The other day, on a lark, I picked up a copy of David Lee Roth’s Crazy from the Heat, which I first bought on vinyl Holy! Fuck! 30 years ago.
Welp.
Anyway, the bit that I had thought most surprising until just now was the roster of backing musicians: Wikipedia has the run-down, of course.
To be clear, it’s not so much the calibre of people who are involved, which is unsurprising—given that DLR was, at that point, an incredibly high-profile rock-and-roller—it’s who.
Specifically: Edgar Winter.
I mean, yeah, Sid McGinnis and Willie Weeks, and these-days-composer James Newton Howard (whose bio as a performer I wasn’t familiar with, and is its own interesting story), and Carl Wilson and Christopher Cross as backing vocalists on “California Girls” are all interesting people to have show up, but at least the first three were primarily studio sidemen.
Edgar Winter, though. The only thing that surprises me more than his presence at all is, shall we say, the distance between “Frankenstein” and “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody”.
