Has anyone but me heard the vocals-only track from Runnin’ with the Devil by Van Halen? Apparently someone has found the track of DLR belting out this classic, complete with all his little … catches.
Here’s a source I found:
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/01/david-lee-roth.html
It’s a great song. But man, releasing just the vocals is dirty pool. 
And freakin’ high-larious! Some of this is destined to become beep sounds on my computer.
Yeah, I saw this on the WFMU blog yesterday, and it’s hilarious when out of context of the music. Some of his screams where he’s sort of hitting 2 notes at once are even more impressive when isolated.
Dave was a unique package…I have always thought of him as a free-form jazz scat singer in a heavy metal setting–Mel Torme in spandex if you will. Van Halen’s songs (in the Roth days, I still deny the Sammy years ever happened) were not the typical vocal frontman backed by music like 99% of other rock music. They were really a 2-way dueling banjos mesh of artistry and oneupmanship between Eddie and Dave and it came across brilliantly. Very similar to how Page/Plant worked off of each other.
Nicely put. IMHO, let’s be clear: Diamond Dave wasn’t a “vocalist” - you can’t call what he did “singing” per se. 
No, Dave was a Front Man. And a truly great one. But no one ever expected Dave to deliver solid vocals - in the pre-American Idol days, we didn’t have the word “pitchy” to work with. My, but Dave is pitchy.
Bottom line: holding Dave to a vocal standard, or isolating him that way is simply bad form and in no way captures what he brought to the Big Picture for VH as a band…but it is hilarious.
Reminds me of when there was supposedly a bootleg of solo’d Linda McCartney’s keyboards/vocals from some Wings sessions. I heard it was strangely Shaggs-like. The Loud Family had a CD named The Tape of Only Linda, BTW.
But DLR is just one of many lead singers who aren’t great singers but make up for it in spazziness, like Mick Jagger, Bon Scott, Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison, etc. We like our singers a tad nutso.
Yeah, how the hell does he do that? I wouldn’t have pegged him as a master of Tuvan throat singing. Do you think that it’s a repeatable technique, or did Dave have a lucky bit of phlegm on his vocal cords that day?
Yeah, that was my point: The songs with DLR are great, they’re classics, and they work well musically. But, wow, does that sound funny on its own.
I have always wondered what the hell he was actually saying here and even heard some rumors of it being something about the Navy. “Goddamn the Navy…unintelligible garble…”
One more little mystery of life solved by The Dope! Thank you!
I’ve also just discovered that DLR was the forerunner of Shakira.
