One frigid January day when I was about 14 years old, I pretended to be sick to stay home from school. I wove an elaborate web of lies to get over on my mom. I confess this is something I occasionally did and I feel bad about it, but this time was something special. That was the day the (then) new Van Halen album 1984 was to be released. Van Halen was my absolute favorite band at that time. To say I was a rabid fan is an understatement. My local rock station was going to premiere the new Van Halen single “Jump” and I was not going to miss it! So I tricked my poor, hard-working mother into believing her baby boy was suffering, though not enough to visit the doctor. That was no small feat, but I managed it.
Finally, at about 7 p.m. “Jump” was moments away. Right about then, I realized the irony of having needlessly skipped school. True to my adolescent resiliency, I quickly made peace with that fact. There I sat, trying to identify each song by its opening notes and that’s when I heard it. There was a wash of keyboards followed by the unmistakable David Lee Roth yelp. This was it! This was…it? My heart sank and then broke. I hated the song. Eventually, I heard “Hot for Teacher” “Panama” and “I’ll Wait.” I disliked each song more intensely than the last. Twenty eight years later, I feel the same way about that collection of songs. I felt betrayed and my feelings about Van Halen have never been the same.
Everyone knows Van Halen’s 1984 went on to be a huge commercial success. Then, at the height of the band’s popularity it imploded and was eventually reborn with Sammy Hagar at the helm. Years later, the Hagar-led incarnation likewise expired and what followed were years of disarray, marked by a couple of failed reunion attempts with Roth and a general diminishing of the band’s once formidable legacy.