Van Halen -- Jump

 

The 1980s were the blooming decade for music videos. MTV and Much Music and all that, and I think my brother and I were fortunate that we were growing up during that time with all of the music and the visuals that now accompanied it. One of the shows, therefore, that we always tried to catch here in Toronto was the "City TV CHUM 30 Countdown" based on our local channel City-TV and the popular radio station CHUM-AM at 1050 on the dial. Roger Ashby would show at least some of the Top 30 songs with videos during that one hour on the weekend.

One song whose video had tonnage-level heavy rotation on the CHUM 30 was "Jump" by the band Van Halen. It was a weekly thing to see the leonine David Lee Roth jumping and singing about while legendary guitarist Eddie Van Halen gave off that supremely beaming smile while working magic with his fingers on the guitar, as he also did on Michael Jackson's "Beat It" among other songs. I didn't realize it until much later since I was still figuring out my genres, but "Jump" was a song by a hard rock band that fully featured a synthesizer in the main melody...the Oberheim OB-Xa, to be exact.

Strangely enough, I first found out on NHK's morning news show a few hours ago that Eddie Van Halen had passed away from throat cancer. I saw the news topics and there was the name in katakana and when I read it and saw the kanji characters for "dead", I just went "Wow!" since I couldn't quite believe it. I never thought that he was that old...and he wasn't. He was just 65.

Ironically, last night I was talking with my anime buddy on the phone (as we now do since our biweekly Sunday anime-and-food routine has been derailed for the past seven months) and because he's also a hardcore guitar buff, some of those names including Van Halen's were bandied about. Less than 24 hours later, to find out that he has left this mortal coil is sobering, to say the least.

It wasn't surprising to know that "Jump", which Eddie had a hand in creating, was a regular video to catch on the CHUM 30 since it did hit No. 1 in Canada after its release in December 1983, and it also did the same on Billboard in the United States. To quote Lenny Kravitz's statement on Twitter on the news, "Heaven will be electric tonight".

For this special ROY article tonight, since "Jump" came out so close to the end of the year, I will go with three of the award winners at the Japan Record Awards for 1983 since they're given out around that time.

1. Grand Prize: Takashi Hosokawa -- Yagiri no Watashi (矢切の渡し)

2. Best Performance: Masako Mori -- Ettou Tsubame （越冬つばめ）

3. Best New Artist: THE GOOD-BYE -- Kimagure One-Way Boy（気まぐれOne Way Boy）