Hey, You Never Know

The Zoo Crew has got a short one spinning for the Zoo Freaks, and short is the right word for it. "Hey, You Never Know" clocks in around two minutes and forty-six seconds, track seven on David Lee Roth's 1994 album Your Filthy Little Mouth, and it rides like a postcard from a guy who had just spent a couple of years staring out a loft window in New York. Roth wrote it with guitarist Terry Kilgore, the same partner who sat in on most of the record, and Nile Rodgers produced the whole thing down at the Hit Factory. Rodgers did not pick up a guitar on the sessions. He wrangled a crew of session players, pointed the ship at whatever style the song wanted, and let Diamond Dave talk. The result is the least Van Halen-shaped record Roth ever put his name on, and this little tune is one of the reasons.

In the tour book that went out with the album, Roth laid it out plain. He said the songs were reflections from living in the city for the better part of two years, written the old magazine way, installments sent back until the year was over and you had a book. Song for song, he claimed, these were people he knew, people he had become, or people he could see through the window. Hardwood floor, two big windows, artist in a loft phase. The ambition, in his words, was to mix a little Henry Miller with his Huckleberry Finn. That line shows up again in the title track, but it hangs over the whole record, including this one. The title Your Filthy Little Mouth, he allowed, had the obvious innuendo, and also a politician in it. Bad news pouring out of the television, gossip pouring out of a last girlfriend, everybody talking and everybody talking back. Passion, he decided, was communication through plumbing. If you do not have anything to say, you are not scoring high on the judge's card.

"Hey, You Never Know" takes that city shrug and turns it into a hook. The singer is laid out after a night, catches a cold, barely makes it home, hears a declaration of love, feels no pain, then crashes a rent-a-car in the pouring rain. He swears he saw the moral on a billboard. The only thing you know for certain is hey, you never know. A buddy named Jerry shows up with aching feet and a story about hitting bottom over a sex problem. The advice comes free, and free for a reason. It is not the loving that slows you down. It is staying out all night looking for it. They say you only live twice. He says hey, you never know. Then the hula girls come in on the chorus, ahh, you never, you never know, like a lounge act that wandered into the wrong borough and decided to stay. Kodak moments, engines humming, cruise control up somebody's driveway. If they are saying you are crazy, well, hey, you never know.

That billboard gag is pure Roth. He has always treated slogans like found objects, the way a biker picks up a sticker at a truck stop and slaps it on the tank. Kilgore's guitar stays light, almost a shuffle, and the backing voices, Tawatha Agee, Robin Clark, Maryel Epps and Brenda White-King among them, give the hula-girl parts a real lift. John Regan held down the bass. Drums got passed around Tony Beard, Larry Aberman and Ray Brinker. Richard Hilton handled keyboards and programming. Nothing on the track tries to out-scream 1984. It is a two-and-a-half-minute wink, parked between the Travis Tritt duet "Cheatin' Heart Cafe" and the reggae detour "No Big 'Ting." The album also covers Willie Nelson's "Night Life" and closes, on most pressings, with an urban New York mix of "You're Breathin' It." Roth was not interested in grunge, and the radio formats of the time were not interested in a record that hopped from jazz colors to country to dance to blues inside one sleeve. "She's My Machine" was the rock-radio single and got as high as number twelve on the rock chart. The album itself landed at seventy-eight on the Billboard 200, twenty-eight in Britain, and did better in Sweden and Japan than it did at home. Deborah Frost at Entertainment Weekly gave the record a B-plus and credited Rodgers for the most listenable, insightful and hysterical Roth effort in years. Metal critics were less amused. Fans who wanted the splits and the scarves mostly stayed home.

The song turned up as a companion cut on the Japanese three-inch single for "She's My Machine," which tells you the label heard something in it even if American radio did not. Years later the whole album got folded into Roth's Warner recordings set, remastered, so the Zoo Freaks who missed it the first pass can still find the loft songs sitting next to the Eat 'Em and Smile material. Rodgers has talked about the sessions in bits and pieces since, and Kilgore has too, mostly about building a studio of his own after the record and about how the songs got chased down in New York rather than in a Hollywood rock room. The through-line is Roth's. He was done proving he could front a shout-along for a while. He wanted the window, the gossip, the billboard, and a chorus a hula girl could sing.

None of that swagger arrived out of nowhere. David Lee Roth was born October 10, 1954, in Bloomington, Indiana, the son of an ophthalmologist. Summers he spent around his uncle Manny Roth, who ran the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, the same cellar room that had already seen Bob Dylan and a long line of folk and rock hopefuls. The family moved west, and Dave landed in the Pasadena area, John Muir High School, then Pasadena City College, where he poked at music theory and worked a stretch as a hospital orderly. The household had a name for his daily blast of energy. Monkey time. He sang with an R&B-tinged outfit called the Red Ball Jets, a nod both to a candy dye that wound him up and to a sneaker brand of the era. Another local trio, Mammoth, Eddie Van Halen on guitar and vocals, Alex on drums, Mark Stone on bass, used to rent the Jets' PA for about ten bucks a night. Roth auditioned, got turned down, auditioned again, and finally got the job. Another band already owned the name Mammoth, so he pushed Van Halen, figuring it had the same long-haul ring as Santana. Michael Anthony came in on bass. Backyard parties in east Pasadena gave way to the Starwood, the Whisky, Gazzarri's. Gene Simmons caught a set and paid for a demo. Warner Bros. signed them. The rest is the loud part of the story, the one the Zoo Freaks already know by heart.

What the 1994 record shows is the other gear. The kid who rented out the PA, who learned the room from his uncle's club, who could sell a slogan off a billboard, was still in there when the spandex years cooled off. "Hey, You Never Know" is that guy on a short leash, grinning, crashing the rent-a-car, telling Jerry to go home. Over on THE ZOO the Crew will let it ride and then dig back into the crate. If you want the man's own porch, the official site is David Lee Roth. He posts tour talk and the odd story on Facebook, keeps the photos coming on Instagram, and still waves the flag on X. Fans comparing set lists and old pictures gather in the David Lee Roth Fan Page group. Spin it again if you want. You never know.