“This is bad”: The terrible song Van Halen insisted on recording
For any professional musician, a good song is all they need to work with. Even if they have the worst production known to man and some of the most lacklustre instruments at their disposal, it’s easy for someone to turn a track into gold if they have the perfect tune at the centre of it all. While Van Halen already had many opportunities where they created perfect tracks, there came a point where they decided to reverse-engineer the process by putting big arrangements around terrible tunes.
Because if there was one thing Van Halen were known for by the early 1980s, it was sounding absolutely massive on record. There had been other bands making strides in the world of production in 1978 like The Cars and The Police, but the minute that Van Halen entered the new decade, hearing the massive wall of sound on ‘Everybody Wants Some’ or the sheer size of ‘Unchained’ was enough for any kid to immediately bang their head once one of their tracks came on the radio.
Even when the band made something a bit below their standard, they were always going to give it 100%. A song like ‘Dancing in the Street’ off of Diver Down is far from any of the band members’ favourite tunes in their arsenal, but for as many times as the Motown classic has been covered, their version is what of the better ones to have been released, especially with David Lee Roth playing up every single city that he names in the verses.
When looking at Diver Down as a whole, this is the moment where their nonstop hot streak ends. Make no mistake, there are some fantastic tunes on the record like ‘Hang ‘Em High’ and ‘Little Guitars’, but you can’t help but hear the band not wanting to be in the studio for this one, especially since they were strongarmed into making a record when their label thought they should strike while the iron was hot.
That attitude doesn’t typically lead to the best tunes, but it did make for some funny moments in the mix. ‘Cathedral’ was one of the more interesting guitar passages that Eddie ever created, and ‘Happy Trails’ is a goofy way to bring the album to an end, but when Roth suggested that the band start working on the jazz tune ‘Big Bad Bill’, the rest of the band only agreed because of how stupid they thought it was.
According to Eddie, the song had a “so bad it’s good” quality for the rest of the group years before they decided to record it, saying, “In a certain spot in his room, if [Dave] pointed the antenna a certain way, he’d pick up this weird…I don’t know what you’d call that kind of music. He played it to us, and we just started laughing ourselves silly. I’m going, ‘This is bad! Let’s do it!’”
If there’s one silver lining behind Van Halen doing a 1930s-style jazz pastiche, though, it was the fact that they got to jam with their father again. Jan Van Halen had been out of the music business for a long time and had lost a lot of his chops as a clarinettist, but there’s something oddly wholesome about hearing that old-time horn section get brought in during the breakdown of the tune, playing up the kind of sideshow aspect of the track.
Despite not loving the track, even Eddie had a soft spot for these moments, eventually saying that he would have loved to have jammed with his father again when asked if there were any artists that he wanted to collaborate with. And no matter where they are, let’s hope that Ed is somewhere in the great beyond playing alongside his old man.
