim OB-Xa synthesizer on the album.

The summer of 1984 saw the release of the album's third single "Panama", which featured a heavy guitar riff reminiscent of Van Halen's earlier work (the engine noise was from Eddie revving up his Lamborghini, with microphones being used near the tailpipes). Later, a video of "Hot for Teacher" was released and played regularly on MTV, giving the band a fourth hit which further sustained sales of the album. Other songs on 1984 included "Girl Gone Bad", parts of which previously had been played during the 1982 Tour amidst performances of "Somebody Get Me a Doctor" (most famously at the US Festival show), the hard rock "Drop Dead Legs" and "Top Jimmy", a tribute to James Paul Koncek of the band Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs. The album concludes with "House of Pain", a fiery, heavy metal song that dates back to the band's early club days of the mid-1970s.

Eddie told an interviewer, "Girl Gone Bad" was written in a hotel room that he and his wife at the time Valerie Bertinelli had rented. Valerie was asleep, and Eddie woke up during the night with an idea, he had to put on tape. Not wanting to wake Valerie, Eddie grabbed a small cassette recorder and recorded himself playing guitar while in the closet.

Eddie Van Halen has stated he wrote the arrangement for "Jump" several years before 1984 was recorded. In a 1995 cover story in Rolling Stone, the guitarist said Roth had rejected the now-famous synth riff for "Jump" for at least two years before agreeing to write lyrics to it. In his memoir Crazy From The Heat, Roth confirms Eddie's account, admitting a preference for Van Halen's guitar work; however, he says he now enjoys the song. Additionally in his memoir, Roth writes that he wrote the lyrics to "Jump" after watching a man waffle as to whether to commit suicide by jumping off of a skyscraper.

1984 peaked at number 2 on the Billboard album charts, (behind Michael Jackson's Thriller, which featured an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo on "Beat It",) and remained there for 5 straight weeks. As previously noted, it contained the anthems "Jump", "Panama", "I'll Wait" and "Hot for Teacher". "Jump" reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. 1984 is the second of two Van Halen albums to have achieved RIAA Diamond status, selling over ten million copies in the United States. Their debut Van Halen was the first. "Jump" went on to be certified Gold in April 1984, months after the album's release.

The album's follow-up singles – the synth-driven "I'll Wait," and "Panama", each peaked at Billboard number 13 on the Pop charts, respectively, in March and June. "Hot for Teacher", was a moderate Billboard Hot 100 success, reaching number 56; the MTV video for "Hot For Teacher" became even more popular. The "Hot For Teacher" video, which was directed by Roth, stars preteen lookalikes of the four Van Halen band members; a stereotypical nerd named "Waldo;" David Lee Roth as Waldo's bus driver; and numerous teachers stripping.

To promote the album, the band ran a contest on MTV. The contest was called, "Lost Weekend" with Van Halen. Fans mailed over 1 million postcards to MTV in hopes of winning the contest. In the promo for MTV, David Lee Roth said, "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."

Kurt Jeffries won the contest and was flown to Detroit to join the band. Jeffries was allowed to bring along his best friend. He was given a Lost Weekend T-shirt and a hat. He was also brought on stage and had a large sheet cake smashed in his face which was followed by about a dozen people pouring champagne on him.

In the band's licensed game, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, three of the nine tracks of this album are available for play; "Jump," "Panama," and "Hot for Teacher."

Track listing

All tracks written by Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, Michael Anthony and David Lee Roth, except where noted.

1. "1984" 1:07
2. "Jump" 4:01
3. "Panama" 3:31
4. "Top Jimmy" 2:59
5. "Drop Dead Legs" 4:14
6. "Hot for Teacher" 4:42
7. "I'll Wait" (E. Van Halen, A. Van Halen, Anthony, Roth, Michael McDonald) 4:40
8. "Girl Gone Bad" 4:35
9. "House of Pain" 3:19

Tracks recorded for the album that remain unreleased or were renamed are according to a Warner Bros. memo from August 24, 1983: "Baritone Slide", "Lie to You", "Ripley", "Any Time, Any Place", "Forget It", "5150 Special", and "Anything to Make It Right (synth)". A September 7, 1983 memo adds an 8th title that didn't make the album, "Won't Let Go (needs lyrics)" while dropping "Lie To You" and "5150 Special". "Ripley" is confirmed to have become "Blood and Fire" on the A Different Kind of Truth album and as "I'll Wait", "Top Jimmy", "Drop Dead Legs" and "Girl Gone Bad" are not mentioned on either memo the titles may have changed, leaving at least four unreleased tracks from the 1984 sessions.

