Just Like Paradise

The Zoo Crew has got the needles down on David Lee Roth and a little slice of sunshine called Just Like Paradise, the big single off Skyscraper, and if you Zoo Freaks have ever stood in a parking lot after a show with the windows down and the amps still ringing in your ears, you already know this one. It is the sound of a man who left the biggest band on the planet, built a new crew out of the wildest players he could find, and then decided the next record ought to feel like a left-hand turn at speed. Released at the tail end of 1987 and riding the album into the new year, the song climbed all the way to number six on the Billboard Hot 100, which is about as high as a solo Diamond Dave single ever got. Keyboard man Brett Tuggle wrote it with Roth, Steve Vai co-produced the record and laid down the guitar, and the whole thing was sequenced and stacked in a way that felt more like a high-tech machine than a basement jam. Billy Sheehan later said he did not even play bass on it. The low end is synth bass, on purpose. Dave had a vision that the dance beat was coming, and he wanted his rock band pointed at it.

That vision split the room. Sheehan has told the story more than once. Eat 'Em and Smile had been a blast, a real band in a room, writing and hanging out and tearing it up on the road. Skyscraper was built a piece at a time. Dave and Vai got forensic about it, and the fun drained out for the bass player. Sheehan has said Dave was right that dance music was about to get huge, and he gives him full credit for the guts it takes to swing that hard. The trouble, the way Sheehan puts it, is that rock people do not want the dance stuff and dance people do not want the rock band doing it. If the experiment had landed clean, Dave would have looked like the genius of the century. It did not land clean for everybody in the band. Sheehan walked before the video was even shot, which is why you see Matt Bissonette, Gregg's brother, holding down the bass in the clip. He has also said he was dead set against faking it, and when he found out background vocals were going to be sampled and played back on stage, he had the meeting and he was gone. Vai stuck around a while longer, but he was not in love with the song either.

Vai has been plain about it. Roth wrote in his memoir that the song had impact and that Steve just hated it and did not want to play it. Asked about that years later, Vai said that was about how he felt. Too pop for him. He did not use the word hate, and he still thinks he did a fine job on it, but he tried to keep it off the record. Dave liked it, so it stayed, and Vai did his best. The solo you hear is not even the one from the proper session. Tuggle brought the keyboard parts over already sequenced. Vai threw a solo on the quick demo in one pass, echo and all, then cut a completely different solo for the higher-quality demo. Dave liked the first one. When they made the record, Vai had to learn his own demo solo and put it back where it was. He has said a lot of the Skyscraper solos came off the demos because Dave liked them that much. The triple-neck heart-shaped guitar in the video was Vai's own idea, a way to make a song he did not choose feel theatrical. Years later he caught it in Rock of Ages and had to laugh. Of all the songs on the record, that was the one they used.

The picture that sold the whole thing was no green screen. Roth went to Yosemite with adventure photographer Galen Rowell and spent a night on the summit of Half Dome. They lowered him down the face for the cover and for scenes in the Just Like Paradise video. Rigger Werner Braun has told the story of how scared Dave was, and with reason. One of the pitons holding the rig was barely in the granite. Braun said Roth took one look, decided the thing would pull out and kill him, and started shaking. Braun told him to have faith in the rigger. Rowell was getting impatient. They talked him onto the face. He shook, he breathed, and then the rock-star grin showed up between the shakes long enough for Rowell to burn through twenty rolls of film. When they were done, Braun gave the piton a jerk and it came right out. Later the climbers got a gold-plated carabiner engraved Diamond Dave. Roth has said the lyric has nothing to do with mountain climbing. Climbing was just how the music looked to him. Pure rock and roll, he told a radio interviewer, translates as excitement or fear, and he was not sure there was a difference. A careening rush toward an unpredictable finish. That is what he got in the studio, and that is what he got on the rock. He has also said he put real time into learning how a record gets made, working close with Ted Templeman on the Van Halen albums and the early solo stuff, until he felt he had the tools to try a radical redesign. Left-hand turns, he called it. Play it safe and you have missed the spirit of the thing.

The man who hung off that cliff started a long way from Yosemite. David Lee Roth was born October 10, 1954, in Bloomington, Indiana, the son of an ophthalmologist. Summers he spent with his uncle Manny Roth in New York, and Manny ran Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, the little room where Bob Dylan and a parade of other hungry players came up. The kid soaked up Al Jolson and Ray Charles before he ever soaked up hard rock. The family moved west, and by his teens he was in the Pasadena orbit, passing through The Webb Schools and John Muir High School. His folks sent him to a psychiatrist for a stretch because the energy would not sit still. They called the spells monkey time. He also did a turn at a horse ranch for troubled kids. At Pasadena City College he studied a little music theory and worked as a hospital orderly. The band that carried him was the Red Ball Jets, an R&B-leaning rock outfit with guitarist Gary Hurricane Taylor. The name pointed at the red dye in candy and at a sneaker brand, and Roth liked to say the red stuff set off monkey hour back at the house.

Across town, Eddie and Alex Van Halen had a trio called Mammoth. Eddie was singing and playing guitar, which he hated, and they did not own a PA. They rented Roth's for ten bucks a night. Eddie later put it plain. It was cheaper to just get the guy in the band. Roth had already been sizing Mammoth up at backyard parties full of kids from Muir, Blair, and Pasadena High, kegs on the lawn, Sabbath and Grand Funk and Cream rattling the windows. He auditioned more than once before they let him in. Around 1974 the name changed. Another band already had Mammoth, and Roth pushed for Van Halen, a name with some longevity to it, like Santana. Alex has said it was Roth's idea and that he almost said no because it felt conceited. Michael Anthony came over from a band called Snake. For a few years they worked the Pasadena and Santa Barbara circuit, backyard parties, rooms the size of a bathroom, Gazzarri's and the Starwood, stuffing flyers in high school lockers and drawing bigger crowds every time they hit the Pasadena Civic. Gene Simmons caught them and paid for a demo. Ted Templeman at Warner Bros. heard what he needed to hear. Six Roth-era Van Halen albums later, Dave walked, built the Eat 'Em and Smile band with Vai and Sheehan, and then made the sharp turn into Skyscraper. Just Like Paradise is the postcard from that turn.

You can chase the rest of the story with the man himself over at David Lee Roth, and the same trail runs through his Facebook, Instagram, and X. The lifers keep the fire going at The Diamond David Lee Roth Army, and there is a long-running fan hang called DAVID LEE ROTH on Facebook if you want the arguments, the bootleg talk, and the old tour stories. However you get there, come back through THE ZOO when you want the record spun by people who still believe a song ought to feel like a rush toward an unpredictable finish. That is the whole spirit of it, Zoo Freaks. Left-hand turns, windows down, and Diamond Dave grinning between the shakes.