Van Halen – "Hot for Teacher" (1984)

I got it bad, so bad

I'm hot for teacher

Emmanuel Macron – who was elected President of France on Sunday – knows exactly what David Lee Roth is talking about in today’s featured song.

The 39-year-old Macron has something in common with Donald Trump: neither man had held elective office prior to being elected president.  

But there are differences between the two presidents as well.  For example, Trump is 24 years older than his wife Melania, while Macron is 24 years younger than his wife Brigitte.

French President-elect Macron
with his mother wife

According to the Washington Post, the fact that Macron is young enough to be his wife’s son rather than old enough to be her father “delights many French women”:

“Why can’t we marry younger men? I date them all the time,” said [Martine] Bergossi, the stylish owner of Alternatives, a secondhand-couture shop in Paris, who prefers to leave her exact age to the imagination.

“It’s normal to see men with younger women,” she said. “So it’s rather great to see the opposite.”

I wonder if Mme. Bergossi was aware that President-elect Macron and his future wife met when he was a 15-year-old 10th-grader at a Catholic school in Amiens, France, and she was a 40-year-old teacher who was married and the mother of three – including a son who was in Emmanuel’s class.

He's hot for teacher!

From the Daily Mail:

[W]hen the teacher-student relationship burst into an affair, the scandal was talk of the town . . . .

“It was a huge scandal at the time,” [said] Benoit Delespierre, a local journalist who is close to [Brigitte’s] family . . . .

“People are opened-minded about love and sex in France.  But still it was a big deal.  She was married with three children and he was her pupil.  You can imagine what the other parents made of it all.”

Emmanuel Macron’s parents were aghast when they learned their teenaged son was canoodling with his married middle-aged teacher, but chose not to make a corrupting-a-minor complaint to local police.

(Why is the President-elect wearing a shirt in this photo?  Hiding his moobs?)

According to Anne Fulda, whose book, Emmanuel Macron: A Perfect Young Man, was published last month, Macron’s mother confronted Brigitte and begged her to leave her son alone – at least until he was 18.  But “Brigitte said she couldn't promise her anything,” according to Fulda.

Macron’s parents packed their boy off to an elite secondary school in Paris, hoping the separation would bring an end to Emmanuel’s dalliance with his teacher.  “You won’t get rid of me,” he told Brigitte before leaving.  “I will return and I will marry you.”

And marry her he did – some thirteen years after the relationship began, when he was 29 and she was a 54-year-old grandmother of seven.  (The French newspapers have run photos of him giving a bottle to the youngest of his step-grandchildren.) 

She's hot for student! 

Inquiring minds want to know one thing above all else about this story: how old Emmanuel was when he and Brigitte started bumping uglies.  But she’s not talking.  From the Daily Mail:

Brigitte has refused to reveal when the unlikely pair first became intimate, proclaiming it “our secret.”

“Nobody will ever know at what moment our story became a love story.  That belongs to us.  That is our secret,” she said.

Why won’t she spill the beans?  Surely the statute of limitations has run by now.  

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Do you think that the reaction to the Emmanuel-Brigitte relationship would have been a little different if he had been the 40-year-old married teacher and she had been the 15-year-old student?  (Or if both the student and the teacher had been male?)

Absotively posilutely!.  At least that would have been the case in the U.S. – the French might just say, “J’en ai rien à foutre.” 

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“Hot for Teacher” was released on Van Halen’s 1984 album, 1984.

Here’s the “Hot for Teacher” music video, which features Norwegian model Lillian Müller, who was Playboy’s 1976 “Playmate of the Year.”  

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Van Halen – "Everybody Wants Some!!" (1980)

Ev'rybody wants some!

Baby, how 'bout you? 

A lot of rock ’n’ roll bands have a shortage of superego and an oversupply of id.  But there has never been a band with a greater ratio of id to superego than Van Halen.  

Richard Linklater’s newest movie,  Everybody Wants Some!!, was named after one of Van Halen’s best records.  

It's the best college movie of all time – which is not surprising given that Richard Linklater also directed the best high-school movie of all time, Dazed and Confused.   

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Everybody Wants Some!! takes place at a fictional state college in Texas.  It's the weekend before fall classes begin, and there's really nothing much for the newly-arrived freshmen and the returning upperclassmen to do except get drunk and hook up.

The movie focuses on the members of the college’s baseball team, who live together and party together.  Linklater went to Sam Houston State on a baseball scholarship, and I’m assuming that many of the characters and incidents in the movie are based on his experiences.

Richard Linklater in 1980

There’s plenty of sex, drinking, and jock shenanigans in the movie, but on the whole the guys are rather sweet.  There’s not a single bully or sexual predator in the whole bunch.  Given that he was a college jock himself, it’s not surprising that Linklater humanizes the athletes rather than presenting them as low-IQ, high-testosterone clichés.

Click here to watch the trailer for Everybody Wants Some!!

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Everybody Wants Some!! is set in 1980.  Linklater is a stickler for getting the details right, so the clothing, hairstyles, music, and other period aspects of the movie are perfect.

For example, Linklater insisted that a Farrah Fawcett poster in one character’s dorm room be replaced.  “Fawcett was ’77, ’78,” he said.  “By ’80, it’s a Susan Anton poster.”

