Hina

The Zoo Crew has got David Lee Roth's "Hina" spinning on the turntable, pulled off the second side of Skyscraper, and if you have been riding with THE ZOO for any length of time you already know we dig the deep cuts as hard as the radio hits. This one never got the push that "Just Like Paradise" did, and that is half the reason it still feels like a secret handshake between the folks who actually lived with the record. Roth and Steve Vai wrote it together, and the two of them produced the whole album, which hit the shelves in January 1988 on Warner Bros. after the Eat 'Em and Smile tour had already proved Diamond Dave could stand on his own. "Hina" runs about four minutes and forty-one seconds, and it sits in a strange little pocket between the dance-floor bounce of "Stand Up" and the pop wink of "Perfect Timing." It does not try to be either of those things.

Roth talked about the song while he was out talking up the Skyscraper tour, and he did not treat it like a throwaway. He said he wrote it about the Polynesian goddess of the moon. There is a whole stack of legends around her, depending on which island you are standing on, and he was not pretending to be a scholar. He also let slip that there was a real young lady he knew down in the South Pacific who was kind of lunar herself. That is pure Roth. He takes a myth, sets it next to somebody he actually met, and lets the two of them share a verse. He said the music was built to sound like a person, with furious stretches and gentle soothing stretches living in the same four minutes. When the solo arrives, he said, it whips up into a storm. Most of the album, he added with that grin of his, was written with your behind in mind. "Hina" is the one that forgets the behind for a minute and looks up at the sky.

Vai has called "Hina" his favorite track on the record, which is saying something from the guy who also cut the title song. He loved the lyrics, called them ethereal and beautiful, and remembered Hina as the moon goddess out of Hawaii or Tahiti. Roth, he said, has always had a soft spot for Tahiti. Somebody once asked if the working title had been "Tahina," and Vai allowed that it might have been. He could not swear to the old demo names, but he remembered how the guitar was supposed to behave. There is a delay that bounces the part from one side of the room to the other, and he plays off that echo instead of stacking a second guitar on top of the first. Listeners who have pulled the track apart on headphones have noticed the same trick. One guitar line sits hard to one side, and the delay answers it in the other ear, so it feels like Vai is duetting with himself. The intro comes in with an industrial scrape before the moonlit stuff takes over. It is the opposite of a party anthem, and that is why it still stops a room.

Skyscraper was cut in the spring and autumn of 1987 around Los Angeles, at Capitol in Hollywood, Smoketree, Stucco Blue, and a couple of other rooms. Roth and Vai took the producer's chair themselves instead of handing it back to Ted Templeman, who had steered Eat 'Em and Smile. Vai later said the two of them got forensic about every detail, and that they probably lacked the easy hand of a man who made rock records for a living. Roth wanted something different from the first solo album, and Vai was glad to follow him there. The solos on a lot of the record came straight off the demos because Roth liked them and would not let them be replaced. Billy Sheehan played bass on the sessions and then walked before the tour, frustrated with how hard the record was to finish. His chair went to Matt Bissonette. Brett Tuggle handled the keyboards, Gregg Bissonette sat at the drums, and Vai played the guitar and even a little alto horn. The cover, Roth hanging off a real face at Half Dome, was not a painting. He climbed. The whole album felt like that climb, ambitious and a little unsteady, and it split the faithful. Some wanted another Eat 'Em and Smile. Others heard "Hina," "Damn Good," and the title track and decided the detour was the point. Vai was gone not long after Sheehan, off to his own records. Skyscraper ended up the commercial peak of the solo run anyway.

Before any of that, Roth was a kid from Bloomington, Indiana, born October 10, 1954, to an eye doctor and a teacher. The family story runs through New York as well. His uncle Manny Roth ran the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, the little room where a young Bob Dylan and a pile of other folk and rock hopefuls got their first real ears. When David was still a boy the family headed west, and he landed in the Pasadena orbit, riding a bus to John Muir High after a stretch at The Webb Schools. His folks sent him to a psychiatrist for a few years because the energy would not sit still. They called the spells monkey time. He also spent time on a horse ranch for restless teens, which sounds like the setup for a Roth story even if he never wrote the song. At Pasadena City College he studied a little music theory and worked as a hospital orderly, pushing carts and learning how a room full of people behaves.

The first band that mattered was the Red Ball Jets, an R&B-leaning rock outfit with guitarist Gary "Hurricane" Taylor, drummer Dan Hernandez, and the Komora brothers on bass and guitar. Roth liked to say the name nodded at the red dye in candy and food, the stuff that used to set off monkey hour back at the house. Red Ball Jets was also a sneaker brand, so the joke worked either way. Across town, a trio called Mammoth, Alex Van Halen on drums and Eddie Van Halen singing and playing lead, sometimes rented the Jets' PA for ten dollars a night. Roth auditioned, got turned down, auditioned again, and finally got the job. The first time he and Eddie stood in front of a crowd together was a backyard party in east Pasadena in the summer of 1973, kids from Muir, Blair, and Pasadena High drinking keg beer while the band tore through Black Sabbath, Grand Funk, and Cream. Another band already owned the name Mammoth, so in 1974 they became Van Halen. Roth has always claimed that name was his idea, something that would last the way Santana lasted. Michael Anthony came in on bass. The backyard band became the club band, Gene Simmons paid for a demo, and the rest is the loud history everybody already knows.

You can follow the man himself over at David Lee Roth, and the same trail runs through his Facebook, his Instagram, and his X account. Fans who want a room full of other lifers keep a light on at the David Lee Roth Fan Page, and the long-running desk at Van Halen News Desk still files the solo years alongside the band years, Skyscraper included. Put "Hina" on when the highway goes quiet. Let the delay answer itself. That moon is still up there.