Hot for Teacher

Eddie used a 1958 Gibson "Flying V" guitar to record this track, from the 1984 album.

To simulate the quiet interludes live (recorded using the neck pickup on the V turned down low in the studio), Eddie used a Roland echo unit with the volume turned down, which he activated from his pedal board.

The single peaked on the U.S. charts at #56.

The band Slow Roosevelt covered this song on a double CD charity release titled Come on Feel the Metal. The CDs featured 35 Dallas/Ft. Worth bands playing covers from the 1970s and 1980s. The album's proceeds went to the American Cancer Society.

The video for this song was directed by Pete Angelus and David Lee Roth and produced by Jerry Kramer.

More than 80 people were selected for the various roles in this video (taken from a tryout of several hundred hopefuls), which was filmed over a four-day period at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, CA. Interestingly, the school had been closed prior to Van Halen's filming the video. The city didn't have the funds to reopen the school, so the band contributed an undisclosed amount (on top of the money they paid to rent the school for filming) to the city to help reopen it.

The voice of Waldo was the late Phil Hartman.

The model who played the teacher in this video was Wayne Gretzky’s wife, Janet Jones.

Some of the children chosen to portray Van Halen as youths were: Beto Lovato (Alex), Bill Bookmeyer (Dave), and Brian Hitchcock (Eddie). According to legend, by the third day of filming the four actors were walking and talking just like their respective counterparts. The actor playing Mike wore one of Michael's earrings for the video, Bookmeyer lost the pair of sunglasses given to him by Dave for use in the video, and after the shoot was over, Edward gifted Hitchcock with one of his own guitars.

In one classroom scene where the teacher is dancing on the desk, a black board is featured with the numbers 20-9-8-19-25-12-15-8. Each of these numbers corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. If you read the encoded word from right to left, you'll notice it spells "holy shit." This is the only known instance of such "hidden" gimmicks in a Van Halen video.

The choreographed dancing scene featuring the band in maroon wedding style tuxedos was reportedly dubbed "Dave and the Pips" by the members of Van Halen.

The hot rod's burnout at the end of the video was totally unplanned. The car's owner was not too pleased, to say the least. The hot rod, named as "Tom's Tub Two" was put up for auction at DavidLeeRoth.com in the fall of 2000.

Another video was made for this song from a live performance on 08/18/84 at Castle Donington, England, during the Monsters of Rock. More than an hour of footage from this concert was filmed and preserved in the Warner Brothers and Noel Monk vaults, though only the video of this song has ever been released.

Hot for Teacher was also a Dutch-based Van Halen tribute band featuring Peter Van Wheelden on guitar.

The TV show Glee covered this song on the 11/15/11 episode.