I’m Easy

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a short, swinging little number that still sounds like somebody kicked open the door of a smoky ballroom and let a rock band loose inside. “I’m Easy,” the third cut on David Lee Roth’s 1986 album Eat ’Em and Smile, is barely two minutes and change, but it carries more brass, more wink, and more old-time jump than half the records that crowded the racks that summer. The Zoo Freaks know the drill. When Diamond Dave leans into that line about coming on down and getting him while you can, the whole room loosens up. Over on THE ZOO we keep the deep cuts spinning for exactly that reason, the ones that show the circus behind the leather.

Roth told CREEM, right around the time Eat ’Em and Smile hit the street, that he had always been into doing twenties and thirties blues send-ups, and he pointed straight at the jumping, jiving “I’m Easy” as the proof on the new record. He was talking about balance. Blast straight through and the listener never gets a sense of scale. Slip in a little country, a little blues, a little lounge, and the hard rock stands up taller. The Rolling Stones albums did that for him. This track was his own version of the relief pitch. Producer Ted Templeman, the same man who had ridden the board for the Van Halen years, is the one who put the song in Roth’s hands. Templeman heard an Australian lounge number and figured it sat perfectly on the Gigolo persona Dave had already been polishing. The original was Billy Field’s “Baby I’m Easy,” written with Tom Price and cut in the early eighties. Roth clipped the title, kept the invitation, and turned the thing into a two-minute pushover with a horn section that could knock the paint off a Cadillac.

Steve Vai, fresh out of the Frank Zappa school and barely into his mid-twenties, wrote the horn score and conducted the session himself. He has told the story more than once. Snakeskin pants, hair flipped out, director’s chair, baton in one hand and a big chart in the other, twelve of New York’s best studio blowers staring back at him. He asked them to make a phrase a little more staccato, and they did. Drummer Gregg Bissonette watched the Berklee-trained guitarist sit down with pen and manuscript paper and write the big-band arrangement on the spot, then heard the session players overdub against the track the band had already cut. Billy Sheehan held down the bass and sang backup with Bissonette while Vai’s guitar danced around the brass. The whole thing clocks in around two minutes and eleven seconds, which is about as long as a good joke needs to land. Warner Bros. even pushed it as a single in Japan in March of 1987, long after “Yankee Rose” and “Goin’ Crazy!” had done their work at home. On the Spanish-language version of the album, Sonrisa Salvaje, the same track showed up as “Soy Fácil.” Same grin, different language.

The song was never the radio spearhead. “Yankee Rose” carried the video, and “That’s Life,” the other lounge cover on the record, picked up the late-year airplay with a clip full of old Van Halen footage. “I’m Easy” lived in the middle of side one, right after Sheehan’s “Shy Boy,” like a palate cleanser before “Ladies’ Nite in Buffalo?” Roth later said a lot of the material written for the album had started life as a soundtrack for a film called Crazy from the Heat that never got made. The EP of that name had already come out in 1985, with the beach-movie covers that proved Dave could sell a wink without Eddie and Alex. Eat ’Em and Smile was the full statement. He told the press he was going to eat the competition and smile, borrowing the line from an old candy-company trademark out of South Dakota and turning it into a battle cry. The album landed on July 7, 1986, with Vai, Sheehan, and Bissonette as the band, Templeman producing, and Roth still wearing the tribal paint from the cover on the “Yankee Rose” clip. Set-list logs show “I’m Easy” stayed in the live book on the 1988 Skyscraper tour, turning up dozens of times that year and then slipping away, the kind of deep cut a room full of Zoo Freaks still leans in for.

Before any of that swagger, there was a kid from Bloomington, Indiana. David Lee Roth was born on October 10, 1954, son of Nathan and Sybil Roth. His father was an ophthalmologist with a deep love of jazz, and that ear for swing never really left the house. The family moved to California when Dave was a teenager and settled around Pasadena. He was not the original singer in the band that became Van Halen. The Dutch-born brothers Edward and Alex already had a group called Mammoth, and Roth started out renting them his PA system. He talked his way into the microphone, and the name had to change because another outfit already owned Mammoth. They took the family name and went to work in the Hollywood clubs, playing the covers hard and the originals harder. Between 1978 and 1984 he fronted six Van Halen albums, from the debut through 1984, and then the split came. He has told the story of those last months more than once. Rehearsals that barely happened, people late or too far gone, his own detour into the Crazy from the Heat sessions, and a return that found nothing changed. He offered a compilation with a couple of new songs, then a live album. The answers came back no. He walked, cut the EP, built the new band, and rolled into Power Station in New York with a guitarist who could write horn charts in snakeskin pants.

That is the long road into a two-minute jump tune. The man who rented a PA to a pair of brothers ended up hiring one of the most studied guitarists on the planet to arrange a Billy Field lounge song like it was a Count Basie chart, then sang it like he was daring the whole front row to take him up on the offer. The Zoo Crew keeps that kind of story in the stack. If you want the rest of the circus, the official camp is at davidleeroth.com, with the road dates and the Roth Show notes. The verified pages sit at Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans still gather in the DAVID LEE ROTH group, and the long-running desk at Van Halen News Desk keeps the old interviews and the Eat ’Em and Smile lore in one place. Spin it again. The man said he was easy. The record says he was anything but.