Production

Pete Angelus – art direction

Chris Bellman – mastering

Ken Deane – engineering

Gregg Geller – mastering

Donn Landee – engineering

Jo Motta – project coordination

Margo Nahas – cover art

Joan Parker – production coordination

Richard Seireeni – art direction

Ted Templeman – production

Van Halen "Diver Down (Japan, Warner Bros. Records, WPCR-80384)"

Diver Down is the fifth studio album by American hard rock band Van Halen, released in 1982. It spent 65 weeks on the album chart in the United States and had, by 1998, sold four million copies in the US.

The album cover artwork displays the "diver down" flag used in many US jurisdictions (which indicates a SCUBA diver is currently submerged in the area). Asked about the cover in a 1982 interview with Sylvie Simmons (Sounds, June 23, 1982), David Lee Roth said it was meant to imply that "there was something going on that's not apparent to your eyes. You put up the red flag with the white slash. Well, a lot of people approach Van Halen as sort of the abyss. It means, it's not immediately apparent to your eyes what is going on underneath the surface." The back cover of the album features a photo by Richard Aaron of Van Halen on stage at the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Florida that was taken on October 24, 1981 as they concluded a set opening for The Rolling Stones.

Five of the twelve songs on the album are covers, the most popular being the cover of "(Oh) Pretty Woman", a Roy Orbison song. At the time, the record company thought it had a greater chance of a hit record if the album was composed of songs that were already successful. In retrospect, it turned out to be one of the Van Halen brothers' least-favorite albums, with Eddie stating "I'd rather have a bomb with one of my own songs than a hit with someone else's." However, at the time while he admitted to the pressure the band was put under to record it, he was able to tell Guitar Player (Dec. 1982) that it "was fun": "When we came off the Fair Warning tour last year [1981], we were going to take a break and spend a lot of time writing this and that. 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. So I said, 'Look, if you want to do a cover tune, why don't we do 'Pretty Woman'? It took one day. We went to Sunset Sound in L.A., recorded it, and it came out right after the first of the year. It started climbing the charts, so all of a sudden Warner Bros. is going, 'You got a hit single on your hands. 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. We spent 12 days making the album... it was a lot of fun." In addition to this, two of the original songs were around long before the album was made. "Hang 'Em High" can trace its roots back to the band's 1977 demos as "Last Night", which had the same music but different lyrics. "Cathedral" was also nothing new, being played in its current form throughout 1981 with earlier versions going back to 1980. Additionally, "Happy Trails" had been recorded for their 1977 demos as a joke.

Two interviews from the period give the best account of how the band – certainly Roth and Eddie – saw the album at the time. The comments here are taken from Roth's interview with Sylvie Simmons (Sounds, June 23, 1982) and Eddie's interview with Jas Obrecht (Guitar Player, Dec. 1982).

"Where Have all the Good Times Gone"

Dave: "We're capable of playing six different Kinks' songs. Because at one time, back in our bar days, I bought a double album from K-Tel or something that had 30 Kinks tunes on it. We learned all of one side and played them into the dirt during the club gigs, twice a night each one, because they sounded so good and they were great to dance to, etc., etc." He added that the band had never met Ray Davies but that "we had a seance once and tried to dredge up his spirit. And Chrissie Hynde materialized for a brief moment."

Eddie: "The solo was more sounds than lines. I ran the edge of my pick up and down the strings for some of those effects. I think I used my Echoplex in that song."

"Hang 'Em High"

Dave: "It's like all those Westerns where there's some kind of dissonant sound in the background. Like they'll have one harmonica that hits only one note—eeeeeeeeee—and that's when you know the hero is coming to town or something terrible is going to happen. And what happens is Edward will come up with a song or a riff and then immediately I'll hear it and I'll know right away what the scenario is."

Eddie: "The solo was just loose, fun, craziness. I play it better every night than I did on the record, but who cares? It has feeling. Actually that was a really old song."

"Cathedral"

Eddie: "I've been doing 'Cathedral' for more than a year and I wanted to put it on record... it sounds like a Catholic church organ, which is how it got its name. On that cut I use the volume knob a lot. If you turn it up and down too fast, it heats up and freezes. I did two takes of that song, and right at the end of the second take, the volume knob just froze, just stopped."

