Damn Good

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on "Damn Good," and if you are a Zoo Freak parked on the shoulder with the window cracked, this one is built for the long stretch of road. David Lee Roth cut it for Skyscraper, the second full-length solo record after he left Van Halen, and Warner Bros. put the album out on January 21, 1988. "Damn Good" came along later as a single in July of that year and climbed to number 2 on the Billboard rock chart. It is the quietest room on a loud album, an acoustic ballad sitting between the party songs, and it still sounds like a campfire that somehow got a whole guitar shop invited.

The music did not start in a Hollywood studio. Steve Vai, who co-produced Skyscraper with Roth and played the guitars, told Guitar World in 1988 that he wrote the piece when he was 14. The plan going into the record was almost the opposite of a ballad. They had talked about dropping a minute and a half of pure acoustic guitar on the album, a virtuoso solo to open with the two chords that kick this song off. Vai played those changes for Roth, Roth liked them, and Vai mentioned he already had a whole song built around the lick. Roth told him to play it again and started singing lyrics on the spot. That is how a teenage guitar exercise became a single. Vai has since said the instrumental version was sitting in his notebook under the name "Scandinavian Air Solo," and that it was scheduled for his own 1990 album Passion and Warfare. Once they cut it as "Damn Good," he left it off that record. You can still hear the family resemblance in Vai's later piece "Sisters," the sliding harmonics and the soft edges.

The tracking session was a guitar convention. Vai counted about a dozen instruments stacked on the arrangement: a doubled Guild acoustic six-string, a Guild twelve-string, two more Guild twelves recorded at half speed so they play back an octave up, a Coral electric sitar, a clean electric, and another six-string at half speed, each one entering on a different part of the chord. The solo is not a shredding break. Vai said he wanted a melody instead of the usual rip-roaring lick, and he played that line on a double-speed twelve-string, the Coral sitar, and a backwards electric guitar. Roth liked the demo solos on Skyscraper enough that several of them stayed on the finished album. Vai has called the whole production forensic. It was Roth's first outing as a producer, and both of them were steering away from the looser, live-in-the-room feel Ted Templeman had given Eat 'Em and Smile. Cash Box heard the finished single and called it a satisfying and artistic effort. The Zoo Crew hears a song you can play for somebody who thinks Diamond Dave only knows how to split the air with a high kick.

Roth was careful about what the words were not. In a March 1988 interview with UPI, while the Skyscraper tour was getting ready to roll, he said the nostalgic tone of "Damn Good" was not a look back at his years in Van Halen. He said he really does not refer to other musicians in his songwriting, and he made a point of saying the line about being more than a hungry heart, which is actually over on "Hot Dog and a Shake," was not a nod to Bruce Springsteen either. His joke at the time was that there are five sides to every coin. He wanted layers, characters, and something true to the art instead of a copy of the last hit. The lyric still lands like a letter you almost did not send: a guy who underestimated somebody, underestimated love, and is trying to say it plain before the night moves on. Around here we do not need a decoder ring. We just turn it up a little when the twelve-strings come in.

Before any of that, Roth was a kid with a borrowed spotlight and a PA system he was willing to rent. He was born October 10, 1954, in Bloomington, Indiana, the son of an ophthalmologist, and some of the first voices he fell for were Al Jolson and Ray Charles. Summers took him to New York, where his uncle Manny Roth ran the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, the same room that had already hosted Bob Dylan and a parade of folk and rock hopefuls. The family moved west, and by his teens Roth was in the Pasadena orbit, singing with an R&B-leaning rock band called the Red Ball Jets. He has said the name pointed at the red dye in candy that used to wind him up at home, and it was also a sneaker brand of the era. Over at the backyard parties, Eddie and Alex Van Halen were playing in a trio called Mammoth, with Eddie singing as well as playing guitar. Mammoth did not have a dependable PA. Roth did. They rented his system for about ten dollars a night.

The audition path was not smooth. Roth tried out more than once before the brothers let him in, and Alex has said they could not stand the Red Ball Jets at first. What changed the math was practical. Eddie did not want to sing lead, and paying Roth ten bucks every gig started to look silly next to just putting him in the band. Roth joined around 1973. He also brought a different record collection into a room that leaned toward heavy rock. He loved the Beach Boys, Motown, and funk, and he treated the show like a job that needed a plan. When another band already owned the name Mammoth, Roth pushed for Van Halen, arguing it had the same long-run identity as a name like Santana. Alex nearly vetoed it because it felt conceited. Roth won. He was studying music theory for a stretch at Pasadena City College and working as a hospital orderly while the band climbed from keg parties to the Hollywood clubs. By 1976 Gene Simmons had caught a set and paid for a demo. Two years later the debut album turned the backyard band into a national act. The high kicks, the karate, the ringmaster patter, all of that came after the PA rental and the second audition.

That is the long road into "Damn Good." The same singer who talked his way into Mammoth with a speaker cabinet wrote the words on the first pass while a guitarist replayed a song he had started at 14. Skyscraper went gold and then platinum, "Just Like Paradise" was the big splash, and this ballad was the one that proved the record had a quieter gear. If you want the rest of the story from the man himself, his official site is David Lee Roth, and the same camp keeps the lights on at Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans comparing set lists and old Skyscraper tour stories gather in the David Lee Roth Fan Page group. The Zoo Crew will keep spinning the deep cuts for the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO. Leave the twelve-string on. It was a damn good idea then, and it still is.