Episode 188 just dropped and the wheel said, “You know what? Let’s get weird.” 🎡

So here we are with Diver Down—the album that feels like Van Halen threw a beach party, invited a jukebox, and just hit shuffle. Covers? Yep. Guitar wizardry? Obviously. Zero explanation? Absolutely.

It’s chaotic, it’s fun, and somehow it all works… kinda like us.

Grab your shades and a questionable playlist choice—we’re diving in.

Diver Down is the fifth studio album by American rock band Van Halen, released in April 1982, by Warner Bros. Records. It spent 65 weeks on the album chart in the United States and had, by 1998, sold four million copies in the United States. Despite its commercial success, selling faster than its predecessor Fair Warning (1981), it was more lukewarmly received by contemporary music critics.

Released per the label’s request that the group record an album to keep them in the public eye, Diver Down was recorded with producer Ted Templeman over the course of twelve days. As a result of its quick production, the album is heavy on cover versions as well as genre experiments and guitar interludes. Alongside full-length original songs, the material includes excursions into jazz, country blues, doo-wop, a cappella and neo-classical music, in addition to covers of mid-1960s songs – the biggest of these, reworkings of Roy Orbison’s “(Oh) Pretty Woman” and Martha & the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street”, were hit singles.

Five of the twelve songs on the album are covers, the most popular being the cover of “(Oh) Pretty Woman”, a Roy Orbison song.

Eddie Van Halen recalled how the album came about:

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 [Lee Roth] 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.

Van Halen
David Lee Roth – lead vocals, synthesizer on “Intruder”, acoustic guitar and harmonica on “The Full Bug”
Eddie Van Halen – electric and acoustic guitars, backing vocals, synthesizer on “Dancing in the Street”
Michael Anthony – bass guitar, backing vocals
Alex Van Halen – drums

Additional Musicians
Jan Van Halen – clarinet on “Big Bad Bill”

Production
Ted Templeman – producer
Donn Landee – engineer
Ken Deane – second engineer
Jo Motta – production coordination

Art Direction
Richard Aaron – photography
Richard Seireeni – art direction
Neil Zlozower – photography
Pete Angelus – art direction

Intro Music/Wheel Spin Music by LiteSaturation from Pixabay