Goin’ Crazy!

The Zoo Crew has got “Goin’ Crazy!” spinning on the turntable at THE ZOO, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any stretch of highway, you already know this one does not sit still. David Lee Roth cut it for Eat ’Em and Smile, the record that landed on July 7, 1986, and the tune sits right in the middle of the running order, track five, written by Diamond Dave and Steve Vai. Ted Templeman, the same producer who had ridden shotgun on the classic Van Halen albums, was behind the glass. Billy Sheehan was on bass, Gregg Bissonette on the drums, and Vai was doing things with a guitar that still make grown roadies look up from the workbench. The single followed in early September of 1986. It climbed to number 12 on the mainstream rock chart and number 66 on the Billboard Hot 100. That is not the whole story. The whole story is that this song was supposed to be a movie theme, and the movie never got made.

After the Crazy from the Heat EP caught fire in 1985, Roth and a partner had a script in hand for a musical comedy of the same name. CBS Films had money on the table. Templeman was lined up to produce the soundtrack. Roth told the press he had already put the band together. Then the picture fell apart. What did not fall apart were the songs. Sheehan has said that tunes like “Goin’ Crazy!” were written to be dropped into scenes, and that he remembers reading dialogue pages with the band written into them. The clothes in the videos, and the fat suit Dave wears in the “Goin’ Crazy!” clip, were built for that film first. Bissonette has said the same thing from the drum throne: the look of “Goin’ Crazy!” and “Yankee Rose” was the look of the movie that never rolled. The videos became the picture. The album became the soundtrack. The tour became the premiere. That is a very Dave way to lose a film and still win the summer.

The clip itself is pure Roth theater. Hours in the makeup chair, then out he comes as the big promoter character, the industry suit blown up into a cartoon, grinning through prosthetic cheeks while the real band tears the room apart. It is the same grin he wore in a 1986 interview when somebody asked what the new outfit was going to do to his old band. He threw his head back and roared that they were going to eat ’em and smile. The album title was not a fresh invention either. “Eat ’Em and Smile” had been part of a trademark registered back in 1928 by a candy company in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Dave just borrowed the wrapper and put a guitar solo inside it. There is also a buried keyboard part on the record, played by Jesse Harms, who had been Sammy Hagar’s keys man in the solo years. Rock and roll is a small town. Sometimes the neighbors end up on the same tape.

Then there is the Spanish version, which still surprises folks who only know the English single. Roth recorded the entire album again as Sonrisa Salvaje. “Goin’ Crazy!” became “Loco del Calor,” which is just “crazy from the heat” with a different passport. His father, Nathan, suggested the idea. Nathan figured the stage act was visual enough to travel, and that a Spanish-language record might open a door south of the border and across the ocean. Dave did not phone it in. He worked with a tutor on the cadences. The Spanish video uses the same footage, with Dave lip-syncing the new lines. It did not set the charts on fire in Mexico or Spain, but it added another chapter to the legend of a man who would try a thing because he could. The lyric, meanwhile, is pure sunburned road talk: rolling down another sunny highway, been in the sun too long, going coconuts but at least going his own way, dancing on the pier, falling in the water, and a cop who is not laughing because somebody has been messing with the mayor’s daughter. That is a Saturday night written down and turned up.

If you want the long version of how this cat got started, you have to go back to Bloomington, Indiana, where David Lee Roth was born on October 10, 1954. His father was an ophthalmologist. Summers took the boy to New York, where his uncle Manny Roth ran Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, the same little room that had already hosted Bob Dylan and a parade of folk and blues singers. Dave soaked up Al Jolson and Ray Charles before he ever soaked up a stack of Marshalls. The family moved west, and the teenage Roth landed in the Pasadena area, passing through The Webb Schools and John Muir High School. The household had a name for his daily bursts of energy. They called it monkey time. His folks even sent him to a horse ranch for a stretch, hoping the work would settle him down. It did not settle the showman. It just gave him another story.

By the early 1970s he was singing with the Red Ball Jets, an R&B-leaning rock band with guitarist Gary “Hurricane” Taylor and a crew of Pasadena friends. Roth liked to say the name nodded to the red dye in old candy, the stuff that used to set off those monkey hours at home. Red Ball Jets was also a sneaker brand, which suited a kid who was always in motion. Another local trio, Mammoth, with Alex Van Halen on drums and Eddie Van Halen singing and playing lead, would rent the Jets’ PA for ten bucks a night. Roth auditioned, got turned down, auditioned again, and finally got the job. Early in the summer of 1973, in an east Pasadena backyard, in front of kids from Muir, Blair, and Pasadena High, the new lineup blasted through Black Sabbath, Grand Funk, and Cream while the kegs went down. Roth pushed to change the name. Another band already had Mammoth. He wanted something with a long shelf life, the way Santana had a name you could hang a career on. In 1974 they became Van Halen. He worked as a hospital orderly on the side and took some music theory at Pasadena City College. The backyard parties turned into the club circuit. Gene Simmons caught a show and paid for a demo. The rest of that chapter is written in gold records. The chapter that matters for this spin is the one that starts when he walked away in 1985, hired Vai, Sheehan, and Bissonette, and proved the ringmaster still had a circus of his own.

Eat ’Em and Smile went to number 4 on the Billboard 200 and sold past a million copies in the States. “Goin’ Crazy!” was the would-be movie theme that became an MTV regular and a summer-party record, the one where Vai and Sheehan stop being a rhythm section and start having a conversation in the solo. The Zoo Crew likes it for the same reason the Freaks do. It is loud, it is funny, and it does not apologize for the tan. If you want the man’s own front porch, the official site is David Lee Roth. He keeps the lights on at Facebook, Instagram, and X, where the tour posters and the tall tales still show up. Fans who like a long table and a loud argument have a home in the DAVID LEE ROTH group, the kind of room where people still trade stories about twelve-dollar general-admission nights and cakes thrown at guitar players. Crank it up. The sun is still up on this highway, and Diamond Dave is still going his own way.