Who knew when David Lee Roth sang “Go ahead and Jump” some people would take it literally.
We have to give credit to Van Halen historian Greg Renoff for tipping us off to this video. On what is the 40th anniversary of the week Van Halen’s “Jump” hit #1 on Billboard, Greg stumbled on this gem filmed back in 1984 by a group of Skydivers from Texas. It features a cast of characters including some pretty girls and courageous Skydivers who lip-sync to the song while in freefall. A quick search of the internet and we were able to find some background to the video. It turns out the video almost ended up on MTV!
Back in 2005, someone who saw the video posted to the online Skydiving community forum dropzone.com asking if anyone knew the people involved and where it was filmed. Four years later, Larry Turner, one of the two producers of the video, posted with the details:
Wow! All this interest almost 25 years later? I’m Larry Turner. I co-produced this video with Pete McKeeman in Dallas in 1984. Pete and I had worked together at WFAA-TV in Dallas. He as a photographer and I was an editor.
The video was Pete’s brainchild, after he had just heard a new band called Van Halen. They had just hit the #1 spot with their song “Jump”. I swear Pete had most of the video completed in his head before the song finished. We bought the latest small video camera and Pete began shooting every jump he made. The idea of having someone sing the song in freefall was a tremendous challenge. I was “lucky” enough to be the lead actor, and I use that term VERY loosely. For editing purposes I had to be able to mouth the words to the song at the same speed as they were recorded, so that we could lay the music track over the video and the “lip-sync” would time out right. Remember there were no iPods then. I had to listen to that damn song every second of every day for 3 weeks. I had to have the timing right after not hearing the song while we climbed to altitude. Somehow it worked. The indoor scenes were shot in the cafe at Aero-Country Airport north of Dallas. Generic skydiving scenes were recorded at Spaceland in Houston and a Freak Brothers Convention in Illinois. The video took a week or so in editing before we were happy with it.
As we watched it for the first time, we knew we had just raised the bar in Skydiving videos. The primary goal was to get the video to Van Halen and let them use it on a new network called MTV. Long story short. We met with David Lee Roth after a Dallas concert and showed him the video. I’m proud to say he was blown away. He gave us the band manager’s phone number for us to contact. We were offered a “substantial” amount of money, but we wanted it to air on MTV also. Negotiations continued for quite sometime, but an agreement was never reached. That left us with a video that we had no music rights to, and left the band with a song they had no video right to. So…..we ended up with a great party video. Word of the video spread fast and suddenly we we were getting requests for the video from literally around the world. We sold more of the videos than I can legally say. Any audio that happened to be on the tape was strictly coincidence 🙂 Anyway, hope that answer some questions about “Jump” the video.
Larry Turner from dropzone.com 1-17-09
The video was posted to YouTube eight years ago and has since gotten ten thousand views. Let’s up that number right now Van Halen fans. Might as well “Jump” to the top of the page and watch!