Perfect Timing

Zoo Freaks, the Crew has got Diamond Dave cranked up on the board, and the cut spinning is "Perfect Timing," the side-two rocker off David Lee Roth's 1988 album Skyscraper. If you came in expecting another Van Halen leftover, settle back. This one is pure solo-band business, written by Roth and keyboard man Brett Tuggle, clocking in at three minutes and forty-one seconds, and sitting right between the strange industrial drift of "Hina" and the horn-section circus of "Two Fools a Minute." Skyscraper hit the racks on Warner Bros. in January 1988, co-produced by Roth and Steve Vai, and recorded through the spring and fall of 1987 at Capitol in Hollywood, Stucco Blue, Smoketree, and a handful of other Los Angeles rooms. The band on the tape was the Eat 'Em and Smile lineup that had already proved Roth could leave Van Halen and still pack a stage: Vai on guitar, Billy Sheehan on bass, Gregg Bissonette on drums, and Tuggle on keys. Most of the record was Roth and Vai writing together. "Perfect Timing," like the hit "Just Like Paradise" and the single "Stand Up," came from the Roth and Tuggle side of the ledger, which tells you why it leans a little more toward the radio and a little less toward Vai's odd-meter laboratory.

Vai talked about the tune back when the record was new, in a Guitar World sit-down that walked the album song by song. He called "Perfect Timing" a more commercial number, then admitted that by the end of the guitar break he was about ready to rip the wang bar clean off the body. His line on that was pure shop talk: might as well overuse it while you are into it. Years later, in a long interview about the Skyscraper sessions, he got more specific about the tone. He had tried fancy preamps and big wooden rooms and found that expensive gear did not beat the sound he already knew how to get. On "Knucklebones" he used a Massenburg preamp and thought the guitar came out a little mushy. On "Perfect Timing" he ran through the Soundcraft console at Stucco Blue, close-miked an SM57 on the top speaker of a cabinet sitting on the floor, added a touch of processing, and called that his favorite guitar tone on the whole record. Heavy, full, distorted, almost AC/DC, he said. That is the bite you hear under Dave's vocal when the chorus kicks in. The solos across Skyscraper mostly stayed the way they were on the demos, because Roth liked them and would not let Vai redo them. Vai later said he and Dave were forensic about every detail, since it was Roth's first real outing as a producer, and that they lacked the easy hands of a career rock producer like Ted Templeman, who had cut Eat 'Em and Smile with a "let's go" attitude. Dave had been in studios long enough that he wanted to steer the ship somewhere else.

The lyric is classic Roth theater dressed up as a late-night phone call. He asks if this is a passing fancy or another passing game, something fallen angels play, then tells her to open the door before he freezes. He has tried to send a message and tried the telephone, and the cards say nobody is home. If the cards are on the table, that is a calculated risk, and only if accidental angels exist. Then comes the line that keeps the song from turning into pure come-on: that light at the end of the tunnel is the front of an oncoming train. Catchy as the hook is, Dave is winking. Perfect timing might also be the worst timing you ever picked. Fans who wanted another Eat 'Em and Smile sometimes filed the cut with the poppier side of Skyscraper, the same camp as "Stand Up," and grumbled that keyboards and a compressed mix boxed Vai in. Others heard exactly what Vai heard, a heavy guitar tone fighting its way through a polished arrangement, and figured the song had single written all over it. It never got the push that "Just Like Paradise" got. That one, also a Roth and Tuggle co-write, climbed to number six on the Hot 100 and carried the album to number six on the Billboard 200, on the way to about two million copies in the States. "Damn Good" took care of rock radio. "Perfect Timing" stayed an album cut, which is how a lot of the deep stuff on THE ZOO earns its keep.

The sessions were not a picnic. Sheehan has long said the record was a hard one, and by the time the Skyscraper tour opened in March 1988 he was gone, off to form Mr. Big. Matt Bissonette, Gregg's brother, took the bass chair for a run that stretched into December and hit North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, including the Monsters of Rock bill in England with Iron Maiden, Kiss, Megadeth, and Guns N' Roses. Roth came down onto the stage on a rope for the title track, sang "Panama" from a boxing ring at the far end of the hall, and rode a surfboard back out for "California Girls." Vai stayed through that tour and then left too. The band that cut "Perfect Timing" never played it on the road in that same shape. What you hear on the record is a snapshot of a lineup already coming apart, still sharp enough to put a commercial rocker next to a song as strange as "Hina" and a horn chart as loose as "Two Fools a Minute."

Roth did not arrive at that kind of nerve by accident. He was born October 10, 1954, in Bloomington, Indiana, the son of an ophthalmologist, and he spent pieces of his childhood around his uncle Manny Roth's club, Cafe Wha?, down in Greenwich Village, where a kid could watch the folk and rock circuit up close. The family moved west, and Dave landed at John Muir High School in Pasadena, already loud, already performing, already the guy who would rent his PA to other bands for ten bucks a night. His own group was the Red Ball Jets, an R&B-leaning rock band with guitarist Gary "Hurricane" Taylor and drummer Dan Hernandez. Roth liked to say the name pointed at the red dye in the candy that used to send him into what the family called monkey hour. One of the bands that kept renting that PA was Mammoth, Alex Van Halen on drums and Eddie Van Halen singing and playing guitar. Roth auditioned more than once before they let him in. The brothers were not sold on the flares, the suspenders, or the kid whose father had money. He kept showing up. By 1974 Mammoth had a new singer and a new name, Van Halen, which Roth has claimed as his idea, a name built to last the way Santana lasted. Michael Anthony came in on bass. The band worked the backyard parties and the Hollywood clubs until Gene Simmons paid for a demo and Warner Bros. finally signed them. The first album landed in 1978. Everything after that, the splits, the high kicks, the solo records, the mountain-climbing videos, runs back to a Pasadena kid who would not take no from a band that needed his microphone.

Skyscraper was the second full solo album after that split, and "Perfect Timing" is one of the cuts that shows what he was chasing once Templeman was out of the chair and the band was his to steer. If you want the rest of the story from the man himself, his official site is David Lee Roth. He posts on Facebook, keeps the road pictures on Instagram, and still turns up on X. Fans comparing notes on the solo years and the Van Halen years gather in the DAVID LEE ROTH group. Drop the needle on Skyscraper, let side two run, and "Perfect Timing" still sounds like a guy knocking on a door he is not sure should open, with Steve Vai's favorite guitar tone on the record right behind him.