Notes on Camp: on David Lee Roth
The case for a Camp reading of one of rock’s greatest frontmen
[The following was written for the March Badness music essay brackets. Writers were challenged to explain why a song deigned as “bad” was either good bad or truly good.]
Camp turns trash into treasure. More than that, camp is pleased that its sources are trash but is also invested in revealing that those sources were treasure all along. This is perhaps the most forceful way in which camp distinguishes itself from similar forms of literary irony such as satire and parody.
— Sarah Rasher, Dirty Old Mentors. Unpublished dissertation, University of Connecticut 2013
Music critics hate me and love Elvis Costello because music critics look like Elvis Costello. — David Lee Roth.
Taking David Lee Roth’s music seriously the way you would take Elvis Costello’s music seriously is not the point of David Lee Roth. Regarding him on a good (i.e. serious, authentic) vs. bad (i.e. tasteless, superficial) axis is misunderstanding his work entirely. But talking Goodness or Badness Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love…and I fucking love David Lee Roth. I’m going to tell you why.
Like any self respecting rock snob mainlining underground music, I used to hate David Lee Roth. Most of my published music writing is about goth rock — real goth rock. So how did I fall in love with a song by an arena rock band that ends up in a March Badness bracket? How am I supporting a sparkly, synth-y, and seemingly unnecessary 1980s cover of a song by legitimate geniuses (and eventual critical darlings) The Beach Boys?
The first time in my adult life that I even considered DLR was while watching VH1 Metal Mania late at night. My husband, a fan of extreme metal, was pretty neutral on it, but from my first viewing of Dave’s Yankee Rose video, I was reeled in by how over the top it all was.
It features:
- Street-harassing the Statue of Liberty
- A lycra unitard/thong combo that my dance instructor in the 80s would’ve killed for
- Dave’s bare ass surprisingly close to the camera with a horse’s tail mounted betwixt
- More “this guitar is my dick” preening than literally any other music video (is that what they taught you at Berklee College of Music, Steven Vai?!)
- Dave’s roundhouse kick bursting open a giant balloon containing…more balloons!
- A really rocking song
This is camp. I love camp! Especially camp that subverts masculinity by revealing its artifice.
Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation — not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it’s not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism)
— Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp.
When people say that California Girls is bad they are missing the camp and so much hard rock of the era is campy as hell. Camp can be deliberate or accidental. But Roth knew what he was doing when he hired legendary fashion photographer Helmut Newton, fresh off a shoot for Playboy, to shoot photos of himself bare chested in chains for the cover of Van Halen’s Women and Children First. Helmut Newton told him “You are my new favorite blond.” The band relegated Dave’s fetish glamor shoot to a foldout poster, instead of the cover. But in solo album land there is no one to tell Roth to tone anything down. Ever.
My DLR fandom began with a certain amount of humor and detachment. “Look at this rock and roll clown’s over the top performance”. The Broadway inspired dance moves. The lycra and makeup and teased hair which — speaking as a fellow Jew — may simply be his natural hair texture plus a bit of spray. His Diamond Dave persona is a deliberate construction that he refers to in the third person. It’s a persona that he developed as a High School theater kid (of course he was a theater kid).
My bar mitzvah was my first starring role
— David Lee Roth
Roth’s pre-Van Halen band was performing at other teens’ Bar Mitzvahs and Quinceañeras all over Los Angeles and their goal was to make everyone dance. His band played funk music and had choreography, performing for racially diverse audiences. He was part of an integration bussing program and he loved being one of the only white kids in school.
That was the energy he brought to Van Halen. Before he joined, the Brothers Halen were doing Sabbath covers. Sabbath are gods — but they don’t make dance music. That alone wasn’t going to make Van Halen into the massive party band that saved heavy metal. And that’s what Van Halen became, as outlined in the excellent book by historian Greg Renoff, Van Halen Rising: How a Southern California Backyard Party Band Saved Heavy Metal.
