Eat 'Em and Smile

Eat 'Em and Smile was the first full-length album David Lee Roth made after leaving Van Halen. Several of its songs, "Goin' Crazy!" among them, had been meant for Crazy from the Heat, a film he had written with Pete Angelus and others and was to star in. CBS Theatrical Films gave it a $10 million budget, but in November 1985, days before shooting, CBS shut down its film division, and the planned soundtrack became a record in its own right. The band came together over the summer and autumn of 1985: Billy Sheehan of Talas, Steve Vai, a Frank Zappa alumnus recommended by Ted Templeman, and Gregg Bissonette, chosen at auditions. Recording began in late November 1985 at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley and moved to the Power Station in New York, with additional work at Can-Am Recorders in Tarzana. Templeman, who had produced all six of Roth's albums with Van Halen, tracked the band live in the first few days, and Vai recalled that about half of Roth's vocals from those basic tracks were kept. Six of the ten songs are Roth and Vai compositions, and Sheehan wrote "Shyboy" in his Talas days. For "I'm Easy", first recorded by the Australian singer Billy Field, Vai wrote and conducted a big-band arrangement for New York session players; the other covers are "Tobacco Road" and "That's Life", the standard Frank Sinatra sang. Released on 7 July 1986, the album reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and No. 28 in the UK, and the RIAA certified it gold and platinum on the same day, 9 September 1986. "Yankee Rose" went to No. 16 on the Hot 100 and No. 10 on Billboard's rock radio chart, and its video, made by Roth and Angelus with costumes and performers prepared for the film, was a fixture on MTV; "Goin' Crazy!" followed at No. 66 and "That's Life" at No. 85. Kerrang! named it its album of the year. The tour that began in August ran to more than 100 North American shows, and in September a Spanish-language version, Sonrisa Salvaje, was released.