Adam Sandler and the band he called “the greatest shit I’ve ever heard”
When people think of Adam Sandler, they often split it into generations. Either the wide-eyed, high-pitched stand-up comic of the 1980s, leader of the big screen irreverence in the 1990s or the more modern-day Sandler, often spotted patrolling the streets of lower Manhattan, wearing super baggy basketball shorts while trying to avoid TikTok vox-poppers.
In his back catalogue of films that stretches between the truly awful – Jack & Jill and That’s My Boy – to the profoundly brilliant – Punch-Drunk Love and Uncut Gems – he’s shown a sense of reliance and loyalty to his phonebook. There’s a well-known Sandler alumni that have appeared in a string of films, all of which seem to represent a sort of idealistic 1980s or 1990s America.
The Grown Ups series gives a window into the white picketed fence world of middle-age America, while Big Daddy, Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer all have that underlying sense of fraternised masculinity that centres around beer-opening and hotdog eating. It’s not necessarily a sleight because I would argue it’s a deliberate ploy and something achieved through intended stylistic choices, namely, through the respective movie soundtracks.
I can vividly remember ‘Carry On My Wayward Son’ by Kansas blaring out over Happy Gilmore or Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ playing through the fleeting scenes of euphoria in Big Daddy. All of these subtly foreground a time in America so vividly represented by these artists.
And in an anecdote shared on his appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Sandler shared the influence the latter band had on his formative years, which was suitably appropriate to the thematic framework I previously mentioned about his films:
“Man, I mean that band [Van Halen] to me, when I was in high school, I think I was in 9th grade the first time I fucking heard them. I was into Sabbath, my brother got me into Sabbath” he said.
He continued “and then I heard- I was walking up to a fucking party, it was like one of my first house keg parties, and Van Halen was blaring over somebody’s Pioneer system and it was ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love’ or some shit, but I remember just going, ‘this is the greatest shit I’ve ever heard’”. A point to which the host swiftly replied: “they were the kings in the ’80s”.
Van Halen feels like the right band to assign as music royalty for Sandler, an artist who has transformed from culture’s wacky cousin to urban uncle. For someone whose work unashamedly captured the raucous energy of American comedy in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a band whose face-melting riffs and hyper-masculine representation were a fitting soundtrack.