"Secrets"

Dave: "The nucleus of the lyrics come from greeting cards and get-well cards that I bought in Albuquerque, New Mexico on the last tour, and they were written in the style of American Indian poetry. 'May your moccasins leave happy tracks in the summer snows'."

Eddie: "I used a Gibson doubleneck 12-string, the model Jimmy Page uses, and played with a flatpick. The solo in 'Secrets' was a first take. I kind of laid back, and it fit the song."

"(Oh) Pretty Woman"

The music video for "(Oh) Pretty Woman" was one of the first banned by MTV, although VH1 Classic has consistently aired it in recent years. In 1982, Roth explained the ban as the result of complaints that it made fun of "an almost theological figure" the Samurai warrior (Michael Anthony in the video) and also because two midgets appeared to molest a woman (actually a Los Angeles area drag queen performer). The video, directed by Roth, was, he said: "rather like a surrealistic art project ... where they paint the picture and come back three days later and try to figure out what they meant." The track "Intruder" on the album, which precedes "(Oh) Pretty Woman", was written specifically in order that there would be enough music to cover the length of the film that was edited down for the "(Oh) Pretty Woman" video. In his 1982 interview with Simmons, Roth takes credit for "Intruder," stating: "I wrote that... When we finished the movie (i.e., the video) it was about three minutes too long. So, I said, we won't cut any of it; we'll write soundtrack music for the beginning. So we went into the studio and I played the synthesizer and I wrote it. It took about an hour to put that together."

"Dancing in the Street"

Dave: "It sounds like more than four people are playing, when in actuality there are almost zero overdubs — that's why it takes us such a short amount of time [to record]."

Eddie: "It takes almost as much time to make a cover song sound original as it does writing a song. I spent a lot of time arranging and playing synthesizer on 'Dancing in the Streets,' and they [critics] just wrote it off as, 'Oh, it's just like the original.' So forget the critics! These are good songs. Why shouldn't we redo them for the new generation of people?"

"Little Guitars"

Dave: "Edward was saying he'd just seen this TV show with a flamenco guy doing all these wonderful things with his fingers, and he says 'I've figured out how to do it with one pick, watch this.' And he did it. And it sounded better than the original... It sounded Mexican to me, so I wrote a song for senoritas." The guitar used on the recording (and subsequent tour) was a miniature Les Paul, built by Nashville luthier David Petschulat and sold to Eddie on the earlier "Fair Warning" tour.

Eddie: "I think that the best thing I do is cheat. I came up with the intro after I bought a couple of Carlos Montoya records. I was hearing his fingerpicking, going, 'My God, this guy is great. I can't do that.' So, I just listened to that style of music for a couple of days and I cheated! [Using a pick] I am doing trills on the high E and pull-offs with my left hand, and slapping my middle finger on the low E. If there's something I want to do and can't, I won't give up until I can figure out some way to make it sound similar to what I really can do."

"Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)"

Dave: "I think it's a great song. And there's been this thread winding its way through all of Van Halen's music and all of our albums since beginning with 'Ice Cream Man.' I played acoustic guitar and songs like this for quite a while before I ever joined Van Halen. It's music. Why do I have to bang my head to every single song on every single album? I don't think the audience has that much lack of creativity or imagination."

Eddie: "It was Dave's idea to do 'Big Bad Bill'. He bought himself one of those Sanyo Walkman-type things with the FM-AM radio, and you can record off the radio if you like something you hear. He was up in his bedroom at his father's house and he found that if he stood in a certain spot and pointed his antenna a certain way, he picked up this weird radio station in Louisville, Kentucky. He recorded 'Big Bad Bill' and played it to us, and we started laughing ourselves silly and going, 'That is bad! Let's do it!' Dave suggested, 'Hey, we can get your old man to play the clarinet.' We said, 'sure.'

"It's so funny, because I couldn't play the song for you right now. I had to read because there were so many chords, I just couldn't remember it. So here's my father to the left of me, sitting on a chair with a music stand in front of him, and I'm sitting next to him with sheet music in a stand. Mike was there, too, playing like an acoustic guitar bass – the kind they have in Mexican restaurants where they come up, play in front of your face, and aggravate you. We had a great time. It looked like an old '30s or '40s session. I used some thick Gibson hollowbody with f-holes. My father hadn't played in a long time because he had lost his left-hand middle finger about 10 years ago. He was nervous, and we told him, 'Jan, just have a good time. We make mistakes! That's what makes it real.' I love what he did, but he was thinking back 10 years ago when he was smokin', playing jazz and stuff. He played exactly what we wanted."

