Van Halen!

I would probably go:

Dance the Night Away
Everybody Wants Some!!
Unchained
Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love
Jainie's Cryin'

"Unchained" was my #1 in the Van Halen poll. Just sick timing in that groove.

I wonder if the super bright, saturated Big Black guitar tone was Van Halen-influenced.

my favorite van halen song is "girl gone bad," that was my no. 1, but my ballot was absolute nonsense lol

I have re-fallen in love with Top Jimmy

1984 best album ever

the best van halen song is without a doubt 'aint talkin bout love'

i'm sorry this isn't even questionable

this may be as fervent as i've ever been on ILM!

i mean the fuckin minutemen covered it!

Idk what my favorite song is but 1984 is def my favorite vh album
Girl gone bad is an excellent choice.
Hot for teacher might be the most advanced boogie shuffle thingy I've heard.

The Minutemen and Van Halen are non-overlapping magisteria in my book

“panama” is forever my favorite, but haven’t seen people mention “light up the sky” yet, that one slays

At the hight of my obsession (age 9) I probably would have picked ain't talkin bout love or running with the devil.

However they are objectively wrong picks and I would now refuse to concede that a song without a real guitar solo can possibly be the best van halen song.

you ppl know nothing of the brown sound!!1!1!!1!

i think the first album is my favorite, but 1984 is a verrrry close second.

last night i was standing in the living room grinning to myself like, how great do they sound with the stereo turned all the way up

model citizen! zero discipline!

Xxp heh the first one is my second fave!
Lol mookie
The brown sound is indeed dear to me but boogie wants advancement.

Van Halen are like Devo - a long illustrious career but their 1978 debut album on Warner Bros. is their best work

Well, it might be fair to say they never bettered it, necessarily, though 1984 probably ties it at least.

What’s ppls favorite of the albums that come between those two

Fair Warning, no contest

Fair Warning is ultra sick

Yes, fair warning.

Xxp What it comes down to for me is debut retains too many elements of 70's dinosaur rock, 1984 is more squarely in their own idiom (apart from the ac/dc ripoff song which is still rad) , has their most advanced songwriting, is leaner and meaner without all the plate reverb.

The drier sound is so much more in your face

has anyone seen Junior's grades?

This name, The Broken Combs, it kept striking me as ...twee? And then given the time and place I realized in was a reference to, gasp, LONG HAIR.

i don't feel tardy

I listen to Fair Warning a ton. It's awesome. Though it and Women and Children First epitomize the "brown sound." They're badass, but also sort of ugly at the same time.

I couldn't make sense of that, because they're so fully a 80s band for me, even if like the Cure or Cars they broke just before. They seem so distant from an era where long hair was a provocation in and of itself.

Women & Children my fave of the betweeners

i brought my PENCIL

I've brought this up before but why does he say "I think the clock is slow" then "I don't feel tardy" because if the clock was slow he'd be even more tardy

xxxp They had beautiful hair.

i thought that was his way of saying he couldn't maintain an erection

I just assume all of Roth's lyrics are metaphors for dicks tho

how rude

debating when I finally wanna do my run of Roth-era Van Halen this week.....

I did like too that for a new practicing guitarist, he had rhythm parts I could play that weren't boring but helped me stretch a bit

(I think a lot of my earliest learned riffs were from Van Halen's first four lol)

So on the question about how VH could have come up with 1984...

Diver Down was probably the end of the line for a draining cycle of touring/recording/touring over 5 straight years, as others have pointed out upthread. But it was also their pop breakthrough, thanks to those two hit cover tunes. And the Diver Down tour ended early in ‘83, almost a year before 1984 was released. They only played 18 concerts that whole year, down from more than 80 a year every year from 78-82. So for the first time in their career they had a long while, like 9 months, to knock a new batch of tunes into Also, 1983 was the year pop metal exploded - between Metal Health and Pyromania, the latter of which at least could never have existed without their influence, they must have felt both energized and like they had something to prove. No wonder the next record was a coup. Eddie was all of 28 years old when they finished it.

because if the clock was slow he'd be even more tardy

The tardy joke is an immature r-word retort.

didn't the band want to fight EVH on recording "Jump"?

When I was reading about it today it looks like the keyboard riff stretched back a couple of years, but they just didn't quite know what to do with it.

On wiki:

The synth line was written around 1981 by Eddie Van Halen but it was refused by the other members of the band. In 1983, producer Ted Templeman asked Roth to take a listen to the unused song idea. Riding around in the back of his 1951 Mercury, with band roadie Larry Hostler driving, Roth listened repeatedly to the tune. To come up with a lyric for it, he remembered seeing a television news report the night before about a man who was threatening to commit suicide by jumping off a high building. Roth thought that one of the onlookers of such a scene would probably shout "go ahead and jump". Roth bounced this suggestion off Hostler who agreed it was good. Instead of being about a threatened suicide, the words were written as an invitation to love. Roth later told Musician magazine that Hostler was "probably the most responsible for how it came out.

The tardy joke is an immature r-word retort.

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, October 7, 2020 7:31 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i know this is true yet i choose not to believe it

just remembering from the Guitar magazine interviews in the 90s how much EVH wanted to kick Hagar's ass after they kicked him out.

I think he said the phrase "He better be wearing a fuckin' cup, next time I see him" about ten times.

Kinda liked his bluntness in that interview.

Re diver down. I Think DLR saw the songs more as a vehicle for the musical personalities (individual and collective) of the band. So was into covering rnr "standards" as if to demonstrate the point. They could do whatever material.

Think a big part of the progression to 1984 had to do with evh building a home studio.

Riding around in the back of his 1951 Mercury, with band roadie Larry Hostler driving, Roth listened repeatedly to the tune.

lolmg

The only thing I remember from that guitar interview is "Dave and sam both suffer from LSD, Lead Singer's Disease" lol

Roth possesses a vocal range of five octaves and three notes.[5]

source - VOGUE magazine

(i'd be amazed if he had, like, 2.5....not a knock but lol no way he has 5)

xxpost oh god, the Lead Singer's Disease quote was a good one yeah.