The Story Behind The Song
It's precisely 07:52 am on 14 January 2010. DJ Steve Penk is broadcasting live on The Revolution FM in the Greater Manchester area. "Now this incident on the M60 is causing an absolute nightmare. M60 anti-clockwise, closed. This is because of a serious police incident: it's a woman threatening to jump from one of the bridges." After receiving a request for the track, the DJ plays Jump by Van Halen in "subliminal" solidarity with drivers stuck in the horrendous traffic. Four hours later, the woman jumps from the bridge.
When lead singer Dave Lee Roth penned the lyrics he was inspired by an actual suicide incident. He recalled: "I was watching television one night and it was the five o'clock news and there was a fellow standing on top of the Arco Towers in Los Angeles and he was about to check out early, he was going to do the 33 stories drop - and there was a whole crowd of people in the parking lot downstairs yelling 'Don't jump, don't jump' and I thought to myself, 'Jump'. So, I wrote it down."
Yet the song is not about suicide. Roth cleverly turned the song into an anthem about being bold and overcoming your fears, making a leap of faith. The lyric was written "in a much more positive vein," he explained. "It's easy to translate it the way you hear it on the record as a 'go for it' attitude, positive sort of affair." Of course, "jump" is also slang for sex and the overriding theme of the song appears to be urging a woman to sleep with him. This is revealed in the second verse "I ain't the worst that you've seen Ah, can't you see what I mean?" and in the chorus "Baby, how you been? You say you don't know You won't know until you begin".
The positive lyric is matched by the upbeat music. In fact, it is difficult to hear the song and think it had any connection to suicide at all. With a strong synth hook, the track was a departure from the group's characteristic guitar-based rock. Based on Kiss On My List by Hall & Oates, the memorable synth line was written in late 1981 by Eddie but was rejected by the other members of the group. They insisted that he was a guitar hero and he should not be messing around with drum machines and keyboards. And so the song with its pop riff was put to one side.
Ironically, the turning point was Eddie Van Halen playing a rock solo on Michael Jackson's pop classic Beat It. Eddie attempted to keep his collaboration a secret. "Believe it or not," he later told Guitar World, "I did the Michael Jackson thing 'cos I figured nobody would know. The band for one – Roth and my brother and Mike – they always hated me doing things outside of Van Halen."
Beat It became a massive global hit in the summer of 1983. "The new Michael Jackson song, Beat It, came on," Dave recalled later. "I heard the guitar solo, and thought, now that sounds familiar. Somebody's ripping off Ed Van Halen's licks." The successful fusion of rock and pop strengthened Eddie's resolve to revisit his old song. Although it had been playing in his mind for a few years, Jump took less than a day to record. The music was laid down in the middle of the night with just his engineer at Eddie's newly constructed home studio. The group's producer persuaded Roth to listen to the track and, while chauffeured in the back of his Mercury, he wrote the lyric during an afternoon. The track was finished in one take later that evening.
Jump was Van Halen's biggest single, completely vindicating Eddie's faith in his song and his instinctive feel for the market. After a protracted period of tension, David Lee Roth "jumped" the group a little over a year later. Although he had a successful solo career, he did not jump too far, returning to Van Halen in 2006 for the group's highest grossing US tour and remained until the group folded after the death of Eddie Van Halen in 2020. Although he will be remembered as the preeminent rock guitarist of the 1980s, Eddie Van Halen's two most successful hits were both strongly pop oriented.
As for the DJ, he was unrepentant about playing Jump at such an insensitive time but was later found in breach of the broadcasting code. The woman who did "go ahead and jump" thankfully survived with relatively minor injuries.
We hereby instate Jump by Van Halen on The Wall as No.7 Best Single of 1984
In 1984 this was my ultimate warm-up song before going out and painting the town red!Dave B