Dave: "I think when you hear Mr. Van Halen playing, you'll have an idea it's a shadow of where Eddie and Alex are now. There's a sense of humour in there, a lot of technique and a whole lot of beer!"

"The Full Bug"

Dave: "You know when you have a cockroach and they run round the house and get into a corner? We used to have these shoes called PRFCs – Puerto Rican Fence Climbers, okay? And this was aptly titled because if you were running from the police or what have you, and you were wearing your PRFCs, you could hit the fence at a dead run and your foot would stay in and you could commence climbing immediately, which was the essence of the whole sport anyway. And these were also great shoes for when the cockroach moves into the corner and you can't get at it with your foot or the broom anymore. You just jam your toe into the corner and hit as hard as you can. And if you did it right you got the full bug. So this slang means — bammm! — you have to give it everything you've got. Make the maximum effort, do everything possible, get the full bug."

Eddie: "Dave plays the acoustic guitar and harmonica on the intro of 'The Full Bug.' My lines in the middle of that are different. I've been doing a lot of stuff with Allan Holdsworth, and he inspires me."

"Happy Trails"

Dave: "Joke 'em if they can't take a fuck, Sylvie! You wouldn't believe the number of TV commercials and radio jingles this band can sing in four-part harmony. I was nannied and weaned by TV—that's the babysitter around here when you're growing up, to sit in front of the tube. You turn into a vidiot. I remember all the commercials. We've been singing 'Happy Trails' for general airport use for years. And we wanted to do something wonderful and different for you."

In the band's licensed game, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, six of the twelve tracks of this album are available for play; "Hang 'Em High," "Cathedral," "Intruder," "(Oh) Pretty Woman," "Little Guitars (Intro)," and "Little Guitars." The game puts "Intruder" and "(Oh) Pretty Woman" together as one track. It also does this with both parts of "Little Guitars."

In 2022, Diver Down was ranked at number three in Guitar World's list of "The 25 greatest rock guitar albums of 1982". Country musician Kenny Chesney, who later socialised with Eddie van Halen and Sammy Hagar, has commented that it was "the first album he ever bought". In rankings of the band's albums, Diver Down has been ranked seventh best by Matthew Wilkening of Ultimate Classic Rock and the staff of Consequence, and ninth best by Eduardo RivadavIa of Loudwire.

Wilkening says that while Diver Down is "easily the most criticized" of the Van Halen albums fronted by Roth, it has a consistent summery feel, "thanks partially to the series of amazing guitar interludes that turn up between tracks". Consequence write that Van Halen "went pop" for Diver Down, in contrast to the aggression of Fair Warning, and that as such it is sometimes dismissed by fans of the group's harder material. However, the website comment that it charms those who "embraced the (power) pop direction". They believe that some tracks are led by "some of the most emotive and pleasant guitar work Eddie Van Halen ever recorded", but believe the album's final songs "veer too heavily into David Lee Roth’s showtunes vibe". Morgan Brown, in Van Halen: Every Album, Every Song (2023), considers it to be "a hugely enjoyable lucky dip of a record" that, despite feeling more like "a superior 'leftovers and rarities' collection than a coherent studio album", still contains only "terrific" material that together showcases the band's exquisite range. Eddie van Halen has since criticized the album for being rushed to meet Warner. Bros' demands and as a result containing too many covers.

Track listing

All tracks written by Eddie Van Halen, Michael Anthony, David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen, except where noted.

1. "Where Have All the Good Times Gone!" Ray Davies 3:02
2. "Hang 'Em High"   3:28
3. "Cathedral"   1:20
4. "Secrets"   3:25
5. "Intruder"   1:39
6. "(Oh) Pretty Woman" William Dees, Roy Orbison 2:53
7. "Dancing in the Street" Marvin Gaye, Ivy Hunter, William Stevenson 3:43
8. "Little Guitars (Intro)"   0:42
9. "Little Guitars"   3:47
10. "Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)" Milton Ager, Jack Yellen 2:44
11. "The Full Bug"   3:18
12. "Happy Trails" Dale Evans 1:03

Production

Richard Aaron – photography

Pete Angelus – art direction

Ken Deane – engineer

Donn Landee – engineer

Jo Motta – project coordinator

Richard Seireeni – art direction

Ted Templeman – producer

Neil Zlozower – photography