Van Halen's "1984" is an album I didn't like when it came out and still don't like all that much now. Yet I recognize it as being a classic guy album of the early 80's.

Some personal history is required here. My high school days, which straddled the 70's and 80's, were spent with a group of guys, my "gang" if you will, who had no set affiliation. Some of us were jocks, or eggheads, or burn-outs. Most of us were varying degrees of all three. One thing united us all: awkward social skills.

I often use the word "dick" when I look back on those high school days, but I can recognize that everyone in high school, in one sense or another, was/is a dick. None of us knew how to act and either imitated what we thought adults wanted us to be or clung to a "Lord of the Flies" sense of teen subculture that may have given us group identities, but told us nothing about ourselves. In my gang, no one got hand jobs from cheerleaders. Most of us got good grades. Some of us had minor trouble with the cops. We tried to stay invisible in a small world we recognized as pure insanity. Blending into the wood-paneled wall in the basement of some cool kid's house during a "parents in Philly" weekend made more sense than having everyone notice us. I may have pulled the occasional weird stunt for attention, like diving into the school pool in a lion's suit on a $0.25 bet, but most of the time I was following Bo Donaldsen and the Heywood's advice in their epic song, "Billy Don't Be a Hero": Billy, keep your head low.

Strangely enough, when I look back on all the kids I knew in high school, the handful I still stay in close touch with are the ones who were my cruising partners. Cruising is the small-town/suburban art form of kids piling into a car and driving nowhere all night long. Why? I'd like to fall back on the stock answer of "there was nothing else to do, man," but there were plenty of things to do. If I went back in a time machine now and played myself in pool at the age of 17, I'd get my ass kicked by that 17-year-old, what with all the time he was spending at Holiday Lanes, a bowling alley/pool hall I was at almost every night senior year. The high school also had tons of activities, but, frankly, I wanted nothing to do with them after 3:00 p.m. rolled around.

No, we drove because it was the thing to do. In my part of Pennsylvania, small towns dot the hills and valleys of the rolling countryside, and they make nice connection points for aimless kids driving in cars. If we happened to be in Shenandoah, the tarnished jewel of the county and cruising central, we'd vainly try to pick up packs of teenage girls doing the same thing in their cars and always fail. Like most teenagers, we were moving in some direction, but not going anywhere in particular. I still do it now some nights when I go back home, sticking to the back roads and avoiding the bright lights, but now that I know what the night holds, it's not the same. I think we were looking for those things we considered "adult" in the night: legal drinking and sex. Well, we eventually found them, and, boy, they weren't what we thought they'd be.

My friend Tony had his own car, an awful little Volkswagen Rabbit with a diesel engine. Being that it was his car, Tony had control of the car stereo. He, Schwamy and I would spend many nights out driving. If it wasn't that combination, our friend George would be cruising in his souped-up '76 Nova with tailpipes. Tony leaned towards heavy metal, and George favored quirky stuff like Frank Zappa.

Man, they had a lot of hair. Diamond Dave & EVH as photographed by Jim Crowley

The common denominator: Van Halen. Tony and George had all their cassettes, from the eponymous first album up to David Lee Roth's swan song, "1984". I think George stopped after that, but Tony, being a Van Halen fanatic, has all their albums. This I know because after whetting my appetite with their greatest hits collection in 1996, I borrowed all the albums from Tony and made a compilation tape featuring the great songs not on the "greatest hits" . . . the ones had stamped on my brain from endless night-time hours of cruising.

It was frightening how well I knew every song from those albums. I was known for being a bit of a priss back then when it came to popular bands. I wouldn't like them because they were popular, sparking many arguments with Tony and Schwamy, although George could have given a shit, as he owed me for turning him on to T. Rex. This meant stuff like Styx, Journey, Def Leppard and Van Halen would get me silently cursing in the back seat while they jammed in the driver's and shotgun seats. I can look back now and see that all those bands had some great pop material amidst the sea of dreck, but I wasn't off base to be down on them either, as any dufus who didn't know a thing about music would go to the local mall and buy their albums because it was the "cool" thing to do.

You have to know something about Tony's Rabbit--he had the worst car stereo in the world. That's not fair, but given that the tiny little car had the acoustics of a tiled bathroom, anything played at top volume nearly made my ears bleed. I'm convinced I have lopsided testicles today because of Tony's car stereo. I can't recall the exact cassette deck, probably a wonderful Audiovox or Soundesign product, but he had Big Brute speakers in the back and one of those cheesy power boosters under the stereo that did nothing but make the sound even louder and muddier. You could hear Tony coming from miles away, blasting out some God-awful metal like Yngwie Malmsteen, and I begged him not to jam and turn it down when he drove into my neighborhood. Tony would often fiddle with the controls, like a studio engineer, and all I could hear was the difference between a "biff" and a "pow" on "Runnin' with the Devil".

