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Diver Down
Diver Down is the fifth studio album by American rock band Van Halen, released on April 19, 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.
Three of the original songs were around long before the album was made. "Hang 'Em High" can trace its roots back to 1976 as "Last Night", which had the same music but different lyrics.[citation needed] "The Full Bug" borrows heavily from a demo track called "The Bottom Line" (not the track of the same name released on Roth's 1988 album Skyscraper) that leaked in 2023. The instrumental "Cathedral" was also nothing new, it having been played in its final form throughout 1981 with earlier versions going back to 1980. Additionally, "Happy Trails" had been recorded for their 1977 demos.[citation needed]
"Where Have All the Good Times Gone" is a cover of a song by The Kinks. During the band's bar-playing days, vocalist David Lee Roth bought a budget label Kinks double album, and Van Halen learned all of the songs on one side to use as staples of their set. Eddie Van Halen created the effects in the guitar solo by running the edge of his pick up and down the strings and using an Echoplex.
"Cathedral" was so named because the band members thought it sounded like a Catholic church organ. The track is a well-known example of the 'cascade effect' on guitar, described by Jon Chappell of EQ Magazine as when the guitarist "plays eighth notes and the delay spits back notes of equal-amplitude on the second and fourth sixteenth notes, creating a steady stream of sixteenth notes. This doubles the rate at which notes come from the guitar". The piece was a stylistic departure for Van Halen, with a quite prowess that has been compared to Focus.
The lyrics to "Secrets" were inspired by greeting cards which Roth bought in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the preceding tour. Eddie Van Halen used a Gibson doubleneck 12-string for the song, played with a flatpick. The solo was done in one take.
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Diver Down
Diver Down is the fifth studio album by American rock band Van Halen, released on April 19, 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.
Three of the original songs were around long before the album was made. "Hang 'Em High" can trace its roots back to 1976 as "Last Night", which had the same music but different lyrics.[citation needed] "The Full Bug" borrows heavily from a demo track called "The Bottom Line" (not the track of the same name released on Roth's 1988 album Skyscraper) that leaked in 2023. The instrumental "Cathedral" was also nothing new, it having been played in its final form throughout 1981 with earlier versions going back to 1980. Additionally, "Happy Trails" had been recorded for their 1977 demos.[citation needed]
"Where Have All the Good Times Gone" is a cover of a song by The Kinks. During the band's bar-playing days, vocalist David Lee Roth bought a budget label Kinks double album, and Van Halen learned all of the songs on one side to use as staples of their set. Eddie Van Halen created the effects in the guitar solo by running the edge of his pick up and down the strings and using an Echoplex.
"Cathedral" was so named because the band members thought it sounded like a Catholic church organ. The track is a well-known example of the 'cascade effect' on guitar, described by Jon Chappell of EQ Magazine as when the guitarist "plays eighth notes and the delay spits back notes of equal-amplitude on the second and fourth sixteenth notes, creating a steady stream of sixteenth notes. This doubles the rate at which notes come from the guitar". The piece was a stylistic departure for Van Halen, with a quite prowess that has been compared to Focus.
The lyrics to "Secrets" were inspired by greeting cards which Roth bought in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the preceding tour. Eddie Van Halen used a Gibson doubleneck 12-string for the song, played with a flatpick. The solo was done in one take.
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