‘Drop Dead Legs’: Eddie Van Halen’s favourite song “whether it’s a hit or not”
Musical quality is rarely a guaranteed method of achieving mainstream commercial success. The world is awash with incredibly talented, prolific artists working in relative obscurity while charlatans and pretenders populate the singles charts. Van Halen was a group that always managed to toe the line between intense commercial success and undeniable musical talent. In the mind of guitar hero Eddie Van Halen, however, some of the band’s all-time greatest efforts inexplicably failed to take root in the pop charts.
Even in the early years of Van Halen, back in the early 1970s, the band showed clear mainstream potential, performing to audiences of thousands around California before they released their debut album in 1978. It is no surprise, therefore, that the band achieved an incredible degree of success during their time together, penning countless chart-hit albums and quickly rising to become one of America’s defining hard rock and heavy metal groups.
One of the most impressive things about Van Halen – aside from Eddie Van Halen’s awe-inspiring guitar stylings – was their ability to create hit albums, as opposed to singles. While the band did create an impressive number of hit singles, their unique brand of hard rock seemed to work much better in the format of a long-form album. Perhaps this is why all of their early albums became multi-platinum certified shortly after their initial release. A particular highlight within the group’s discography came in 1984, with the imaginatively titled 1984 album.
Featuring the band’s most successful single, and only number one, ‘Jump’ as its lead single, 1984, represented Van Halen at the peak of their productivity and musical quality. The album also features ‘Panama’ and ‘Hot For Teacher’, two tracks which came to define Van Halen and the American rock scene of the 1980s in general. For Eddie Van Halen himself, though, none of these efforts were quite as good as ‘Drop Dead Legs’, the final song on side one of 1984.
During a 2009 interview with Spinner, the guitarist was asked to select some of his favourite deep cuts from the discography of his band. In response, Van Halen quickly shared, “One of my favourite songs of ours is ‘Drop Dead Legs’,” adding: “Whether it’s a hit or not, I love that song.” The song never had the chance to become a hit, given that it was never released as a single. Seemingly, Warner Bros thought that ‘Panama’, ‘Jump’, ‘Hot For Teacher’, and ‘I’ll Wait’ had more cause to be released as singles than ‘Drop Dead Legs’.
Nevertheless, ‘Drop Dead Legs’ still became a firm fan favourite and a mainstay of Van Halen’s live performances. The guitarist’s love of the song is perhaps derived from its wailing guitar solo, which certainly goes down as one of Van Halen’s greatest efforts, which is no small feat considering the fact that Eddie Van Halen completely reinvented the world of guitar solos. Moreover, the song – and the 1984 album on the whole – is notable for being the last to include vocalist David Lee Roth, who was replaced by Sammy Hagar the following year.
The likelihood seems to be that ‘Drop Dead Legs’ would have become a hit single had the record label chosen to release it as a single. After all, Van Halen was on top of the American rock scene during the mid-1980s; everything they touched turned to gold. Particularly when taking into account the mainstream popularity of ‘Jump’ and ‘Panama’, not releasing ‘Drop Dead Legs’ as a single does seem like a gross oversight by the label bosses.
Even if it did not trouble the top 100, the song remained a firm favourite of Eddie Van Halen for many years afterwards. Today, decades after its release, the song remains one of the band’s most recognisable and well-known compositions despite its apparent lack of hit potential. Plus, the colossal commercial success of the album’s other singles probably helped to soften the blow a little for Van Halen.
