The best thing about this song is the film clip.
You've got the guitarist; who looks like "Booger" from Revenge of the Nerds, swinging from a cable, wailing on his Jack Daniels axe whilst drinking beer at the same time.
Now I'm sorry but you simply can't rock out harder than that. Let me repeat again.
Swinging from cable, wailing on Jack Daniels motiffed guitar, drinking beer whilst at the same time looking like a filthy unwashed rock star.
I've come to the conclusion that Van Halen PURPOSELY engineered their songs to be confusing and really have no meaning at all.
People will be analizing their songs for years to come.
Anyways
Panama is actually the name of Dave's Car.. It's not about a stripper, or some drag race he saw... He had the hood and bumper mounted in his hallway.. You can see the bumper/hood if you watch his video for SHOOBop over on Youtube. He has a stuffed deer's *** crashing through the front windshield. A plaque underneath that reads - Your First deer, courtesy of PANAMA.
DLR : "You heard me talking about my Opal Cadet 1969 Station wagon in Dance the Night Away. The nickname for that blue 1969 Opal cadet station wagon was, "Panama" cuz that was the farthest South that you could possibly go and still have a really corrupt good time. That car now, what I did is I had a friend of mine torch off the front engine lid, and at my house in Pasadena, California we have it bolted to the wall in the front hallway. You have the front engine compartment in the grill and the two front halves of wheels like that, and we mounted the windshield right up on the top of it okay? Like it came crashing through the wall of the hallway. And then what we did, is we went to a place called Ellis Mercantile which is where you rent all of the movie props that they make in Hollywood and all of these environments. There's a section that's very famous at Ellis Mercantile where all of the Cowboys and Indians stuff is. So there's a whole stack of stuffed deer at Ellis Mercantile. And I bought one, and we sawed it neatly in half and took just the butt, the tail and the back legs and positioned it like it was coming through the windshield of my Opal Cadet station wagon, and hit it and ran through the wall of my house like that. And we painted the hooves blue, "Blue Suede Hooves." And underneath we have a little plaque that says, "My first deer, courtesy of Panama."
~Rudra