A Song that Always Makes Me Smile

There are an endless number of reasons to like a song, but it usually comes down to the fact that it makes you feel good somehow; it has a catchy or meaningful lyric, a pleasant melody, a scorching solo or perhaps it just plain sounds good in your ears.  Often, however, it is because it associated with a memory that is especially personal and unique to you.

I’m not a big Van Halen fan.  Eddie is a phenomenal guitarist and the band is musically sound but I never particularly cared for David Lee Roth.  He has an interesting voice but I could never get past the little shriek he does.  Truth be told, I much prefer the Sammy Hagar edition of VH.  There is, however, one VH/DLR tune that ALWAYS brings a smile to my face.

Back in about 1995 my wife and I told Scott we’d get him a twelve string guitar for Christmas.  He and I decided we would make a “Grand Tour” of all the guitar stores in northeast Atlanta over Thanksgiving weekend.  Along with Kyle, one of his best friends, we managed to visit thirteen stores in about 8 hours.  If I remember correctly we drove about 150 miles but never got more than 30 miles from home, so we spent a lot of time in the car listening to the radio. 

Someplace along the road we started talking about song lyrics and how people miss-hear them sometimes.  I mentioned legendary the Beatles lyric from “Lucy in the Sky”, “…the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” being sung as “the girl with colitis goes by”. Scott got a kind of sheepish grin on his face. “What?”

“You know that Van Halen song Jump”?  I always thought he was saying “Maxwell Jump”

I kind of ran through the song in my head; it took a couple of tries but I finally “heard” what Scott had. “Maxwell Jump” instead of “might as well jump.” I could see how he might make that mistake. I confessed I had one of those songs, too.  Steve Miller’s Jungle Love.  I always thought it was “Charcoal Love”.

We had a good laugh; by the end of the trip we decided that “Maxwell Jump” made a lot more sense than “Charcoal Love”.  As for who the hell Maxwell was and what he was doing with his back against the jukebox, I guess that’s for Scott to explain. To this day I can’t hear Jump without getting an ear-to-ear grin thinking about that guitar trip; for some odd reason I don’t get the same feeling from Jungle Love.  Maybe Scott does…

-KJB