The song Eddie Van Halen wanted to be remembered for: “A major step”
You could say that most hits across history have occurred because someone was playing it safe. When Eddie Van Halen felt he’d stumbled upon gold, however, he had to fight to get others to see it for what it was.
In the mid-1980s, there were a number of reasons why Van Halen felt the need to switch it up. One was that many of their decisions in the past, including filling half an album with cover songs (Diver Down), weren’t getting the kind of reception that they craved. Van Halen had been told that covering a song was a necessity for success, and that if you managed to pull it off, you’d already be “halfway there”. But it wasn’t the kind of breakthrough he’d hoped for.
Another was that he wasn’t satisfied with the lack of creative challenge in other aspects of creating the following record, 1984, feeling that, as a band and on an individual level, everything felt a bit stale and stagnant. And so, in an effort to exhume the flame that still existed deep within, he decided to build his own studio to prove to himself that he still had it.
His studio, 5150, became the place where he could flex his more experimental muscles, moving beyond the arena he’d established himself in, namely, the kinds of material he wrote on guitar, and into different explorations with other instruments. The first that came out of this new venture was the band’s defining hit, ‘Jump’, but the others weren’t so convinced at the time.
This was also the nature of the dynamic – David Lee Roth, especially, was often convinced that they were constantly going in the wrong direction. And so, when Van Halen turned up with a song he’d written on the keyboard, you can imagine the kind of reaction he’d had when he was still of the mindset that the best music was written with the guitar in mind.
But Van Halen was laser-focused, knowing that his desire to branch out and his interest in familiar pop sensibilities were to be trusted. ‘Jump’ might have taken a while to warm up the crowd, especially among fans who expected more sounds and styles that reflected their older material, but in the end, it ended up proving just how important Van Halen’s position was in the broader scope of rock.
Van Halen knew this from the start, and even went so far as to tell Guitar World that, of all their songs, ‘Jump’ is the one he’d like to be remembered for. “I’d rather bomb with my own shit than make it with someone else’s,” he said. “So that’s when I built my own studio, 5150, which was a major step for me – not to prove any point but just so I could be myself and experiment musically. People were telling me, ‘You can’t use keyboards, you’re a guitar player!’ So that’s when I wrote ‘Jump.’”
He went on, “Musically, it was a real departure… we had the challenge of integrating the keyboards and synths with the guitar for the first time… the word ‘pop’ comes from ‘popular’, meaning a lot of people like it… 99% of the reason I make music is to, hopefully, touch people with it… and this one touched the most people – so far.”
Despite the positives of running with an idea as left-field as ‘Jump’ felt at the time, some people say it was the initial spark that resulted in Van Halen’s frayed dynamics, with Roth eventually leaving the lineup to make way for Sammy Hagar. Therefore, it’s interesting to look at how ‘Jump’ cemented their legacy while also catalysing a whole new era.
