The Best

The Best collects David Lee Roth's solo recordings for Warner and was released by Rhino in the United States in October 1997. Nineteen of its twenty tracks come from the five releases he made for the Warner group, from the 1985 EP Crazy from the Heat to Your Filthy Little Mouth of 1994; the twentieth, the opener "Don't Piss Me Off", was a new and previously unreleased recording. Roth's own website listed the collection among his solo releases as Best of David Lee Roth. The year before, he had briefly rejoined Van Halen to record two new songs for that band's greatest-hits album, and 1997 also saw the publication of his autobiography, Crazy from the Heat. The sequence ignores chronology and mixes the albums together. Six songs come from Eat 'Em and Smile, among them "Yankee Rose" and "Goin' Crazy!"; four from Skyscraper, including "Just Like Paradise"; three from Crazy from the Heat, including the Beach Boys cover "California Girls" and the medley "Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody"; and three each from A Little Ain't Enough and Your Filthy Little Mouth. The new song was recorded at The Alley in North Hollywood, with Steve Hunter on guitar, Freebo on bass and Brett Tuggle on keyboards, and the whole collection was remastered by Bill Inglot and Dan Hersch. The album spent a single week on the Billboard 200, at No. 199 on the chart of 15 November 1997. Warner Music Japan released it in Japan on 25 November 1997 and reissued it on SHM-CD on 18 April 2018. The following year Roth released an album credited to the DLR Band on his own label, Wawazat!!, and in 2025 Rhino gathered the five Warner releases sampled here into the box set The Warner Recordings 1985-1994.