The Van Halen song written about phone sex
For most 1980s hard rock bands, you couldn’t go wrong with writing a song about sex. Although the creed normally comes down to sex, drugs, and rock and roll, most people figured out that if you were a little coy with your innuendo, sex was really all you needed to get people screaming at the top of their lungs. Although Van Halen may have grown up compared to their hair metal peers by the time the 1990s rolled around, they weren’t afraid to get a little bit nasty on the song ‘Spanked’.
Before making one of the goofier songs about sex to have ever been written, it did seem like Van Halen were starting to turn a corner with their lyrics. They may have more than a few songs about sex when David Lee Roth was fronting the band, but once Sammy Hagar joined, there were a lot more lyrics written about the power of love and the broader questions about life on tracks like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Love Walks In’.
It might be normal for every band to want to grow up, but there’s only so long that you can write serious songs before you start approaching ‘dad-rock’ territory. Though Van Halen probably weren’t thinking in those terms when making For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, they weren’t exactly taking things that seriously on ‘Spanked’.
Despite the dad joke placed in the anagram of the album title, the sexual innuendo reaches its absolute peak in this song. Even with all of the great sex songs that the band wrote with Roth, they never dared to get this blatant on record, with Hagar singing about having to pay three dollars for the first minute and then being charged extra for every other minute that he’s on the line.
Michael Anthony also matches Hagar line by line. ‘The Red Rocker’ may have had lead vocals covered in the band, but Anthony is practically a second lead vocalist on the chorus, crying along with Hagar as he talks about all the bad bad boys that try to call up these lines to be satisfied in the sickest way possible.
Considering how much the band were maturing at this stage, the fact that they still had this sense of humour is at least commendable. The song may come dangerously close to becoming too goofy for its own good, but the music behind Hagar’s lyrics is far too good to ignore.
By this time, Eddie had started to become a lot more interested in making strange sounds on his guitar, as he had done by using an electric drill on ‘Poundcake’. When he steps up to the plate with this song, though, he plays some of the most fluid playing of his career, making it hard to tell when he’s actually tapping and when he’s just playing with his left hand.
The good times weren’t meant to last with this iteration of the band, though, with Hagar leaving after the next record, Balance, and never making another record with them again. They might not have been able to recapture the magic of this record ever again, but this might be the only time you can hear a song as existential as ‘Right Now’ and a song about some sexual conversation all on the same album.
