Van Halen!

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.

And then the following month's issue had a letter to the editor where some irate Hagar fan wrote "too bad all his brains are in his fingers"

And something about Sammy changing Glen Ballard's introspective, pink floydesque lyrics for the twister song to "some shit like I can't see your diamond ring/through your shooting star"

"and besides I have a plane to catch"

Guess I remember quite a lot of it, actually. I was so young and impressionable.

Ha, I mean, from the open low E on a guitar to the 24th fret on the high E string would be four octaves. xps

took it out of the wikipedia article. NOT ON MY WATCH

Good work

love to see Deflatormouse get all riled up (depite being rong)

My dealer is late; what ya gonna do? <3

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

lol no it's not. all these things are just funny things to say to the teacher. they're not telling a narrative. 'you're late' 'i don't FEEL late' is a quality joke. that's all it is. sheesh!

'but wait, why would he have brought his pencil if he's such a poor student?'

somebody get a wookipedia going for 'hot for teacher'

Agree with Tracer that tardy not a r-word reference but a Cali-stoner joke response to the teacher telling a student they are late. You could imagine this spoken by Spicoli, no problem.

I do agree that the pencil line is a dick reference because of the audible leer DLR puts into that word and because it is DLR.

Folks, we are doing deep line readings of a song called, "Hot for Teacher."

“Reach down in between my legs, ease the seat back”
What is happening here

well calstars when a david lee roth and a woman love each other very much

It's a double entendre because both his penis and the lever/bar to ease the seat back would be between his legs.

I have to admit that was a confusing line for me as a 12 year old... wait, why is he doing that in a moving car??

thanks y’all for rescuing my favorite hot for teacher ad lib

It took a while before I got it too bc ime the lever to adjust the seat was always on the left.xp

is he speaking in the second person or just thinking out loud?

Pretty sure its a triple entendre, as she would also be easing her "seat" back onto his dick.

I feel gross having posted that, but there ya go.

Panamo_O

The song is about a car.

Is he...fucking... the car?

I also used to wonder what the country of Panama had to do with anything else in the song. SO MANY LAYERS.

I like the story that DLR wrote that song because someone tried to insult him by saying he only wrote about girls, parties and cars, and he realized he hadn't actually written a song about cars.

Wiki:

Although the song features some suggestive lyrics, it is about a car that Roth saw race in Las Vegas; its name was "Panama Express", hence the title of the song.

Panama was also the name of Roth's Opel Kadett. He had the hood and bumper mounted in his hallway, which can be seen in his video for "SHOOBop". He has a stuffed deer's behind crashing through the front windshield. A plaque underneath reads, "Your First Deer, courtesy of Panama."

lol

In one classroom scene where the teacher is dancing on the desk, a black board is featured with the numbers “20-9-8-19-25-12-15-8”. Each of these numbers corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. If you read the encoded word from right to left, you’ll notice it spells “HOLY SHIT.” This is the only known instance of such “hidden” gimmicks in a Van Halen video.

None of the other Van Halen gimmicks are hidden, it's true.

I had just bought the story that "Panama" was a model of car but it actually seems vaguer than that. Aside from the two cars mentioned above, there was also some reference tbat the country was the furthest south you could go and 'have a corrupt good time' and there might be a stripper involved as well: https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/a1850441/van-halens-1984-automotive-anthem-panama-far-more-complex-and-meaningful-you-ever/

there might be a stripper involved as well

You could probably add this to the end of any Van Halen story.

I am now reminded of one of my favorite covers from the A.V. Club Undercover series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vQce1vI7J4

I do agree that the pencil line is a dick reference because of the audible leer DLR puts into that word and because it is DLR.

This is brought home by the next thing he says: "Gimmie somethin' to write on!".

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

the video I tried to post but couldn't yesterday is of the MTV interview with Ed and Alex re: their disaffection with DLR and Sam… EVH describes his mounting anger with DLR's self centered antics backstage at the 1996 VMA, culminating with the very phrase cited above. The entire interview is fucking amazing, easy to find on YT but wouldn't load yesterday…

It took a while before I got it too bc ime the lever to adjust the seat was always on the left.xp

― The nexus of the crisis and the origin of storms (Sund4r), Thursday, October 8, 2020 7:33 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

ime the recline level is on the left, but the bar that lets you slide the seat back in directly under you between your legs - but i guess i've always had shitty cars i know a lot have electronic controls now, given this is the 80s i'd imagine it wasn't electronic

Alex always gives me some real dark vibes
like he was Eddie's henchman

why does he say "I think the clock is slow" then "I don't feel tardy"

Has anyone else misheard this as "i dont feel it turnin" referring to the hands of the clock?

if not his henchman, his protective older brother/ yes man/ enabler. He quit drinking in the late 80s and has apparently stuck with it. Yet he was also close to DLR from mid 70s to mid 80s, where as EVH could barely tolerate him; if AL didn't share DLR's omnivorous intellectual, experiential and musical appetites, he certainly was bruhs in arms re: pussy and partying. Also he was as articulate as Dave, moreso than EVH, and was the second best spokesperson in VH.

If you want dark evil Alex stories read Noel Monk's Runnin' With The Devil.

I click submit post
Like there's...no tomorrowwwwww

man it's just so easy to smoke a bowl and run through the whole dlr van halen discography, the longest album is the debut at an outright bloated 36 minutes

s/t: rock perfection
vh ii: every song great, just ever so slightly less great as a whole than the s/t
women and children first: solves the problem of duplicating the debut again by rocking harder
fair warning: same thing except rocking weirder
diver down: exhausted stopgap that's still fun
1984: pop perfection

i love their arrangement of their Dancing in the Streets cover. It sounds a little like Eminence Front, and doesnt quite follow the original melody so it feels kinda new but not reinventing the wheel eithrr

EVH hated it, but what they shoulda done is put in new vocal melody and words, then you gotta new song, in any case a precursor to "Jump" and one of their truly danceable cuts…

I think for the entire Roth period, they cut those records super fast…and any time they have resissued them for remastering, never have they put out outtakes, unused shit, unreleased gems as extras…

I thought the tardy line was BOTH the r slur and “I don’t feel late” in the “mrs krabapple I am INSULTED” way a kid will talk like a grownup to mock the authority figure

you’ll need more evidence then this line in this song to connect the word “tardy” to the r-word partic in 1983, let’s move on

I mean I remember using both the r slur specifically and referring to someone in the abbreviated form up thru second grade