California Girls

The Zoo Crew is back on the boards at THE ZOO, spinning vinyl for the Zoo Freaks, and tonight the needle drops on David Lee Roth's "California Girls," off the 1985 EP Crazy From the Heat. This is not the Beach Boys record you remember from the family stereo. Same words, same sunshine, but Diamond Dave treats it like a boardwalk carnival with the volume cranked and the grin turned all the way up. East Coast girls are still hip, Southern girls still knock him out, and he still wishes they all could be California girls. He left the old slang in on purpose. No rewrite, no grit added to the lyric sheet. The dirt is all in the delivery.

The story of how the cut got made sounds exactly like something a guy named Dave would tell you between sets. He has said the whole EP was dreamed up at the beach on a dull afternoon. Those four songs had been riding around in his suitcase for years, waiting for a window. Somebody put on the Beach Boys, "California Girls" came through the speakers, and one of the bodyguards looked over and said he ought to do that one. Dave's answer was "THAT'S IT." They packed up, drove about fifteen hours through the desert to the airport in Puerto Vallarta, and flew straight home. From the airport he went to Warner Bros. president Lenny Waronker and told him he had a great idea. Four of them, actually. In a Rolling Stone sit-down from April 1985 he said he spent about a month putting the project together and only four or five days recording it. He did not write the songs. He picked them the way people pick dogs, because they remind him of himself. Bits of mirror, he called them.

Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys sang backup, which is why a little of that old harmonic salt still hangs in the air, and Christopher Cross was in there too. The single climbed to number three on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1985, higher than almost anything Van Halen, Roth, or Sammy Hagar ever landed outside of "Jump." Roth later said that to the other guys in the band it was just another song, but to him it was his favorite Beach Boys tune, with special import. The EP hit the racks on January 28, 1985. By April 1 he was out of Van Halen. The record was the first clear sign he could carry a party without Eddie's guitar holding the roof up.

Then there is the video, which MTV wore out in 1985. Pete Angelus, the same director who had worked the "Jump" and "Hot for Teacher" clips, shot the whole thing on location at Venice Beach. It opens like a bent Twilight Zone episode, fish-eye lens and all, with Roth as a tour guide loading oddball tourists onto a tram bound for "the sunlight zone." A place card quotes Maurice Chevalier, "Thank heaven for little girls," and then Roth and Angelus answer, "And some of the other sizes too." He walks a path lined with swimsuit models like he is inspecting a museum that happens to be alive. His 1951 Mercury convertible, the one he named the California Girl, shows up in the Southern girls stretch. Same car you see in the "Panama" video. In his book he has claimed he wrote, directed, edited, cast, and color-corrected videos like this one, and he has called "California Girls" and "Just a Gigolo" the Wizard of Oz of pop video. On the shoot itself he has remembered the little disasters the way a road dog remembers flat tires. The Midwest farmer's daughter has not shown up. The monitor just blew up. One step at a time, he would say, and they kept rolling.

The EP also fed a movie that never got made. Roth had a script called Crazy From the Heat, about a rock star named David Lee Roth landing on a made-up place called Dongo Island with his manager Bernie. He has said CBS had a production deal, storyboards, and costumes before the plug got pulled. When the film fell through, the solo band came together instead, with Steve Vai, Billy Sheehan, and Gregg Bissonette, and Eat 'Em and Smile followed in 1986. The Venice Beach clip and the number-three single were the loud proof that the solo idea was not a side hobby.

David Lee Roth was born October 10, 1954, in Bloomington, Indiana, the son of an ophthalmologist. The house stereo leaned toward Al Jolson, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Prima, which explains a lot about the showman who later medleyed "Just a Gigolo" with "I Ain't Got Nobody" on this same EP. Summers he would visit his uncle Manny Roth in New York, who ran the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, the room where a young Bob Dylan and a long list of other folks got their first real stage time. The family moved to California in 1963. Roth landed in the Pasadena orbit, went to John Muir High School, and for a while studied music theory at Pasadena City College. He also put in time as a hospital orderly, and as a younger teen he had been sent to a horse ranch aimed at building some responsibility. By the early seventies he was fronting an R&B-leaning rock band called the Red Ball Jets. He has said the name nodded at the red dye in candy that used to wind him up at home, though Red Ball Jets were also a sneaker brand of the era.

Across town, Eddie and Alex Van Halen were playing backyard parties under the name Mammoth, and they kept renting Roth's PA for about ten dollars a night because they did not have one of their own. Alex has said they could not stand the Red Ball Jets, but they also knew Eddie should not be the singer. After a couple of auditions that did not take, Roth joined. One early blowout, summer of 1973 in an east Pasadena backyard, had the new lineup blasting Black Sabbath, Grand Funk, and Cream for a crowd of high-school kids and a keg. Roth pushed to rename the band Van Halen, figuring a family name would stick the way Santana had. Michael Anthony came in on bass. They worked the Sunset Strip clubs, Gazzarri's and the Starwood among them. In 1976 Gene Simmons caught a show, liked what Eddie was doing, and helped pay for a demo. Warner Bros. signed them, and the first Van Halen album arrived in 1978. From rented PA to the biggest rock band of the next decade, that is the on-ramp. Crazy From the Heat is what happened when the singer decided the suitcase songs deserved their own afternoon in the sun.

If you want the man in his own words and pictures, his official website is David Lee Roth. The official Facebook page is David Lee Roth on Facebook, the Instagram account is @davidleeroth, and the X account is @DavidLeeRoth. Fans comparing notes and posting road shots gather in the David Lee Roth Fan Page group and the DAVID LEE ROTH group. For the long paper trail on the EP, the Van Halen News Desk write-up lives at VHND. That is the record. California girls, a Mercury named after them, and a singer who heard a Beach Boys song on a dull beach day and drove fifteen hours to cut it.