Was the phone number in Van Halen’s ‘Spanked’ a real sex line?
For some unknown reason, heavy metal and hard rock acts love to delve into raunchy territory when writing lyrics, and among the kings of penning smutty songs were Van Halen.
They’ve never exactly been the most subtle band, and that’s exactly what has garnered them such an adoring fanbase over the years. The virtuosic musicianship was always going to impress those inclined to take note of such a thing, as were the theatrical vocals of both David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar, but when it came to their sense of humour, it was always designed to appeal on the most base level.
No band can expect to write a song called ‘Hot For Teacher’ and expect it to pass even the most innocent-minded listeners by without a quick double take. In fact, you don’t even need to be familiar with the song to know what it’s about – this is conveniently spelled out for you in the song’s title.
Perhaps a little more subtle is ‘Everybody Wants Some’, taken from their third studio album, Women and Children First. You can’t exactly glean from the title exactly what it is that everybody is clamouring to get a bit of, but for those more acquainted with Van Halen, or for anyone who is curious enough to take a listen, the ‘some’ that Roth is referring to is, rather unsurprisingly, ‘romance’, to put it politely.
Even after Roth had left the band and been substituted with Hagar, the lascivious filth kept coming, and it was clear from some of the band’s earliest material recorded with their new frontman that they’d replaced their old frontman with someone who had sex on the brain just as much.
Three albums into his tenure, the band chose to release the incredibly, err, creatively-named For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge; titled as such for their love of acronyms, of course. According to Hagar, a man who didn’t care for censorship laws, he’d apparently wanted to simply call the album Fuck, and be done with it, but instead, he had to make his horniness clear through the lyrical content on the album instead.
The album’s highlight in this regard is the song ‘Spanked’, which tells the story of Hagar on a particularly randy night when he discovered a sex line, and seemingly serves as a call to action for all men to get their rocks off with the simple instruction to “call her up on the spank line”.
Provided in the song is the number for said line, “1-900-SPANKED”, and while there are some parallels to the real world in as much as all sex lines in the 1990s began with 1-900 in the US [the US dialling code plus the designated ‘900’ for any pay-per-call services], calling the number itself never led to a real destination, presumably breaking the hearts of fans looking for some quick titillation.
This is the sort of practical joke you’d expect a band like Van Halen to have leaned into, and that they would have gone to the trouble of setting up such a thing just to amuse themselves and their fans. Saying that, ‘Spanked’ was never released as a single, so putting in the effort wouldn’t have been worth it for an album track, and besides, it would have involved the band using their imagination, something they were evidently bereft of at this point in their career.
