Happy 35th: Van Halen, Women and Children First

35 years ago today, Van Halen released their third album, an effort which was surprisingly not called Van Halen III, although they did eventually use that title…and having acknowledged such, let us never speak of it again.

From a chart standpoint, Women and Children First matched its predecessor in the U.S., hitting #6 on the Billboard Top 200, while its UK performance was actually the best of the band's career up to that point, giving them their first top-20 album, and there are some who hold the record aloft as being as strong as their self-titled debut. There's little doubt that it's a strong album, but it's also an album that stands slightly apart from their first two efforts, offering more in the way of overdubs and less in the way of backing vocals. Coincidentally or not, it was also the first Van Halen album that failed to find a huge amount of love from pop radio, only making it to #55 with its first single, “And the Cradle Will Rock…” That said, however, there are millions of '80s movies fans who have fond memories of a guitar-playing hamburger shredding its way through “Everybody Wants Some!!” in Better Off Dead, which is a far more impressive legacy than a top-40 hit.

WATCH CLIP: Here

Unfortunately, the album - or, more specifically, the photo shoot for the album - caused certain tensions within the band, as documented in this rather amazing Cuepoint piece detailing David Lee Roth's decision to hire Helmut Newton and the repercussions of that decision. But, hey, in the long run, it's really all about the music, right? And 35 years later, Women and Children First still rocks pretty darned hard.