The Story Behind The Song: Van Halen's number one hit 'Jump' (2024)

By 1984, no rock band was bigger than Van Halen. Originally formed in the early half of the 1970s, Van Halen solidified when brothers Alex and Eddie Van Halen recruited bassist Michael Anthony and singer David Lee Roth. After years of playing Los Angeles clubs and honing their signature style, the band achieved immediate commercial success with their 1978 debut LP Van Halen. Four top ten albums followed, moving Van Halen into the realm of stadiums while they spearheaded the growing glam metal movement. But there was one mountain the band had yet to ascend: nabbing a number one pop single.

Although they were huge, Van Halen wasn’t much of a singles band up to that point. They had three covers that all landed in the top 40 – ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘(Oh) Pretty Woman’, and ‘Dancing in the Street’ – but only one original, ‘Dance the Night Away’. The rest of the music world was finally beginning to catch up to Van Halen’s mix of hard rock, heavy metal, and glittery pop swagger, with Mötley Crüe, Quiet Riot, and Def Leppard all scoring charting singles in 1983. With the business finally behind them, all Van Halen needed was a catchy crossover hit that could find a home on pop radio.

In that respect, ‘Jump’ is one of the strangest and least likely number one hits of all time. The composition of the track is both dense and surprisingly complex, featuring a key change and some incredibly syncopated rhythms during the song’s guitar solo section. Roth barks out his lyrics like a call to action, but the origins of his words related more to suicide than to freewheeling good times. Still, ‘Jump’ had an irresistible synth line and the band’s catchiest melody at its centre, two factors pushing Van Halen into the mainstream and pulling the band apart.

The story of ‘Jump’ begins during the recording of 1981’s Fair Warning. Eddie Van Halen, a former piano prodigy, had created a new keyboard line with major pop appeal. However, there was a division between those who wanted to embrace synthesisers and who wanted to stick to guitar-based music. Roth and producer Ted Templeman were dubious of adding keyboards to the band’s sound, rejecting Van Halen’s keyboard line for a number of years. “Certain people didn’t want me playing keyboards because they thought I should only be a guitar hero,” Van Halen later observed to Guitar World.

When Van Halen was able to build his own home studio, 5150 Studios, that allowed him the freedom to record just about anything he wanted. The live room originally only had space for Van Halen’s guitar rig, a Simmons electronic drum kit, and an Oberheim OB-Xa synthesiser. The OB-Xa provided the iconic tone of the ‘Jump’ keyboard line. Daryl Hall later claimed that Van Halen admitted to pinching Hall & Oates’ synth line from ‘Kiss On My List’ for ‘Jump’, but Van Halen himself never confirmed it before his death in 2020.

After completing the basic track on his own, Van Halen eventually showed the instrumental of ‘Jump’ to Templeman, who in turn convinced Roth to write lyrics for the track. After cruising around in his 1951 Mercury sports car, Roth recalled a news story about a suicidal jumper in Los Angeles. Roth believed that someone would inevitably tell the guy to “go ahead and jump”, sparking the initial line that eventually became the song’s title. The rest of the lyrics deviate from those darker origins, with Roth also claiming that some of the lines were come-ons that he heard from strippers around the same time.

Most of ‘Jump’ doesn’t even feature Van Halen playing guitar – the only time he picks up his signature instrument is during the song’s solo section, which begins on guitar and eventually transitions into a keyboard solo. Van Halen had insisted on using keyboards to build some of the tracks on 1984, most notably the future single ‘I’ll Wait’. Tracks like ‘Panama’, ‘Drop Dead Legs’, and ‘Hot For Teacher’ retained the guitar-focused sound that Van Halen was known for, but it would be ‘Jump’ that gave the band their first, and only, number one single.

By the end of the 1984 tour, Van Halen couldn’t have been bigger. A number one hit, a multi-platinum album, and a massively successful concert tour meant that the band should have been celebrating. Instead, Roth decided to split. His debut solo EP, Crazy From the Heat, had produced two top 20 hits and even landed Roth a movie deal reportedly worth $20 million. His clashes with the Van Halen brothers over the direction of the band were reaching new peaks, eventually leading to his departure in 1985. Van Halen continued on with former Montrose singer Sammy Hagar as their new singer, landing four consecutive number one albums. But Van Halen never again reached the pop singles summit after ‘Jump’.

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