Diamond Dave

Diamond Dave arrived five years after DLR Band and was released by Magna Carta on 8 July 2003. David Lee Roth produced it with Alex Gibson, and it was recorded and mixed at Henson Recording Studios in Hollywood. Eleven of its fourteen tracks are covers. The first three are Savoy Brown songs, the opener being "I'm Tired" retitled "You Got the Blues, Not Me..."; the Steve Miller Band's "Shu Ba Da Du Ma Ma Ma Ma" becomes "Shoo Bop", and the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" appears as "That Beatles Tune". Elsewhere come the Doors' "Soul Kitchen", Jimi Hendrix's "If 6 Was 9", "She's Looking Good", associated with Rodger Collins and Wilson Pickett, and the Hombres' "Let It All Hang Out". Roth said every song was cut as an ensemble, with a real band playing together. The arrangements added vintage keyboards such as the Hammond B3 organ and the Mellotron, and the players used drum kits and amplifiers from the 1960s and 1970s. The core band was Brian Young on guitar, James LoMenzo on bass and Ray Luzier, back from DLR Band, on drums. The three originals are "Medicine Man" and "Act One", both by Roth, and "Thug Pop", written with John Lowery, his guitarist on DLR Band. The last two tracks, which the label called bonus tracks, feature Edgar Winter on saxophone: "Bad Habits" and John Brim's "Ice Cream Man", a song Roth had also recorded with Van Halen, here with Nile Rodgers on guitar. The album did not enter the Billboard 200 but reached No. 18 on Billboard's Independent Albums chart. Victor Entertainment released it in Japan in September 2003, and Cleopatra reissued it on CD and vinyl in 2021. By October 2026 no further solo studio album had followed.