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Hot For Teacher: Van Halen’s Lesson In Tongue-In-Cheek Rock
Pictorial Press
In Depth

Hot For Teacher: Van Halen’s Lesson In Tongue-In-Cheek Rock

Its promo video caused controversy, but Hot For Teacher found Van Halen once again at the top of the hard-rock class.

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In addition to their signature hits, most successful bands release songs often referred to as “cult favourites”: tracks whose appeal for dedicated supporters goes way beyond their commercial yield. In Van Halen’s case, a good example of this is Hot For Teacher, the storming 1984 single which may not have earned the group their biggest sales, but which most fans still hold close to their hearts.

Listen to the best of Van Halen here.

The song: “Beyond any boogie I’ve ever heard”

Already a confirmed highlight of the Californian rockers’ massive, diamond-selling sixth album, 1984, Hot For Teacher was issued as a single during that album’s namesake year, it’s 27 October release leading it to arrive in the slipstream of the chart-topping Jump and two further Top 20 hits, I’ll Wait and Panama.

While Hot For Teacher failed to set the charts alight on release, it still sets discerning rock fans’ pulses racing, for two very good reasons. Firstly, it remains one of Van Halen’s most blistering hard-rock tracks; secondly, its highly memorable promo clip retains many of the hallmarks of the the era’s best music videos.

Musically, Hot For Teacher also helped dispel some concerns that 1984’s reliance upon keyboards was beginning to take preference over the band’s tried and tested approach of guitar, bass and drums. The song was a powerful showcase for all three of Van Halen’s musicians, with – as Classic Rock magazine put it – “Alex Van Halen’s jackhammer double bass drum technique paired with a classic Eddie [Van Halen] tapping riff and a ferocious Michael Anthony bassline birthing a ZZ Top-on-steroids power shuffle in the spirit of Van Halen tracks like I’m The One and The Full Bug.” Indeed, the band were rightly proud of the track, with Eddie later deeming it to be “beyond any boogie I’ve ever heard” in an interview with Rolling Stone.

The video: “We make cartoons”

However, while Hot For Teacher remains one of Van Halen’s most dynamic rockers, it will always be synonymous with its promo video, which – despite its somewhat risqué and provocative content – enjoyed heavy rotation on MTV at the time of its release.

Effectively a fantasy about adolescent schoolboys with a crush on their teachers, the clip, directed by Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth, in collaboration with Pete Angelus, the filmmaker who also helmed the video for Jump, centres on an introspective young student named Waldo (voiced by Phil Hartman, the Canadian actor and screenwriter known for developing the character Pee-wee Herman) and the unruly behaviour of his schoolmates. Excited simply to be in the presence of their young teachers, played by models Donna Rupert and Lillian Muller, the boys can barely contain themselves when said teachers tear their dresses off to reveal bikinis underneath.

The controversy: “I thought the social workers were gonna go through the ceiling”

Accordingly, the Hot For Teacher video has since copped flak, though it’s worth mentioning that The Police (with 1980’s chart-topping Don’t Stand So Close To Me) and Tame Impala (with 2012’s Mind Mischief) have also scored hits and made promotional videos dealing with similar student-teacher infatuation scenarios. For their part, Van Halen certainly believed the Hot For Teacher video contained nothing that was too racy for mainstream consumption.

“We make cartoons.” David Lee Roth said in an interview with US journalist Ethlie Ann Vare, for her syndicated Rock On column. “We hired these ten-year-olds to act as us, you know, the junior Van Halen, except we couldn’t drag them from the set. I thought for sure the social workers were gonna go through the church ceiling. They were in admiration as well.”

As Roth suggests, one of the coolest aspects of the Hot For Teacher video was the idea of portraying the four members of Van Halen as schoolkids, and then adding a cinematic “Where Are They Now?” epilogue through which viewers learned that the kids have grown up to become a gynaecologist (Alex Van Halen), a sumo wrestler (Michael Anthony), a patient in a psychiatric hospital (Eddie Van Halen) and, in Roth’s case, a game-show host. It still makes for an amusing watch today, and the four-day shoot – which took place at the John Marshall High School, in Los Angeles – is remembered with fondness by those who signed up for it.

In a 2022 interview with Classic Rock, Yano Anaya, who played the junior Michael Anthony, said, “I got there on the first day at 9.30 in the morning, and I told my mom: ‘I need to meet the band, that is my priority.’” After knocking the door to the band’s trailer, Anaya was greeted by Alex Van Halen. “I went: ‘I’m part of the cast, I’m playing Michael Anthony, Jr. I just wanted to see if I could hang out with you guys.’ And he went: ‘Come on in.’ I was like: ‘Yeeeeahhhh!’”

The legacy: Van Halen “at their absolute zenith”

Yet, while band and cast alike enjoyed interacting and recall the Hot For Teacher video shoot as being an upbeat, fun exercise, its completion marked the end of an era for Van Halen. While no one realised it at the time, the single’s release marked the last hurrah of the band’s original line-up – at least for the best part of 30 years.

The next time David Lee Roth hooked up with Pete Angelus to make a video, it was in 1985, for Roth’s solo cover of The Beach Boys’ California Girls – a US No.3 which rapidly launched his solo career. Roth went on to enjoy Top 10 success with his initial pair of solo albums, Eat ’Em And Smile and Skyscraper, while Van Halen recruited new vocalist Sammy Hagar and secured their future by releasing the chart-topping 5150 in 1986.

Hot For Teacher “shows [Van Halen] at their absolute zenith”, Cash Box asserted in their enthusiastic review of the single, adding that the group’s “multi-watt voltage surges through this speeding hard rock anthem, with Eddie Van Halen again proving why he is the best”.

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