Songoftheday 6/20/12 - Callin' out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat?

Van Halen - "Dancing In The Street"

from the album Diver Down (1982)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #38 (two weeks)

Weeks in the top-40: 3

Today's song of the day is the second single released from Van Halen's fifth album, Diver Down. Both singles were cover records of sixties hits, and while the first was the blue-eyed soul of Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman", the followup took on Motown with Martha Reeves & The Vandellas' classic "Dancing In The Streets".

The song, co-written by Marvin Gaye, and released at the time of urban unrest in America, seemed at once both a release and a call to action in the summer of discontent in 1964. The song became a #2 pop hit in the US and top-5 in Britain.

Van Halen covered five songs on the Diver Down album, and "Dancing..." incorporated more of a faithful approach (well besides the guitars and all) to the original and featured both guitar and keyboard work from Eddie that he would expand more on their next album, 1984.

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The song became the band's fourth top-40 hit, and while it only made it for a couple weeks to #38, the song was a huge hit on rock radio, becoming a top-3 hit there, second at the time only to the #1 "Pretty Woman". Since then Eddie has disavowed the album as not true to their writing talents, but he would make up for that in a couple years with the biggest hit of their career, "Jump".

The song would be remade after that most famously at Live Aid by David Bowie and Mick Jagger, who released the recording as a single that made the pop top-10...

Ugh. If it wasn't for being a charity single. Tragic.

And Australian oldies group Human Nature revamped the song for their popular Vegas show...

and as a coda, a couple of 60s versions - first the Mamas and the Papas had a minor hit with their take featuring Mama Cass in 1967..

and jazz-funk great Ramsey Lewis also charted his version that same year...

Up tomorrow: three hippies reunite for their first top-10 hit in 5 years.