Another Look: Diver Down

Another Look is a new recurring feature in which I re-examine albums from back in the so-called day.

Van Halen--Diver Down (1982)

Diver Down was the first Van Halen album I ever owned. I'll freely admit I was late to the party with VH. I had heard a few of their songs over the previous four years, but they never really clicked with me. I really started to dig them when 1981's Fair Warning came out; it coincided with my immersion into hard rock and metal and the band's darker sound on songs like "Mean Streets" and "Unchained" really appealed to me. But for some reason, I never bought the album until a few years later.

So in early 1982, I was living in Richland, Washington, when VH's cover of Roy Orbison's "(Oh) Pretty Woman" hit the radio airwaves. I dug it, although I was disappointed there was no Eddie VH guitar solo. Later, the band's cover of Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Streets" was a hit. It was quite a departure from the hard rock classic that was Fair Warning. True metalheads were disappointed at this danceable sound. And so it was that my buddy Andy, who had purchased the cassette of Diver Down, was so disgusted with it that he gave it to me. I only bought vinyl back in those days, but I wasn't about to turn down a free Van Halen album.



As it turns out, the band had recorded the Orbison cover as a one-off and released it to fill the time between albums. When the song shot up to #12 on the top 40 chart, VH rushed into the studio to rush an album together in 12 days. Unlike the previous four albums, Diver Down sounds like it was slapped together. In all, there's five covers, including a good take on the Kinks' "Where Have All the Good Times Gone?", the jazzy "Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now" (featuring Eddie and Alex's dad Jan on clarinet) and the album closer "Happy Trails." And there's three instrumentals, which leaves four original songs: "Hang 'Em High," "Secrets," "Little Guitars" and "The Full Bug." All of this is packed into 31 minutes, which fit with the early Van Halen ethos of keeping albums short.

According Ian Christe's VH bio "Everybody Wants Some," a rift between David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers had been growing for a while by the time Diver Down was recorded. Eddie had married Valerie Bertinelli the year before, while Dave was living it up with an entourage and groupies galore. "Hang 'Em High" was a reworked version of an old song the band did in the '70s and between that and all the covers, it was pretty clear there wasn't a whole lot of songwriting going on.

Still, for a quick production, Diver Down is pretty entertaining. The instrumentals actually work well with the songs they're paired with: The dark, squealing "Intruder" (written by Roth, believe it or not, but featuring some great Eddie skronking and riffing) segues into "(Oh) Pretty Woman"; they were originally paired because the video Roth directed for the song was longer than the song itself.



"Cathedral," with its ethereal volume-knob twiddlings, floats right into "Secrets," which is the best song on the album. "Secrets" is another example of Roth's ability to write good midtempo songs; others include "I'll Wait," "Hear About It Later" and "Women in Love," as "Ladies' Night in Buffalo" from his first solo album.



The intro to "Little Guitars" features Eddie playing some pretty flamenco guitar before launching into the song itself, which starts with him riffing the hell out before it moves into a fairly sensitive love song to a senorita, featuring chiming guitar and Dave's plaintive vocals. All played on, yep, a little version of a Les Paul that a fan gave Eddie at a show.



There's still some of the old rip-roaring VH sound in "Hang 'Em High" and "The Full Bug," which almost make up for all the covers. Almost. Ultimately, Diver Down doesn't come close to the kickasstastic thunder of the band's first four albums, but it serves as a bridge to 1984, which went to number 2 and featured the band's first number one single in the synth-laden "Jump." And which was the last VH album to feature David Lee Roth...at least until the album the band is working on now comes out. Whether that new release will compare favorably to the early VH catalog remains to be seen. All I know is even though Diver Down was disappointing, I'm still glad Andy gave me the tape.