I can’t remember why we started talking about it, but a hotly contested theory from my distant youth was invoked again this past weekend, and it occurred to me to bring the debate here that we all might glean something from it … or not.
Perhaps prompted by the title of the new Linklater movie, “Everybody Wants Some,” my friend Rob B. and I were discussing vintage Van Halen on Saturday, when he came over to visit me and the kids while my wife is away on a business trip. While we were remarking how a proper reunion of the band isn’t likely to happen (it won’t –- to our opinion -– really matter unless Michael Anthony is re-instated, his high-piped harmonies being the core of the band’s original sound next to Eddie’s squealing guitar), I took the opportunity to run a particular theory up the flagpole, one that dates back to my grade school years.
Released in 1980, the third album by Van Halen -- Women and Children First -- not only boasted future classics like “And the Cradle will Rock” and the afore-cited “Everybody Wants Some,” but it also featured a compelling group portrait on the cover by photographer Norman Seeff, one finding the band posing in a sort of exuberantly priapic rugby scrum.
While arguably iconic (Weezer, of all bands, once posed similarly in tribute), the photo also had some significance in that I vividly recall hearing a convincing argument at some point in seventh or eighth grade that the band’s depicted histrionic pose is actually meant to emulate the shape of the United States. I know, … it sounds ridiculous (and, frankly, it is), but let’s review, shall we?
So, yeah -- Eddie’s left leg is Florida, Michael Anthony’s head is Maine, the space between the neck of Ed’s guitar and Michael being part of the Great Lakes. Eddie's left hand is the "over mitt" of Michigan. Fittingly, this all makes David Lee Roth’s ass the band’s home turf of Southern California.
I mean, it’s not entirely inconceivable, right? I mean, it certainly made sense at the time.
Rob wasn't buyin' it. How `bout you?
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