DLR Band

DLR Band followed Your Filthy Little Mouth of 1994 and was credited to the DLR Band, on David Lee Roth's own label, Wawazat!!. A double A-side single, "Slam Dunk!" and "King of the Hill", came out in early May 1998, and the album followed on 9 June 1998. Roth said the two single tracks were written and recorded in four days, and the whole album was recorded and mixed in ten, a pace he had not worked at since Van Halen II in 1979. The production credit went to Wawazat!!, with Erwin Musper engineering and mixing. Roth wanted new faces rather than session players. John Lowery, then 24 and working with Rob Halford's project 2wo, and later known as John 5, played guitar and bass on half the album; he had called Roth's management after finding their number in the back of Roth's autobiography, and sent demos he had recorded with Bob Marlette. Mike Hartman, who had just turned 21, played on "King of the Hill" and "Indeedido", and the rest of the guitar parts came from Terry Kilgore, Roth's bandmate in the pre-Van Halen group Red Ball Jets, who had also played on the previous album. The drummer, Ray Luzier, came from Metal Shop, an early version of Steel Panther, and stayed in Roth's band until 2005. The album spent one week on the Billboard 200, at No. 172 on the chart of 27 June 1998, while "Slam Dunk!" climbed to No. 11 on the Mainstream Rock chart. Promotion amounted to a handful of radio interviews and no tour followed the release. Roth went on the road the following summer, opening for a reunited Bad Company, by which time Lowery had joined Marilyn Manson's band and Bart Walsh, from the Van Halen tribute band the Atomic Punks, played guitar. The album first reached iTunes in June 2009.