Experience

The Zoo Crew has got "Experience" spinning right now, track four off David Lee Roth's 1994 album Your Filthy Little Mouth, and if you came in expecting the high kicks and the split, settle back. This one is a slow blues walk, produced by Nile Rodgers, and Diamond Dave wrote it like a man who had finally got some scenery in the rearview mirror. The Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO know the difference between a party anthem and a song that takes its time, and this one takes its time on purpose.

Roth was living in New York when he put Your Filthy Little Mouth together, the better part of two years in a place with a hardwood floor and two big windows. He talked about the record the way old magazine writers used to work, heading out on a trip and sending the installments home until, at the end of the year, you had a book. He said the ambition was to mix a little Henry Miller with his Huckleberry Finn. The title has the obvious wink, sure, but he also said there was a politician in there, and that the subjects had not changed since the third grade: romance, complaint, and fascination. He told interviewers the record was a hybrid, blues-rock at the heart, more adventurous than what he had been doing, and not the cartoon people kept looking for.

The writing method is the part worth telling twice. Once a song was demoed, just a guitar and a drum beat, he would ride around the city with that demo coming out of a little beat box bungee-corded to the back of his bicycle, sometimes for weeks. He wanted each song to be a reflection of an experience, and he wanted more than one point of view inside it. He said you think nothing of that when you read it in a Tom Wolfe novel, and that music almost never shares it. He singled out "Experience" as the example. Ask somebody what that word means on a Friday night and you get one answer. Ask the same person on a Monday morning and you get another. You might have to wait through a whole weekend just to get past the first verse. Or maybe it is a completely different character looking at the same stretch of road, and only a long passage of time lets you arrive at it. Otherwise, he said, it is what he called Big Bang Theory: you get it right away and it passes through you right away.

On a BBC Radio 1 sit-down with Claire Sturgess around the album's release, he came back to the same idea and got a little sharper. He called the song a reflection, not a folk song, and a little sarcastic. There was scenery in the rearview by then. It had all been about the hood ornament not terribly long before. He said only a fool thinks experience can replace an education. Some things that took him ten years he could have learned in ten minutes if somebody had shown him the book. Street smarts got a shrug. The prisons, he said, are full of people with street smarts. Then he sang the line the band is playing for you: experience moves kind of slow, you get off the bus the same guy that got on twenty years ago. The lyric keeps turning the word over. Half of what he knows came from the worst teacher going. Smart ones from the city made a life's work of it and a decade later were still doing poorly. Is it art or imitating? If it is art, all his life has been fingerpainting. He would rather be the art project than weasel out wearing one. Then the grin comes back in: doing ninety, her top down, wind in the beer can, or that moment on a bungee jump when you are done going down and you are coming up. One shining moment lost in time, the one with the showroom shine. Till he made it, life was hit or miss. After he made it, life was take a hit of this.

Your Filthy Little Mouth came out on Reprise on March 8, 1994, Roth's last album for Warner in that run, and "Experience" sits fourth, after "She's My Machine," "Everybody's Got the Monkey," and "Big Train." Rodgers wrangled the session players and did not play himself. The record runs rock, country, and jazz in the same sitting, which is exactly why a lot of the old party crowd walked past it. A Steve Harris phone interview from March 4, 1994, caught Dave a little world-weary, saying he had started the record about eighteen months out and spent maybe ninety days in the studio. Steve Newton got him on the line that June, ten days after the O.J. Simpson story took over the television, and Dave used the moment to swing at the media circus. The album did not sell the way the eighties solo records had. The Zoo Crew will tell you that is not the same thing as the songs not holding up. "Experience" is the one you put on when the highway is empty and you are willing to let a verse finish its thought.

Before any of that, David Lee Roth was a kid from Bloomington, Indiana, born October 10, 1954, son of an ophthalmologist. Summers he went to New York to see his uncle Manny Roth, who ran the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, the room where Bob Dylan and a lot of other restless people got a stage. The family moved to the Pasadena area in 1963. He wore leg braces as a boy, worked early jobs, spent time as a hospital orderly, and put in a stretch at a horse ranch for troubled teens. He sang in school plays and came up loving Al Jolson and Ray Charles as much as the rock records. At Pasadena City College he studied a little music theory. His own band was the Red Ball Jets, named either for the old sneaker or for the red dye in the candy that used to set off what the family called monkey hour at home. Across town, Eddie and Alex Van Halen had a trio called Mammoth, and Eddie hated having to sing. Mammoth would rent the Red Ball Jets' PA for about ten dollars a night. Eddie later said it was cheaper to just get Dave in the band. Roth auditioned more than once, joined around 1973, and the first time they played together was a backyard party in east Pasadena for kids from John Muir, Blair, and Pasadena high schools, blasting Black Sabbath, Grand Funk, and Cream. Another band already had the name Mammoth. The brothers kicked around Rat Salade. Roth pushed for Van Halen, something with a long identity, like Santana. Alex almost said no because it sounded conceited. Roth won. Michael Anthony came over from a band called Snake. They stuffed flyers in high school lockers, drew hundreds and then thousands at the Pasadena Civic, ground out the Top 40 at Gazzarri's, and in 1976 got a demo financed by Gene Simmons. Ted Templeman at Warner Bros. heard them. The first Van Halen album landed in 1978. Dave left in 1985, made the solo records, and by 1994 he was the guy on the bicycle with the beat box, writing "Experience" for anybody willing to wait until Monday morning.

You can follow the man himself at his official website, David Lee Roth, and on the official accounts he still posts from: Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans comparing notes on the old shows and the deep cuts gather in the DAVID LEE ROTH Facebook group. The Zoo Crew will keep the record turning. Experience moves kind of slow. That is the whole point of the song.