The Van Halen song that was too shocking for MTV to show
Rock and roll has never been known as the most family-friendly genre in the history of music. The whole point behind some of the biggest names in music was that they were trying to push the envelope, and that normally meant trying out things that may have been considered risque a few years before they tried to put them in their songs. While Van Halen usually left all of their dirty moments in their music, there were a few times when the concerned parents had something to say about their practices.
Considering all of the hair metal bands that spawned in their wake, though, Van Halen could be considered tame. The whole point behind their songs was about having fun, and even if not every one of them had the cleanest lyric sheet at the end of the day, it was a far better road than listening to Mötley Crüe sing songs about wanting to murder a woman because they can’t live without her on ‘You’re All I Need’.
If anything, Eddie’s trademark guitar solos were the one thing most people were focusing on. Anyone could have latched onto what David Lee Roth had to say whenever the group played live, but hearing Eddie play those tapping licks wasn’t something that any of us had heard before, so when he had his showcases live, everyone was looking with their mouths on the floor half the time.
Although the band got their start long before MTV became a major power player, though, it was shocking how well they translated to the medium. Roth was a cartoon character before a camera was even on him, and by the time Eddie leapt onto the table to play his solo in ‘Hot For Teacher’, fans got a good look at the boy-next-door charm he had whenever he performed.
That’s not to say they couldn’t get a bit goofy in their videos as well. Since no one wanted to make Diver Down in the first place, the video for their cover of ‘Oh Pretty Woman’ was them being as exaggerated as possible, with Eddie clad in a cowboy outfit and Michael Anthony playing the role of a samurai. However, there are a few frames that people called into question after everything settled.
When working with various extras for the shoot, the video portrays various little people getting too hot and heavy with a woman before the final shot reveals that she was a man. Anyone who had been familiar with songs like ‘Lola’ knew that cross-dressing was far from a taboo topic in rock, but MTV didn’t think it was that funny, eventually trying to play it only at select times when they knew cable companies wouldn’t be paying attention.
Since there are no real explicit activities done in the video, Roth always defended what they made, saying, “What you have is the most overblown, over-the-top home movie ever made. We did it rather like a surrealistic art project, like where they paint the picture and come back three days later and try to figure out what they meant.”
While you’d have to stretch to call this an art project in the same way someone like David Bowie made art projects, this was a case of them trying to have fun in whatever way they could. And considering that most of the accompanying album was made from them desperately trying to churn out whatever they could to please their record company, it’s nice to know they at least kept their sense of humour intact a little bit.
