Jump

This song appeared on the albums 1984, Best of Volume 1, Live: Right Here, Right Now and The Best of Both Worlds.

Parts of Jump had originally been written on the back of a tour bus in the late 1970s/early 1980s. However, the band had always felt the song didn't quite fit any of the albums they'd been working on. David Lee Roth and Ted Templeman were the biggest opponents of Eddie's keyboard songs and consistently vetoed recording this song for more than two years.

When Eddie gained control in the studio by building 5150, he was able to record more with just Alex and Don Landee. One day the three laid down the basic tracks to the song and presented it the following day to Dave, Mike, and Ted. Whether the rest of the band truly loved the song or felt somewhat compelled to record it is not known, but soon Dave was writing lyrics for it.

David wrote the lyrics around a single phrase: "go ahead and jump." He came up with the line after watching the news and seeing a man on top of the Arco Tower threatening to commit suicide. The vocalist thought that there's always at least one person in the crowd telling the guy to "go ahead and jump."

Eddie recorded the song using an Oberheim OBX-A keyboard. The solo was spliced together from at least two different takes.

The ending of the song has a history all its own. The main riff for Top of the World was written around the ending of Jump. However, the ending of Jump had been heard before, during the 1983 Us Festival, when Eddie played it at the end of Dance the Night Away.

Jump spent 5 weeks at #1 on the charts. The single was certified gold on 04/03/84.

The video for Jump (the first from the album), produced by Robert Lombard and directed by Pete Angelus, debuted on 12/31/83. It was filmed using 16mm hand-held cameras at The Complex in Santa Monica, CA. The entire cost for the video was a little more than $6,000 (though David Lee Roth liked to claim the total cost was only $600).

The video version of the song differed slightly from the album version.

Sharp-eyed viewers will also notice Eddie's keyboard is quite dusty, proof that it's the music that's most important, not the image.

When it came time for Sammy Hagar to sing the song in concert on the 5150 tour, he used to pull a person out of the crowd to sing for him. After this tour he was comfortable enough to sing it on his own.

Aztec Camera recorded an acoustic version of the song as a b-side to their All I Need Is Everything single and later included it on their live album, Backwards and Forwards, and on the compilation album, Retrospect. When Aztec Camera performed the song live, vocalist Roddy Frame would introduce it as "an American folk song about girls who commit suicide."

The group Bus Stop released a techno/dance version of Jump (Festival, 1795) in 1999.

Jump was on an Australian compilation album named Throbbin' '84, released at the beginning of 1984.

The song also appeared on the compilations Slammin’ Sports Jams Vol. 1 (Simitar, 1998) and Best of Superstars Vol. 1 (1999 from Germany).

The song was to appear in the Ricky Gervais UK TV series An Idiot Abroad, in a scene where the star Karl Pilkington performs the song with a chorus club. The rendition was so bad, the band worked to ban it from a U.S. or DVD release, but the full version was aired in the UK.