Diver Down is the fifth studio album by American rock band Van Halen, released on April 19, 1982,
Released per the label's request that the group record an album to keep them in the public eye, Diver Down was recorded with producer Ted Templeman over the course of twelve days. As a result of its quick production, the album is heavy on cover versions as well as genre experiments and guitar interludes. Alongside full-length original songs, the material includes excursions into jazz, country blues, doo-wop, a cappella and neo-classical music, in addition to covers of mid-1960s songs – the biggest of these, reworkings of Roy Orbison's "(Oh) Pretty Woman" and Martha & the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street", were hit singles.
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:
Three of the original songs were around long before the album was made. "Hang 'Em High" can trace its roots back to 1976 as "Last Night", which had the same music but different lyrics. "The Full Bug" borrows heavily from a demo track called "The Bottom Line" (not the track of the same name released on Roth's 1988 album Skyscraper) that leaked in 2023. The instrumental "Cathedral" was also nothing new, it having been played in its final form throughout 1981 with earlier versions going back to 1980. Additionally, "Happy Trails" had been recorded for their 1977 demos.
"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.
"Cathedral" was so named because the band members thought it sounded like a Catholic church organ. The piece was a stylistic departure for Van Halen, and is comparable to Neu!'s "Negativland" (1972). Reviewers have compared it to Cream's "Mother's Lament" at the end of Disraeli Gears (1967), and The Muppet Show. David Lee Roth said it was meant to imply that "there was something going on that's not apparent to your eyes. You put up the red flag with the white slash. Well, a lot of people approach Van Halen as sort of the abyss. It means, it's not immediately apparent to your eyes what is going on underneath the surface." While impressed by Roth's creative marketing spin, manager Noel Monk also explained the sexual double-entendre "dive her down" in his 2017 band memoir Running with the Devil. The back cover of the album features a photo by Richard Aaron of Van Halen on stage at the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Florida, that was taken on October 24, 1981, as they concluded a set opening for The Rolling Stones. The sleeve has been noted for its 'modern', minimalist aesthetic, reminiscent of the sleeves of "Joy Division impersonators".
|rev2 = Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s
|rev2score = B−
|rev3 = Encyclopedia of Popular Music
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|rev4 = The Great Rock Discography
|rev4score = 6/10
|rev5 = Lincoln Journal Star
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|rev7 = Rolling Stone
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|rev8 = The Rolling Stone Album Guide
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|rev9 = Sounds
|rev9score = "Best of all", he added, is the band's "loony sense of humour", as shown by covering the vintage jazz-blues song "Big Bad Bill". Cynthia Rose of New Musical Express praised Templeman's production for holding the experiments – namely the acoustic intros, "planes" of synthesizer, clarinet parts, a cappella singing and "some throwaway humour" – in "expert balance", and wrote that while a quarter of the album is filler, Roth's voice suits the crass lyrics.
Steve Smith of The Times stated that Diver Down continues the band's "four-year tradition of recycling old songs ... without adding anything new, save some heavy-metal chording and David Roth's snarling vocals." However, he noted several pleasant surprises that, along with the "odd little instrumentals", evidence the band's imagination, further lauding Templeman's production and "brief moments of instrumental lucidity" from the Van Halen brothers. Parke Puterbaugh of Rolling Stone notes that if listeners disregard the five cover versions and three instrumentals, Diver Down "suddenly seems like a cogent case for consumer fraud. Van Halen, it appears, is running out of ideas: there's more excelsior here than in a shipment of glassware." He adds that aside from Eddie's "three guitar nocturnes", there are only four original compositions, only two of which are exciting.
In a retrospective review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic called Diver Down "one of Van Halen's best records, one that's just pure joy to hear", saying it hearkens back to the exuberance and lightheartedness of their early albums while retaining the tightly knit and practiced playing honed over the length of their career. He also found it effectively showcased all four individual members, and said the cover songs were thoroughly revamped to make them distinctly Van Halen works. Colin Larkin, writing in The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (1997), names Diver Down the weakest Van Halen album, praising only the covers of 1960s standards as the standout tracks.
Legacy
In 2022, Diver Down was ranked at number three in Guitar Worlds list of "The 25 greatest rock guitar albums of 1982". Country musician Kenny Chesney, who later socialized with Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar, has commented that it was "the first album he ever bought". In rankings of the band's albums, Diver Down has been ranked seventh best by Matthew Wilkening of Ultimate Classic Rock and the staff of Consequence, and ninth best by Eduardo RivadavIa of Loudwire,
Wilkening says that while Diver Down is "easily the most criticized" of the Van Halen albums fronted by Roth, it has a consistent summery feel, "thanks partially to the series of amazing guitar interludes that turn up between tracks". Eddie van Halen has since criticized the album for being rushed to meet Warner. Bros' demands and as a result containing too many covers.
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