Songfacts®:

• This song is a credo of sorts for Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth: all he needs is a beautiful girl. Or more accurately, beautiful girls, as Roth played himself off as a rock-and-roll Lothario.
  
  The song showcases his clever wordplay ("She was seaside sittin', just a smokin' and a drinkin' on ringside") as well as Eddie Van Halen's deluxe guitar riffs and Michael Anthony's rich backing vocals.
• "Beautiful Girls" was the second single from the Van Halen II album, following "Dance The Night Away." Their singles did not sell well, but their albums did. Many people bought the first Van Halen album after hearing this one.
• The group wrote this in David Lee Roth's basement. They had just finished a tour and were under tight deadline pressure to record their second album. They released an album every year until 1984.
• Roth fractured his foot doing a jump for the album's photo shoot. Since there was no way Roth could stay still on stage, they postponed their tour so he could heal.
• The album took six days to record. Van Halen was quick in the studio because they laid down most of the tracks live, with very little overdubbing.
• Brad Tolinski, who spoke with Eddie Van Halen for Guitar World a number of times, had a revelation about this song after a conversation with Steve Vai. "I was listening to 'Beautiful Girls,' and what hit me was that these wild assortment of bends and growls and zany guitar sounds, they functioned almost as commentary on David Lee Roth's outrageously, hypersexual, Bugs Bunny persona," he said. "It was almost like Looney Tunes. Like Carl Stalling, who wrote the music for Looney Tunes. So, what you have, since Ed is such a sensitive musician, he's responding to this outrageous persona of David Lee Roth and just creating sounds that would somehow go along with that. I think that 'Beautiful Girls' is such a perfect example of David Lee Roth being funny and off the wall, and Eddie having to figure out something on the guitar to respond."