Reaching For The Stars, Vol. 113

Chart Week: June 23, 1984
Song: “I’ll Wait” – Van Halen
Chart Position: #32, 11th week on the chart. Peaked at #13 for two weeks.

I made my three-hour drive to Lexington, KY last Saturday morning solo. As it was also my birthday weekend, I thought the best way to celebrate would be to listen to an American Top 40 from June, 1984. Believe it or not, I could recall exactly what I was doing 41 years ago! Almost to the minute, even!

This probably doesn’t surprise some of you.

On the morning of June 23, 1984, my Little League baseball team was scheduled to play a game. When we arrived at the field, our coach was already there, and he was pissed. The team we were supposed to play, the Rangers, had decided not to show up, gifting us a forfeit win. He was angry not because we all got up and got ready and showed up on a hot, humid morning for no reason, but rather because the Rangers were ducking us. We were battling them for first place and, apparently, their best pitcher was not available that morning. So the Ranger’s coach, who my coach did NOT get along with, decided to bail rather than have one of his weaker pitchers face us. Which seemed dumb. Why not at least try to beat us rather than hand us a win that could make the difference in which team got to bat last in the playoffs?

Keep in mind, we were all 12 and 13 year olds, playing mediocre youth ball in Kansas City. Not exactly high stakes stuff.

Anyway, we had an open diamond and our entire team was there, so our coach decided to put the time to good use. In full uniform, he worked us out harder than he ever had at a practice. He hit rockets at us for infield practice, had the outfielders sprinting to cut off line drives, and even sat behind home plate and had us try to steal bases as he fired balls to the second baseman. He knew word would get back to his nemesis that rather than sit in air conditioning like his team, we were toiling to get better.

Throughout the practice our coach cracked off-color jokes about the Rangers, and despite the intensity of the workout, we were laughing the entire time. He also let us pull out a boombox and play music. We heard a lot of songs from this countdown in those 90 minutes we spent practicing. When we walked off the field we were all sweaty and dirty like we had actually played a game, and in great moods, high-fiving each other as we headed our separate ways.

I have no idea if that morning had any impact, but a month later we beat the Rangers two games to one in the championship series. Oh, and we were the home team, although we scored the clinching run in the bottom of the fifth, not the bottom of the seventh. Take that, Rangers coach!

So this countdown was a bit of a mental time capsule.

This might blow your mind, but it ended up being a double time capsule.

WHAT?!?! DOUBLE TIME CAPSULE??? TELL US MORE, D!

This is one of the shows in my collection that was recorded straight off an American Top 40: The Eighties broadcast, commercials and all. It aired in June 2021 on a station in Maine. A station here in Indy was still playing AT40 at the time, and I bet they inserted a lot of the same commercials into the program. Ads for Cologuard and Home Depot, Geico and Progressive, plus the inevitable bad ads for local car dealerships.

There were also some ads unique to the moment. Several noted that various organizations or businesses were “getting back to normal.” A local junior college announced they would be returning to in-person classes in the fall, with a reopening ceremony scheduled for June 30. And there were government ads encouraging folks to get the Covid vaccines.

Wow, what a quaint idea: the government encouraging people to get a shot to keep them from getting sick. Somehow that seems like a long, long time ago.

The songs in this show got me thinking about the summer I was 13, and the commercials got me thinking about the summer we were coming out of Covid.

Naturally I loved all this. It’s probably a good thing I was by myself. And that I finished the show before L rode home with me on Sunday.

Lots of great, memorable songs this week. I’ve done the review of a full countdown from the summer of ’84 thing before, so I can’t go that direction. Instead, let’s focus on the second single from Van Halen’s 1984 album.

“I’ll Wait” was different from any other Van Halen song. Yes, it was heavily synthesizer-based, but Eddie had already shown his cards there on the #1 hit “Jump.” What really set the song apart from the rest of their catalog was that David Lee Roth did not write the lyrics on his own.

His original inspiration came from a magazine ad for Calvin Klein women’s underwear. Something about it struck him – I can make some guesses as to what – so he cut it out and taped it to his TV, where he could stare at the model while he wrote an ode to her.

Easy task for a legendary horndog like DLR, right? He kept getting stuck, though, spinning his wheels in his attempts to turn thoughts into coherent words while the rest of the band wrote and recorded most of the music he would sing over.

Hearing the bones of a potential hit, producer Ted Templeman called his pal Michael McDonald to help get Diamond Dave over the hump. They sat down and soon had a finished song.

Later McDonald said he made more money from his songwriting credit for “I’ll Wait” than he had made from the entire final Doobie Brothers album he helped to write. Who knows if that is true but he obviously got a good deal when he agreed to pinch hit for VH.

When I was 12/13, I was familiar with the idea of being a little obsessed by someone you saw on TV or in a magazine. But it was all pretty innocent, like “Gee, it sure would be nice to meet a pretty lady like that and have her be my girlfriend.” Mary Hart and Vanna White were high on that list.[1] I’m not sure I quite got some of the subtext in Roth and McDonald’s lyrics. At least not yet; that insight would come soon enough.

These days becoming fixated on a person you will probably never meet seems creepy. But Van Halen was never worried about that. Certainly not in 1984.

Where “Jump” was all poppy brightness, “I’ll Wait” has a much icier quality. Eddie’s synthesizers are still huge, almost as big as brother Alex’s drums, but they seem ominous, perhaps reflecting the weirdness of staring at a model in a magazine for too long. Eddie repeats the synth solo followed by guitar solo bit from “Jump,” as well. I think he does it better here.

However, there is something off about the song I never picked up on as a kid. It is all in Roth’s voice. Missing is the gigantic, Cock Rock swagger he was famous for. He was always the sexed-up life of the party, turning any room into a bash through sheer force of personality. Here he is subdued, perhaps in recognition that he will never meet the object of his desire? Has our fornicating superhero been tamed?

Who am I kidding? This was Van Halen and David Lee Roth. There was no great meaning to this song. If a woman turned him down, he’d find 20 more just like her and move on with his life. I’m overthinking things. Any flaws are purely because McDonald wrote a song that would have been terrific for anyone else, but didn’t quite match what was great about Van Halen. 7/10