Yankee Rose

And he had plenty of solo hits.

California Girls, Yankee Rose, Just Like Paradise in the late 80s.

And in Van Halen's 78 debut album, they sold more than 12 million copies.

Man.

Wow.

Me refiero a la Yankee Rose.

[laughs]

Oh.

Now, let's check in on David Lee Roth.

Eat 'Em and Smile came out July 7th and kicks off with Yankee Rose.

A dynamite rocker to ignite Diamond Dave's true solo career.

His confidence is beaming right off the bat.

As this just positively erupts when listening, Hagar's vocals could shatter glass and the music is strutting with an insatiable beat.

A terrific portion that always makes me want to crank up the volume.

For Edelman Smile, I decided to go with Yankee Rose's first few verses.

While the intro on Edelman Smile is fantastic, the most memorable part of Yankee Rose is when Dave gets into the verses.

This is, this is really fucking stupid.

But can we agree that Yankee Rose is a much superior piece of American exceptionalism to VOA? To VOA.

Yeah.

Because you know what Yankee Rose is about, right?

No. It's about the Statue of Liberty.

Okay.

So that's the Yankee Rose he's talking about? Yeah.

That makes sense.

And I'll tell you where our 250 fuck-up is.

For episode 249, we did Yankee Rose.

And for episode 250...

We did...

Now, had we been thinking ahead of time, and we're notoriously bad at acknowledging holidays and anniversaries.

We never time this stuff right.

Wouldn't Yankee Rose have been the better 250th episode? Oh, my God.

That would have been...

They were way off the mark, even though the front man was usually kind of doing some of this stuff.

David Lee Roth with the Yankee Rose.

Even though the music video comes off as pure high-energy party chaos with critics pointing out to its overt sexual innuendo and then many accused the song as being related to Anton LaVey's book, The Satanic Bible, Yankee Rose was actually written as a straight-up tribute to the Statue of Liberty.

It's the truth.

That's right.

It was not about a lady of the night.

It was about the Statue of Liberty.

Yankee Rose came out in 1986, remember? This is right when the monument was going through major public renovations leading up to its 100th anniversary.

It's a gem, you know, cause she's in a band.

I've just always, since I was like a kid, like watching David Lee Roth videos, like the Yankee Rose video with my babysitter and, neighbor and it was like wow and i love that and then i loved wrestling because like the ultimate warrior looked like he could have been in a hair metal band but he was athletic you know and my family are party people but they're also all jocks you know the jocks and they're sports with a

big sports party uh so jersey short are you guys philly people

I don't know what they, whatever teams they were into was whoever they were betting on.

Was Dave going to play Van Halen songs? Was he going to play his songs? What was he going to do? So that was kind of my thought process, you know, going in.

As far as the song that I still remember, I mean, I would say it was Yankee Rose because that was his new song.

And that got the crowd really pumped.

He did, by the way, do Van Halen songs, but it was more towards the end.

He was trying to establish himself more as a solo artist.

But no, I'd say Yankee Rose, because that was the one the video had been pumping for the last like month or two on MTV.

The song had been all over the radio.

And that was kind of the vibe that I was ready for that.