Susan Anton

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From Jacob Hall’s review of the movie:

Everybody Wants Some!! is more party than plot.  Remarkably simple and straightforward, there is no traditional narrative here and no three-act structure here.  Linklater, who also wrote the screenplay, simply asks the audience to tag along with a group of young college baseball players as they live it up the weekend before classes start.  Not much occurs, but everything happens.

Hall’s review gets to the heart of what makes Richard Linklater different from most of his peers:

Richard Linklater is defined by his empathy.  Few filmmakers love their characters quite as much as he does, and his affection fills his low-key dramas and broad comedies alike.  Linklater’s affection for the young men at the core of his new film, Everybody Wants Some!!, is evident in every frame.

Richard Linklater on the set
of Everybody Wants Some!!

One thing I really liked about Everybody Wants Some!! is that I didn’t recognize a single one of the young actors and actresses in the movie.  That made it so much easier for me to believe in the characters than if Linklater had cast the same hot young actors that we saw in the latest vampire and comic-book-hero movies – guys like Taylor Lautner and Chris Hemsworth and Channing Tatum and Zac Efron.  

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My favorite scene in the movie is at the very beginning, when five of the players crowd into a Chevy Monte Carlo and cruise the parking lots of the girls’ dorms while singing along to the Sugarhill Gang’s classic early rap song, “Rapper’s Delight.”  (You can click here to watch that scene.)

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If someone had taken a video of me watching Everybody Wants Some!!, it would show me grinning like an idiot for an hour and forty minutes.  I wish the movie had been twice as long.  There were no jokes to speak of – I can’t quote a single funny line to you.  But it was sooooo much fun to watch.

I don’t know if women will like this movie as much as I did.  I don’t really see it as a guy’s movie, although it’s about a bunch of jocks who spend most of the weekend getting drunk and high and trying to poke every babe they see.  It’s as far from a Will Farrell or Seth Rogen comedy as it could possibly be.  (THANK GOD!)

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The last part of the movie focuses on a budding romance between two adorable freshman – a baseball pitcher played by Blake Jenner (no relation to Bruce and Kris – thankfully) and a theatre-dance major played by Zoey Deutch (the daughter of Lea Thompson).

Zoey Deutch and Blake Jenner

Maybe they will remain a couple, or maybe they will quickly move on to other girlfriends and boyfriends.  I’d like to think that each of them will remember the time they spent together with great fondness, no matter what happens.  

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The soundtrack of Everybody Wants Some!! doesn’t disappoint.  It’s a mix of new wave, disco, country, and hard rock – everything from the Knack’s “My Sharona,” to Devo’s “Whip It,” to Chic’s “Good Times,” to ZZ Top’s “I’m Bad (I’m Nationwide),” to M’s “Pop Muzik.”

Last but certainly not least, the soundtrack includes “Everybody Wants Some!!”  Click here to listen to that track, which was released on Van Halen’s 1980 album, Women and Children First.

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Van Halen – "The Cradle Will Rock" (1980)

And the cradle will rock

Yes, the cradle will rock

And I say, "Rock on!"

In 1978, singer/guitarist Beki Bondage helped found the UK punk band, Vice Squad.  Beki left Vice Squad a few years later, but in 1997 she joined forces with guitarist Paul Rooney to put together a reconstituted version of Vice Squad.  

Beki Bondage

Since then, the band has toured extensively in Europe and the U.S., and has released several studio albums of what they call "old school punk."

Paul Rooney e-mailed me about a 2 or 3 lines post that featured one of Vice Squad's songs, and he's now one of my more interesting Facebook friends.

Paul Rooney

Paul's been a guitarist since he was a teenager, and he's played in a lot of different bands.  He's forgotten more about punk rock, and glam rock, and many other varieties of rock than I've ever knew, and I particularly look forward to his Facebook posts about music.

Van Halen's David Lee Roth

Recently, Paul posted a video of Van Halen performing today's featured song on television in 1980.  Here's what he had to say about that band:

You know what?  I think in many ways showmanship, fun and excitement has been driven out of modern music.  I totally subscribe to the need to make worthwhile, thought-provoking, and meaningful music but the flip side must exist where music helps people forget the daily grind and the hassles and concerns relating to money, work, family and climate change.  Few bands these days can do that.

As Paul points out, Van Halen is one of those few bands.

Songs like "Runnin' With the Devil," "Hot for Teacher," "Panama," and "Everybody Wants Some!" were classic guilty pleasures.  The band members may have all hated each other, but singer David Lee Roth and the rest of Van Halen always sounded like they were having one hell of a good time.

Alex Van Halen

There are two particular things to note in this video of today's featured song.  The first is Alex Van Halen's elaborate drum kit – including four bass drums and some octobans (which are deep, small-diameter tube-shaped took-toms).  The other is David Lee Roth's astonishing outfit (especially the fuzzy boots).

By the way, the opening instrumental riff may sound like it was played on a guitar, but it was actually played on a Wurlitzer electric piano equipped with a phase shifter.

Here's "The Cradle Will Rock."  (Actually, I haven't seen Junior's grades.)

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: