Ladies’ Nite in Buffalo?

The Zoo Crew has been spinning "Ladies' Nite in Buffalo?" off David Lee Roth's Eat 'Em and Smile, and if you have been riding with THE ZOO for any length of time you already know Diamond Dave does not do a slow song the way most frontmen do a slow song. This one rolls in like a late cab on a quiet street, all swagger and side-eye, with Steve Vai's guitar laid back in the passenger seat instead of standing on the hood. The Zoo Freaks have been calling in for it, and the Crew is happy to let it run. It is one of those cuts that sounds easy until you find out how hard the band had to fight to leave it alone.

Vai has told the story more than once. The demo he brought in was stacked with keyboards and guitar overdubs, the kind of arrangement a player that precise likes to build in layers. When the band got into the Power Station in Hell's Kitchen with producer Ted Templeman, Templeman told them to lay down a basic track and just play the thing live as a guide. Vai figured he would collapse all those parts onto one guitar for the moment and rebuild the fancy version later. Templeman heard the pass, looked around the room, and said that was the song. Engineer Jeff Hendrickson remembered Vai pushing back hard because he thought the rough track was terrible. He was meticulous about that stuff. Everybody else in the room thought the take had already blown the doors off, and they could not believe he wanted to change it. Templeman and the rest of the crew eventually got him to hear what they heard. Years on, Vai said there was a beautiful rawness and an in-your-face intimacy in that stripped version that the produced demo never had. He came around. "Ladies' Nite in Buffalo?" was beautiful the way it was.

Roth, true to form, disappeared after the track was cut and built a story around it. That was his habit. He would hear a groove and then invent the movie that went with it. Vai has admitted he never really knew why the title ends in a question mark, or exactly what Dave was pointing at. Asked about it, he basically shrugged and said it was ladies' night in Buffalo, New York, and if you wanted the rest of the plot you ought to ask Dave. The lyric sits in that 2 a.m. pocket, traffic slow, looking for love in the back of a taxi, the kind of scene Roth could sketch with one raised eyebrow and a wink at the microphone. Spin called the track alarmingly cool. Rolling Stone called it sophisticated. AllMusic later singled it out as arguably the most legitimate piece of art Roth ever put his name on, which is a high compliment for a man who spent a lot of years making sure the party never sat down.

There is a Buffalo thread running under the whole record that the Crew likes to point out. Billy Sheehan, the bass man on Eat 'Em and Smile, was living in Buffalo when Roth's office rang him in June 1985 and asked if he wanted to be in a movie. Sheehan knew Dave from the days when his band Talas opened for Van Halen, said yes, and headed for Los Angeles. The movie, meant to be called Crazy from the Heat after Roth's 1985 solo EP, never got made. A pile of the tunes written for that soundtrack ended up on the album instead. So a song about a ladies' night in Buffalo got cut with a bass player who had just taken the call in Buffalo. That is the kind of accident the rock and roll road specializes in. Warner Bros. put Eat 'Em and Smile out on July 7, 1986, with Vai, Sheehan, and drummer Gregg Bissonette behind Roth, and Templeman in the chair. When the band took it on the road, "Ladies' Nite in Buffalo?" sat in the set between the Van Halen oldies and the new solo cuts, right there with "Shy Boy," "Yankee Rose," and "Goin' Crazy!" A Spanish-language version of the album, Sonrisa Salvaje, retitled the song "Noche de Ronda en la Ciudad." Same midnight stroll, different street sign.

Roth recorded a lot of that album feeling the street outside the studio. He liked the Power Station because Hell's Kitchen did not let you get comfortable. He told a reporter the neighborhood was more dangerous than New Guinea, and that if you stayed more than a month you soaked up the anxiety and it came out on the tape. You can hear a little of that in the way "Ladies' Nite in Buffalo?" refuses to hurry. It is not anxious in the loud way. It is the quiet kind, the kind that watches the corner before it crosses. Bryan Rolli at Ultimate Classic Rock later called it the best and boldest song to come out of the Van Halen orbit since 1984, which is a mouthful, and the Zoo Crew is not about to argue with him while the record is on the platter.

If you want the long road that got Dave to that cab in Buffalo, you have to go back to Bloomington, Indiana, where David Lee Roth was born on October 10, 1954, the son of Dr. Nathan Roth, an ophthalmologist, and Sybil Roth. The house had jazz in it. His old man was deep into that music, and young Dave took a shine to Al Jolson and Ray Charles before he ever took a shine to a stack of Marshalls. Summers he would head to New York and hang around his uncle Manny Roth's place, the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, the same room that had already seen Bob Dylan and a long line of folk and rock wanderers. That was his first real look at a stage that was not a living room. The family moved west when he was a teenager, landing around Pasadena. He did time at The Webb Schools and at John Muir High School, and his folks even sent him to a psychiatrist for a stretch because the boy ran hot. They called the daily bursts of energy monkey time. He also spent a stretch on a horse ranch for restless kids, which is a long way from the splits and the scarf collection, but it is part of the same story.

By the early seventies he was singing with an R&B-leaning rock band called the Red Ball Jets, named partly for the red dye in the candy that used to wind him up and partly for a sneaker brand. He studied a little music theory at Pasadena City College, worked as a hospital orderly, and kept an eye on the competition. The competition was a backyard band called Mammoth, Eddie Van Halen on guitar and vocals, Alex Van Halen on drums, and a rotating bass player. Mammoth did not own a decent PA, so they rented Dave's for about ten bucks a night. Eddie later said it got cheaper to just put him in the band. Dave auditioned, got turned down a couple of times, and then got the gig. He could not stand singing and playing at the same time the way Eddie had been doing it, and Eddie could not stand singing at all, so the trade made sense to everybody except the people who had liked Mammoth exactly as it was. Another band already had the name Mammoth, and Roth pushed to call the group Van Halen, after the brothers, the way Santana carried a name that stuck. Alex almost said no because it felt conceited. Dave won that one. Michael Anthony came over from a band called Snake, and the four of them worked the Pasadena and Santa Barbara bars, the high school dances, and the civic halls, stuffing flyers in lockers and building a crowd that did not need a record company to show up.

Gene Simmons caught them and paid for a demo. Ted Templeman at Warner Bros. caught the demo and produced the records that followed. From 1978 through 1984 Roth was the ringmaster, the guy who turned a virtuoso guitar band into a show you could not look away from. He left in 1985, put out Crazy from the Heat, and then built the Eat 'Em and Smile band like a man who wanted to prove the party still had a forwarding address. "Ladies' Nite in Buffalo?" is the quiet proof. No cartoon, no cannonball, just a story told from the back seat while the band stays out of the way. That is a hard trick for a singer who made his name jumping off drum risers, and he pulled it off.

Dave is still out there doing the Roth Show, and the official camp keeps the lights on at David Lee Roth. You can also find him on Facebook, Instagram, and X. The Zoo Crew will keep the platter warm. If the cab is still rolling and the traffic is still slow, "Ladies' Nite in Buffalo?" has got the rest of the ride.