David Lee Roth - Crazy from the Heat

I wonder how much of a debt Dave owes to The Honeydrippers 1984 EP Volume One? That showed there was an audience for this kind of stuff. Since they never dropped a number two, Diamond Dave did that for them.

I did buy The Honeydrippers EP, but never did get Crazy from the Heat. I did like the videos and thought his version of "California Girls" was awesome. I did know that Christopher Cross provided backing vocals with Carl Wilson. For whatever reason I thought that was really cool ... mainly because I loved and still love Christopher Cross' music.

When this dropped Dave was still in Van Halen and as his little EP took off, eventually going platinum I guess he figured a solo career was to be had and off he went. It is telling, that while Ted Templeman produced, long time engineer Donn Landee wasn't twiddling the nobs. Okay maybe not telling, I'm probably reading into it, but Donn and Ed seemed to be really tight and who knows maybe there's a nugget of truth in my armchair guessing.

Regardless, the little EP that doesn't even crest fifteen minutes is more fun that you'd expect. What I didn't know was how involved Edgar Winter was in the making of the record. Edgar plays keyboards and saxophone on three of the four tracks and kills it. The opening track "Easy Street" was written by Dan Hartman and was originally recorded by Edgar Winter. The first side closes with "Just a Gigolo" that based on the old Louis Prima standard. Of course if you're of a certain age Louis Prima was the guy who sang "I Wanna Be Like You" from The Jungle Book. To those Christian fundamentalists who liked to burn records in the '70s saying that bands like The Carpenters and Partidge Family would eventually lead the youth of America to buy Black Sabbath records were full of shit. It was a Disney soundtrack that would be my gateway into Louis Prima's back catalogue ... but that's another story for another time ... maybe.

With only four songs Dave wisely, or accidentally, put "Just a Gigolo" and "California Girls" on separate sides guaranteeing people would listen to the whole thing. The little EP ends with a cover of an old Lovin' Spoonful song, "Coconut Grove" that ends the EP on a quiet and contemplative note.

Crazy from the Heat was a revelation even back then. David always seemed to be dismissed as a singer and praised as a front man. Well the upshot here was that Dave could sing. I mean Holy kermole, I know it still sounds like he's singing with his tongue in his cheek, but dagnabbit he sounded good. Really good. Maybe he really was crazy from the heat.

Comments

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the 90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984 my (dearly departed, and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read just go back and skim it, I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off and on again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...

Lighthouse - Sunny Days

Bin diving at my local record store where there were more than a few choices to make. After picking out a half dozen treasurers I figured I'd stop looking and leave before I caused myself trouble at home.Lighthouse was one of those ridiculously large bands in the early 70s I didn't understand. I mean really, BTO was just four guys, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in the band? Of course I had a radio - it was the first significant purchase I made with my money from cutting lawns. I think at the time it cost about $35 bucks, and had FM and other high frequency things I never got to use living out in the suburbs away from the reach of the big city FM signal. Sunny Days was a great song, I remember thinking it was cool and didn't switch to the other AM station when it came on. A few years later when I got my first record player the obligatory K-Tel anthologies would feature a myriad of cut up and edited classics, among them Sunny Days and other golden nuggets that...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog