David Lee Roth – California Girls

The Cover Stopped At The Exact Chart Position Of The Original, With A Beach Boy Singing On It

Number three is where Billboard’s Hot 100 stopped the Beach Boys’ California Girls in August 1965, and it is where the same chart stopped David Lee Roth’s remake in March 1985. The coincidence flatters a record most people filed as a joke: the singer of Van Halen clowning his way through a surf-era standard. It was better built than that. One of the voices stacked behind Roth belonged to Carl Wilson, who had sung on the original, and the man who wrote the song ended up among the cover’s admirers.

Keep watching: Van Halen – Jump · The Beach Boys – Surfin’ USA

The original never needed rescuing. Brian Wilson and Mike Love wrote it, Wilson produced it, and the Beach Boys’ single arrived on July 12, 1965. What Roth needed twenty years later was material. Van Halen had just come off the tour behind 1984, and his work with the band had left him no time to write songs of his own. He wanted a solo record anyway, and covers were the quick way to get one. His taste ran older than hard rock. Born in Bloomington, Indiana, on October 10, 1954, he was the nephew of Manny Roth, who owned the Cafe Wha? in New York, and the songs he picked came from Louis Prima, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Edgar Winter and the Beach Boys.

Because it was a side project, it moved fast. Roth cut the tracks in the fall of 1984 at the Power Station in New York in about four days, with Van Halen’s own producer, Ted Templeman, in charge. None of his bandmates played. Templeman used session men: Eddie Martinez and Sid McGinnis on guitars, Willie Weeks on bass, John Robinson on drums and Sammy Figueroa on percussion, with Edgar Winter and Brian Mann on synthesizers. For the harmonies he brought in Christopher Cross and Carl Wilson. Cross later said Roth’s side wanted “a stamp of approval and validation” for touching the song. A Beach Boy at the microphone gave them one.

A vacation that turned into an exit

Approval from the source did not hurt at radio. Warner Bros. put the single out ahead of the four-song EP Crazy from the Heat, which followed on January 28, 1985. Billboard ranked the song No.3 on both the Hot 100 and its rock chart. It reached No.6 in Australia, No.7 in New Zealand and No.8 in Canada, and the Official Charts Company logged a No.68 peak in Britain on March 2. The EP climbed to No.15 on the Billboard 200, and the RIAA certified it platinum. A second single, the medley Just a Gigolo / I Ain’t Got Nobody, went to No.12.

The video did as much as the record. Roth directed it with Pete Angelus, who had made Van Halen’s Jump and Hot for Teacher clips, under the joint credit the Fabulous Picasso Brothers. They shot at Venice Beach. It opens on a spoof of The Twilight Zone, then casts Roth as a tour guide leading a group of tourists along the beach, past swimsuit models frozen in place like store mannequins, before he dances off down the sidewalk. Roth described the approach as the Marx Brothers meeting rock and roll. On MTV it presented him as a solo entertainer with no band in the frame.

That worked too well for the band he was still in. Within months of the EP’s release, Roth and Van Halen had split. The group hired Sammy Hagar and released 5150 in 1986, the same year Roth answered with Eat ‘Em and Smile. A record made on a break had become the reason he no longer had anything to take a break from.

Brian Wilson gave the verdict that matters. He told the New York Times in 2005 that Roth’s version was “really, really good,” and on other occasions he pointed out that it had reached the same chart position as his own and that having Carl sing on it kept the feel. A parody would not have earned that from him. Roth changed the costume and left the architecture alone, with the harmonies intact and sung in part by a man who helped build them. That is why the cover landed exactly where the original did, and why four days of fun at the Power Station turned into the hinge of his career.