When it comes down to my "guy album" designation for a Van Halen album, I could choose any of their first six, but for me it comes down to "Diver Down" and "1984". The main thing I realized about Van Halen albums when I recently borrowed from Tony's collections: their albums are spotty. I wasn't wrong to get so bent out of shape when we listened to "Fair Warning" all the way through for the 10,000th time some night in the summer of 1983. As a whole, their albums are uneven, although each album has a few great songs that add up to one dynamite mix tape.

"Diver Down" and "1984" sound like they were made for cruising. The weakness of "Diver Down" is that its best songs--"Where Have All the Good Times Gone," "Cathedral/Pretty Woman" and "Dancing in the Street"--are all covers. There are no covers on "1984", and for this it gets my vote as their best album. It was also the album that solidified their image, thanks to constant exposure on MTV via the videos for "Jump," "Panama" and "Hot for Teacher." David Lee Roth was already a superstar before then, but his sense of pure showmanship in these videos catapulted the band to another level of popularity.

The guy record from the vault

"1984" also has one of Van Halen's most under-rated songs: "Drop Dead Legs". My other under-rated favorite is "Women in Love" from "Van Halen II," although it suffers from ham-fisted Roth lyrics. But "Drop Dead Legs" is Roth at his best, sleazy without being too insulting, perfectly matching his saucy image with a killer Eddie Van Halen riff. I still remember the first time Tony played the cassette in the car and thinking, "Yes, that's the one song that will stick with me through the years."

But it's not the only one. While the synthesizer riff in "Jump" was inescapable at the time and became tiresome as every sports show used it for their highlights, I can listen now and hear the mark of pure pop genius, a riff so simple no one else could come up with it. (A cover of "Jump" by the Scottish pop band Aztec Camera is worth tracking down, although beware, the CD versions I've heard delete the Halen-esque, three-minute guitar freak-out at the end from the original vinyl version, robbing the irony-laden song of its true glory.)

"Hot for Teacher"? "I'll Wait"? "Top Jimmy"? "Girl Gone Bad"? "House of Pain"? Yes, I can listen to these songs, but I rarely do when I play the CD. "Hot for Teacher" has more staying power as a video than song, as it was a brilliant send-up of the band's bad-boy image using child actors to play the very-young band misbehaving in grade school, all to scare "Waldo", the nerdy good kid. "I'll Wait" has become one of those dramatic sports highlights songs, which is fine, but it's a bad sign for a song's true cultural impact when it's used for this purpose. Then again, this has happened to a lot of Van Halen songs. I know too many people who associate Barry White's brilliant Love Unlimited Orchestra song "Love's Theme" with sports highlights and late-night movie themes, when the feel of the song invokes Barry cruising down 125th Street on a Saturday night in a stretch limo.

The true appeal of Van Halen was that every nerdy guy in high school wanted to be David Lee Roth, and have that sense of style, and all those beautiful women around, the party-guy image--everything we weren't, save those poor jack asses who thought they were and came off like dimestore Belushi's or extras in Porky's Revenge. Yes, Roth was a dick. But he was a dick who got laid a lot and always seemed happy, a teenage kind of happy, not the warm half-smiles of adulthood. The guy knew how to have fun. Mix that with Eddie Van Halen's talent, and it was a formula for success.

Their image matched their music, exactly. I can still recall Roth, when asked why critics panned their music, answering, "Most critics hate us and love Elvis Costello because they look like him"; I was just getting into Costello at the time, but had to laugh my ass off, as he had managed to nail a few hard truths in one arrogant boast. Even if Roth wasn't fully aware of it, he perfectly exploited all the myths teenage males have about sex. In his case, they may not have been myths, as the man most likely has reached that Wilt the Stilt summit of getting "more ass than a toilet seat." But most of us have not had casual, meaningless sex with dozens of beautiful women. Like any sane man, I can recognize this as more a curse than a blessing and most likely a deep psychological disorder. But then again . . .

When Roth left, something went missing, although Van Halen still put out great singles like "Why Can't Be this Love" and "Dreams". More than anything, it was odd to see Sammy Hagar reel in his wild-man Ted Nugent image for the sake of a maturing metal/pop band. George was a big Hagar fan and had such classic Hagar albums as "Three Lock Box" and "Standing Hampton" (which was slang for a hard-on, man). Also, George couldn't drive 55; 45, or maybe 58--but not 55.

I think the reason I can't listen to a lot of this stuff now is because it no longer applies to me. It applied perfectly to a bunch of kids riding around all night in cars, or attending basement parties. But now? I feel silly listening to "Hot for Teacher" in front of other people. Alone, I can remember what it meant (especially to Tony) and get a perverse kick out of the song's purpose and impact. But in front of other people, even if they like the song, I feel like they're listening in on some bizarre secret--eavesdropping on a teenage fantasy that never grew into an adult reality. It's the stuff of good porn videos. And that's a large part of what Van Halen, and rock-and-roll in general, have always been about.