Van Halen is a combination of the Van Halen brothers’ heavy metal power and technical innovation mixed with Dave’s showmanship, his theater kid campiness wrapped in a legibly over-the-top masculinity. Without Dave, Van Halen’s music got dull and self serious. Without the Van Halen brothers Dave’s music was less influential but 300% campier and still incredibly fun.
Renoff tells me “from Jump to Hot For Teacher through Just a Gigolo [Dave’s solo work] you can see that kind of evolution to a more campy, ironic type of approach to performance and musical presentation which was at odds with the type of stuff (some 0f) his peers were doing in 1985. What I mean by that is that Roth’s videos are much more like Cindi Lauper’s videos than like Mötley Crüe’s videos in 1984.”
Am I going to be an original or an archetype? I’m both.
— David Lee Roth
But who needs a cover of the perfect Beach Boys song California Girls? This cover is excess itself! Yet The Beach Boys themselves cosigned Dave’s endeavor — Carl Wilson sings backing vocals on the track and Brian Wilson speaks highly of it.
Are you going to tell Brian Wilson he’s wrong about this cover being good? Do YOU know better than Brian Wilson?
The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson is one of the greatest composers ever. The instrumental intro to The Beach Boy’s California Girls is one of the most stunning 25 seconds of music ever made. Did you know it was based on Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring? More like “California Girl, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Here, The Beach Boys’ lush 12 string guitar and horns is translated into a light tinkling synth of a melody performed by Brian Mann. California had changed a lot since the song’s 1965 heyday and Dave is going to make it as much of a time capsule as possible.
Some have told me the video is painful to watch. I’m largely desensitized to sexist art from the 80s if it leans so heavily into camp as this does. But there are racist caricatures in the video. The ways that it is racist are really obvious and I don’t have much insight to add to it. So I’m not going to tell you HAVE to watch this video. Maybe the real March Badness is me, since I’ll still watch stuff like this despite the racism. But these are the other things I see in this video, if you’re willing to follow me in.
The California Girls video was huge on MTV — it had initially been envisioned as part of a TV movie but they lost financing. There’s a Maurice Chevalier quote then it opens with a Twilight Zone voiceover welcoming us to “the sunlight zone”. We get a fisheye lens view from inside a tour bus of a bunch of jittery caricatures of tourists visiting LA. Many of them are fucked up and I’m not going to defend them.
Under Pete Angelus’s direction, we get Dave in a white gloved bus driver uniform with a Your Guide cap making eyes at us. We’re about to get the Dave’s Eye View of California. Dave teaches you how to Dave. He is Your Guide. He shows you how to watch his video, it’s not just the Male Gaze, it’s the Dave Gaze.
The video is full of Dave looking at things and directing his tour group, and you the viewer, to look at those things with him. He points at them, and the camera follows his eye lines to gaze at things. Largely he’s directing you to look at bikini girls.
But as Dave says on his YouTube series “I agree with the younger generation: a bikini is a script, a bikini is a storyline.” So we get the bikini stories of the women in their regional bikini costumes. Special shout-outs to his “midwest farmer’s daughters” tableau as well as his disturbingly, deeply distressed jeans in the Southern scene — -also possibly his dick? Probably the only thing that can compete for attention from his ironic use of the Traitors Rag (for fucks sake don’t use that, even ironically). He also directs us to look at female bodybuilding legend, Kay Baxter, who was Dave’s trainer.
Everything in the video is as much a caricature as the national bikini girl tour get-ups. It’s a missed opportunity that the East Coast Girl who’s hip is holding a hotdog and not a bagel.
The whole video is a shtick-laden show performed on a beach. There’s also a literal garbage fire on the sidewalk. There’s some Busby Berkely style leg dances, Fosse-esque hand and hip isolations. The end is a now famous shot of women posing as mannequins along a walkway as Dave dances between them in a bow-tie, vest and gloves, doing his iconic yelps, kicks and spins and mugging the whole way.
There’s no David Lee Roth without the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz and The Nicholas Brothers.
