Songoftheday 3/10/14 - There will come a day and youth will pass away, what'll they say about me?...

David Lee Roth - "Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody"
from the EP Crazy From The Heat (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #12 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 10

Today's Song of the Day is from crazy flamboyant (but straight) hard rocker David Lee Roth, who left Van Halen and released an EP of four non-metal-style songs, which had already spawned a left-field top-3 pop hit with a campy take on the Beach Boys' hit from 1965, "California Girls". For his follow-up he went even farther back, with a medley of two pre-rock era songs done in an almost vaudevillian way. "Just A Gigolo" is an adaptation of an Austrian song from 1929 by Leonello Casucci and Julius Brammer reworked by Irving Caesar, while "I Ain't Got Nobody" is a ragtime/jazz standard from 1915 by Spencer Williams and Roger Graham. It was merged as an early-style "mash-up", if you will, by outgoing bandleader and singer Louis Prima in 1956...

David's cover basically cribbed the whole feel of Prima's version, though nobody of age to be watching MTV would notice a lick. But dayum, Dave knows how to make an entertaining music video.

"Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" became "Diamond Dave"'s second solo hit in June of 1985, while stopping at #25 on the rock radio chart in Billboard magazine. Internationally, the record went top 10 in both Canada and New Zealand....

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


Roth wasn't the only act to reprise Prima's medley....in 1979 the Village People, yes, the Village People recorded the song as a single...

Up tomorrow: It's looking up for a British keyboard whiz.