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Diver Down is the fifth studio album by American rock band Van Halen, released on April 14, 1982. It spent 65 weeks on the album chart in the United States and had, by 1998, sold four million copies in the United States.
"Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)" is a song with music by Milton Ager and lyrics by Jack Yellen, written in 1924. The song became a vocal hit for Margaret Young accompanied by Rube Bloom, and an instrumental hit for the Don Clark Orchestra.
The song has also been recorded by Ernest Hare (1924), Billy Murray (1924), Clementine Smith (1924), Emmett Miller (1929), Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra (1940), Peggy Lee (1962), Merle Haggard (1973), Ry Cooder (1978), Leon Redbone (1978), Van Halen (1982) and others and has been a popular song in barbershop quartet and chorus competitions.
The lyrics describe a man "in the town of Louisville..." who was once a fearsome and rough character known for getting into fights, who, after getting married, becomes a peaceable person who devotes his time to domestic activities such as washing dishes and mopping the floor. He was "Stronger than Samson I declare, Til the brown skinned woman, Bobbed his hair."[7]
Background and recording:
Five of the twelve songs on the album are covers, the most popular being the cover of "(Oh) Pretty Woman", a Roy Orbison song. Eddie Van Halen recalled how the album came about:
When we came off the Fair Warning tour last year [1981], we were going to take a break and spend a lot of time writing this and that. Dave [Lee Roth] came up with the idea of, 'Hey, why don't we start off the new year with just putting out a single?' He wanted to do 'Dancing in the Streets.' He gave me the original Martha Reeves & the Vandellas tape, and I listened to it and said, 'I can't get a handle on anything out of this song.' I couldn't figure out a riff, and you know the way I like to play: I always like to do a riff, as opposed to just hitting barre chords and strumming. So I said, 'Look, if you want to do a cover tune, why don't we do 'Pretty Woman'? It took one day. We went to Sunset Sound in L.A., recorded it, and it came out right after the first of the year. It started climbing the charts, so all of a sudden Warner Bros. is going, 'You got a hit single on your hands. We gotta have that record.' We said, 'Wait a minute, we just did that to keep us out there, so that people know we're still alive.' But they just kept pressuring, so we jumped right back in without any rest or time to recuperate from the tour, and started recording. We spent 12 days making the album... it was a lot of fun.
"Where Have All the Good Times Gone" is a cover of a song by The Kinks. During the band's bar-playing days, vocalist David Lee Roth bought a budget label Kinks double album, and Van Halen learned all of the songs on one side to use as staples of their set. Eddie Van Halen created the effects in the guitar solo by running the edge of his pick up and down the strings and using an Echoplex.
"Cathedral" was so named because the band members thought it sounded like a Catholic church organ.
The lyrics to "Secrets" were inspired by greeting cards which Roth bought in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the preceding tour. Eddie Van Halen used a Gibson doubleneck 12-string for the song, played with a flatpick. The solo was done in one take.
"Little Guitars" was inspired by the flamenco guitar playing of Carlos Montoya. Eddie Van Halen found he was unable to imitate Montoya's finger picking, so he used a pick as an assist. Roth, who thought the music Eddie Van Halen came up with sounded Mexican (Montoya was actually Spanish), wrote lyrics intended to evoke that nation. The guitar used on the recording (and subsequent tour) was a miniature Les Paul, built by Nashville luthier David Petschulat and sold to Eddie on the earlier Fair Warning Tour.
Covering "Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)" was Roth's idea, as was having Eddie and Alex Van Halen's father Jan play clarinet on the track.
Personnel: Van Halen
David Lee Roth – lead vocals, synthesizer on "Intruder", acoustic guitar and harmonica on "The Full Bug"
Eddie Van Halen – electric and acoustic guitars, backing vocals, synthesizer on "Dancing in the Street"
Michael Anthony – bass guitar, backing vocals
Alex Van Halen – drums, backing vocals on “Happy Trails”
Additional personnel:
Jan Van Halen – clarinet on "Big Bad Bill"
Production:
Richard Aaron – photography
Pete Angelus – art direction
Ken Deane – engineer
Donn Landee – engineer
Jo Motta – project coordinator
Richard Seireeni – art direction
Ted Templeman – producer
Neil Zlozower – photography F80qsAvnVRU |