40 Years Ago: Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ Video Points to End of an Era

By waiting until January 1984 to issue their 1984 LP, Van Halen broke an impressive one-album-a-year streak that dated back to 1978. They made up for it by picking up their first No. 1 single in the U.S. with the record’s lead-off single, “Jump.”

The December 1983 release was accompanied by a cheerfully low-budget video that showed the band goofing around on a sound stage, with David Lee Roth pulling out some of his most advanced preening techniques while the rest of the guys just generally looked happy to be there. At a time when dry ice and inscrutable storylines seemed to be the order of the day, the “Jump” clip was refreshingly simple, even if the story behind the video included more than its share of complications.

Producer Robert Lombard, who supervised the shoot with director Pete Angelus, said the video exposed tensions that soon came to a head between Roth and the other members of the band. Lombard and Angelus wanted to put together a clip that Angelus described as “something very personal.” As he put it, “Let’s see if we can get Edward [Van Halen] to smile.” But Roth insisted they film footage of him engaged in stereotypical rock-star pursuits, like driving sports cars and hanging out with gorgeous women.

READ MORE: Ranking Every David Lee Roth-Era Van Halen Song

They gave in but their misgivings remained, and according to Lombard, the duo eventually approached other members of Van Halen to plead their case.

“I said, ‘Guys, I’m taking a stand here,” Lombard recalled later. “If you put in this crazy footage … the video isn’t gonna have the impact it should have.'” He says they backed him up, but Lombard still ended up paying the price: “Two days later, I got fired. Noel Monk, their manager, said, ‘You don’t do that. You don’t go behind Dave’s back. Here’s your check, never want to see you again.’ That video won the award for best performance video at the first VMAs, and I still don’t have my award.”

Roth’s footage actually ended up going into the “Panama” video, but the incident highlighted one more disagreement in the history of a song that Van Halen later claimed sat around for years because other members of the group – particularly Roth – didn’t want to record it.

Watch Van Halen’s Video for ‘Jump’

‘Jump’ Had Differing Origin Stories

Van Halen said he wrote the song “during or before” the sessions for 1981’s Fair Warning album, when asked about its origins of ‘Jump’ in a 1984 interview. “Not the way it’s on record, but musically, note for note, exactly the same,” he said, adding that the song was composed on a “Prophet 10 synth that blew up on me. It started smoking. You know, everything I touch blows up – the way I like sound is on the verge of dying.”

Roth disputed Van Halen’s version of events in a separate interview. “Well, there are always bits and pieces of music that go flying by, you can never tell exactly what form it was in two years ago,” he argued. “I doubt if it sounded exactly the way it does this year two years ago when Edward played it for us, because I can’t imagine us passing it up.”

According to Roth, “‘Jump’ is a song that we wrote for several different reasons, primarily because it is leap year and secondly, because I was watching television one night and it was the 5 o’clock news, and there was a fellow standing on top of the Arco Towers in Los Angeles and he was about to check out early, he was going to do the 33-story drop – and there was a whole crowd of people in the parking lot downstairs yelling ‘Don’t jump, don’t jump’ and I thought to myself, ‘Jump.’

“So, I wrote it down and ultimately it made it onto the record, although in a much more positive vein,” Roth added. “It’s easy to translate it the way you hear it on the record as a ‘go for it’ attitude, positive sort of affair – an I-jog-therefore-I-am approach.”

Whatever the song’s origins – and however people chose to interpret it – “Jump” was a raging success for Van Halen, taking the top spot on the pop charts from Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon” during the week of Feb. 25, 1984, and staying there until the week of March 24, when it fell to Kenny Loggins’ “Footloose.” One of three Top 40 hits from the album, “Jump” helped 1984 become Van Halen’s most successful album to that point.

Roth began a long hiatus from the band the following year, but “Jump” nevertheless kicked off a period of massive crossover success for Van Halen that continued until the mid-’90s with successor Sammy Hagar.

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