The Van Halen classic the band didn’t want to record: “They didn’t like it”
For any Van Halen, nothing was necessarily off the table when it came time to record. By the time they started their debut album, Eddie Van Halen could write classic riffs in his sleep, and over half of the best musical passages he ever pumped out just came from him sitting on his bed and plucking away until he found something that made his ear perk up. But there was also room for him to grow as a songwriter, and when he took a more mellow approach to the song ‘Secrets’, he remembered getting a lot of blank stares from his bandmates.
Then again, it’s hard to really tell someone like Eddie ‘no’ when it came to deciding what was going on the record. After all, his name was the band’s moniker and if there was any chance that original music was going to make it on a record, it was going to be usually his handiwork instead of Michael Anthony’s.
As the group made their way into the 1980s, Eddie started to stray away from the usual formula that he had for his music. He had played the piano ever since he was little, and if he wanted to truly express himself, he needed another instrument to work with, eventually shoehorning it into songs like ‘And the Cradle Will Rock’ or weird experiments like ‘Sunday Afternoon in the Park’.
So what made ‘Secrets’ so different? On the surface, it’s actually not that bad a tune at all, but it’s definitely one of the sleeper hits of the David Lee Roth years. Instead of being in your face, this song is more about establishing an atmosphere as it progresses, which is probably the exact opposite of Roth’s strengths. Since there’s a cartoon character out front, the backing track feels more like something that should be faint background music.
When they all got desperate for material on the album Diver Down, Eddie remembered everyone changing their tune pretty quickly, saying, “‘Secrets’ on the new album, I wrote last year. I wanted it on Fair Warning, and everyone’s going, ‘Aaaah, pfft!’ They didn’t like it. And all of a sudden, just because…. See, [producer] Ted Templeman never heard it, and when Ted heard it, he liked it, and all of a sudden, they liked it too.”
Then again, Templeman probably saw something in the track that no one else did. For all of the posturing that Roth liked to do both then and now whenever he got onstage, there are still some pieces of the track that cater to his strengths. He could bring things down occasionally, like the breakdown of ‘You Really Got Me’ or the build-up in ‘Everybody Wants Some’, so hearing him try his hand at a smooth and easy song almost sounds like he’s trying on his best Frank Sinatra impression.
Or maybe that was just the fact that everyone didn’t really want to be in the studio. As much as Diver Down has a fun summertime feel to it, it’s not really supposed to exist, instead being used to promote their cover of Roy Orbison’s ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’, which they had released a few months before.
The fact that Diver Down sounds halfway decent is partly a miracle considering the circumstances, but ‘Secrets’ is still a great song from their catalogue. Because every time Van Halen turns the energy all the way up, it’s nice to see them mellow out just a little bit on a record.