(Oh) Pretty Woman

The Zoo Crew has got the turntable locked on Van Halen's cover of "(Oh) Pretty Woman," the Roy Orbison number that kicked open the door for Diver Down, and if you think that record was a neat little plan, the brothers and Dave will tell you otherwise. After the Fair Warning tour, the band figured they would take a break and write. David Lee Roth had a different idea. He wanted to drop a single and stay visible, and he handed Eddie Van Halen a tape of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas doing "Dancing in the Street." Eddie listened, shrugged, and said he could not find a riff in it. The way he played, a song needed a hook you could grab, not a pile of barre chords. So he looked at Dave and said, if you want a cover, why don't we do "Pretty Woman." They cut it in one day at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, right after the first of the year, and figured that would buy them some breathing room.

It did the opposite. The single started climbing, Warner Bros. smelled a hit, and suddenly the label wanted a whole album. Eddie told Guitar Player they had only done the cover so people would know the band was still alive. The company kept pressing. They went back in with no rest off the road and built Diver Down in about twelve days. Eddie later said he would rather have a bomb with one of his own songs than a hit with somebody else's, and Diver Down, loaded with covers, landed near the bottom of his own list. The flag on the cover, diver down, is the one you fly when you are underwater and you want the boats to stay clear. That is about how the band felt.

Eddie called "(Oh) Pretty Woman" their only legitimate hit at the time. It reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, and he remembered it as ten or eleven. He also noted that this song and "Dance the Night Away" were the only two Van Halen tracks with no guitar solo, which almost made him feel bad, because it showed how much people hang on a solo. The arrangement stayed fairly straight, but the opening figure is his. He loved the original Roy Orbison guitar line, the one that smokes, and that is the main reason he wanted the tune. Rehearsals were pure Van Halen. Eddie needled Dave about whether he had learned all the words. Dave needled Eddie about whether he had learned all the music. In the middle of the sniping they left a chunk of the original out, noticed it after the tape was down, and kept the hole. Producer Ted Templeman never wanted the song. He told people he did not like it even when Orbison did it, and that he could have named ten better oldies. He thought it was wrong for Dave's voice and wrong for the band. They settled on it anyway.

The video is the part the Zoo Freaks still argue about in the parking lot. The clip ran longer than the three-minute single, so the band wrote "Intruder," that droning instrumental with Roth on a Minimoog, just to stretch the front of the film. Roth told Creem the sound was like those old Westerns, one harmonica stuck on a single sour note so you know the hero is riding into town and something terrible or wonderful is about to happen. On screen, Dave played Napoleon, Eddie a gunslinging cowboy, Alex Van Halen came in as Tarzan, and Michael Anthony showed up as a samurai. They were supposed to rescue a damsel who turned out to be a man in a dress, while two little people did the villain bit. MTV pulled the clip, one of the early bans, over the captive scene. Pete Angelus, who was on the set, remembered the main cameraman quitting in the middle of the shoot. He also remembered megaphones yelling for the little people, who kept vanishing. Angelus later figured they were dealing mushrooms and had wandered off into a field. He walked into the wrong trailer once and found a scene he said was burned into his memory like a bad dream. That is the kind of afternoon you do not get on a normal session.

Before any of that, the band was a backyard operation in Pasadena. Eddie and Alex were born in the Netherlands. In 1962 the family, Jan and Eugenia and the two boys, landed in California. Both kids took classical piano. Rock got them anyway. Alex started on guitar and Eddie on drums, then they swapped. Eddie was out delivering papers, Alex got on the kit, and Eddie decided he was not going to be outplayed in his own house, so he took the guitar. They ran through names like the Broken Combs and Genesis, then Mammoth, with bassist Mark Stone. The gigs were keg parties in east Pasadena yards, Black Sabbath, Grand Funk, Cream, windows rattling, high school kids from Muir, Blair, and Pasadena High doing the drinking.

Roth was across town in the Red Ball Jets, renting PA gear, sizing up the competition. Alex has said he and Eddie could not stand the guy or his band at first. Roth kept angling in. He joined, the group became Mammoth with him out front, and the brothers' fans took a while to warm up. Another band already had the name Mammoth. Eddie and Alex kicked around Rat Salade. Roth pushed for Van Halen. Alex almost said no, because he did not want to look conceited. They went with it. Michael Anthony came out of a band called Snake, a high-energy singer and bass player they met on a shared bill. They rehearsed, hit it off, and by the mid-seventies the four of them were auditioning every club that would have them: Gazzarri's, the Starwood, Walter Mitty's, Boomers, the Rock Corporation, Barnacle Bill's. Club sets ran heavy on covers, including a whole side of Kinks tunes Dave had picked up on a K-Tel double album, played twice a night because people danced. A few years of that circuit, a Warner Bros. deal, and the 1978 debut. The rest is the loud part of the story.

You can dig the whole catalog, the remasters, and the family news over at the band's own place, van-halen.com, where Diver Down still sits in the remaster lineup cut from the original analog tapes. The official pages are up on Facebook, Instagram, and X, the last of those being the account that has pointed fans at the Diver Down reissue right alongside the other Roth-era albums. For the long-running fan bench, VHLinks has been the big message board since 1999, and the crew gathers in the VHLinks Facebook group. Spin it loud, Zoo Freaks. The flag is up, the riff is smoking, and THE ZOO is keeping the needle in the groove.