— David Lee Roth, on Design Matters podcast.
Dancing is really important to Roth’s performances. Not sure how many hard rockers talk about the choreography that inspires them. His style is a combination of martial arts — which he studied all his life — and old school showbiz moves. He tap dances “wings” and even does Scarecrow’s heel click at the end. But the fact that he’s citing the iconically campy The Wizard of Oz as well as early 20th century Black tap dancers/choreographers is a pretty good thesis statement on Dave as a student of pop culture.
Only a fool thinks that just experience can replace an education.
— David Lee Roth on vocal lessons.
One of the things that moved my interest in Roth from ironic detachment to genuine love was realizing how fun his songs are to sing. It’s not just the over-the-top lyrics, it’s his vocal lines that give a singer a lot to do in between the trademarked yelps. Dave’s voice is satisfyingly raspy while being strongly melodic and he uses it. He’s one of those singers whose speaking voice sounds exactly like his singing voice. He is actually a trained singer — which may explain how he was able to perform effectively for so long.
He got his start singing from his Bar Mitzvah coach (of course he did) who was a Holocaust survivor. His teacher told him “Mr. Roth, if you can’t find it within yourself to sing on behalf of those who went up the chimneys with a song in their hearts, sing so you don’t go up the chimneys.” Performing is self expression, but perfectionism is a survival mechanism.
Dave often says “you don’t need to speak English to understand what I’m singing about” but for anyone who doesn’t, he did record an entire version of his Eat ’Em and Smile album in Spanish. His attempt at universalism is undermined by this video, which I understand is hard to watch for many people. But Dave wants to be understood, he wants you to join his party bus.
Unlike his subsequent solo albums there’s no killer guitar solo on California Girls. This cover is too faithful for that. It basically BeDazzlers the original song in 80’s production values and lets his campiness and the brilliance of the original composition carry the day. I think it succeeds. It’s a tribute to the aesthetics that shaped him as a performer.
Roth has said many variations of, “Music critics like Elvis Costello because music critics look like Elvis Costello.” There is truth to that. He’s not the relatable nerd. He makes music for the masses and his entire persona is about being a star. But he’s not just talking about himself when he points out critical biases, he’s talking about the MTV of his day that wouldn’t play black artists. He claims he was fired by CBS Radio for playing what the station called “too much ethnic music” when he took over for Howard Stern’s radio show. He talks enough about funk and blues artists that I believe him.
To be clear, I’m not saying he’s “woke” — that’s ahistorical and wrong. At minimum, he was active in Republican Hollywood at some point. He has racist caricatures in his videos. Those sorts of characters also exist in the vaudeville that he draws upon too. Camp can be racist.
Speaking of problematic, it’s telling that while some of the bands that followed in Roth’s footsteps, like Mötley Crüe (who I adore) have been rehabilitated in critical assessment — Roth has not. I think it’s the camp factor. He’s not trying to be tough, or serious. He is trying to seduce YOU (everyone?) and he is going for a laugh. That can be uncomfortable for straight male audiences and straight people generally don’t recognize camp. The queer audiences who might see Diamond Dave and truly Get It are largely not going to see it in the first place because it is not marketed towards us. Or maybe they’re understandably put off by the racist video — I can’t blame anyone for that.
But you do not get those later bands without Van Halen, and you don’t get Van Halen without Roth. “I was sexually inappropriate with an entire generation, musically speaking,” Roth proclaims. He feels even more inappropriate today. That’s rock. That’s camp. That’s David Lee Roth’s cover of California Girls, submitted for your approval, March Badness 2020.
Elana Levin podcasts at the intersection of comics, geek culture and politics as Graphic Policy Radio. Elana has written about comics and politics for sites including The Daily Beast, Wired Magazine, Graphic Policy and Comics Beat and would love to have the opportunity to write about music more often. Elana tweets a little too much @Elana_Brooklyn and teaches digital strategy for progressive campaigns and nonprofits.
