Songoftheday 11/10/15 - Rockin' steady in her daddy's car, she got the stereo with the big guitars and that's all right...

"Just Like Paradise" - David Lee Roth
from the album Skyscraper (1988)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #6 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 11

Today's Song of the Day comes from David Lee Roth, who left his gig as lead singer of hard rock titans Van Halen for a solo career, first releasing an odd retro-novelty EP set before truly re-emerging with the top-20 hit "Yankee Rose" in 1986. With guitarist Steve Vai and bass player Billy Sheehan (who both would leave Roth's band right after recording, the latter eventually forming Mr. Big), "Diamond Dave" released his second full-length solo rock album, Skyscraper, two years later. The shiny-bright first single, "Just Like Paradise", was his most commercially viable hook-laden single apart from his former band, sounding like .38 Special played through a Poison filter...

"Just Like Paradise" became Roth's second and so-far latest top-10 pop hit in March of 1988. The song also went all the way to #1 for a solid month on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart, his only solo track to do so. Internationally, the record went to #8 in Canada, reached the top-20 in Australia and New Zealand, and topped out at #27 in the UK (his first and biggest solo hit there).

Dave would hit the top-10 on the rock chart with two more songs from Skyscraper, with one of them, "Stand Up", his last on the Hot 100. In 1991, he released A Little Ain't Enough, with the title track making the British pop top-40 and #3 on the American rock chart. Three years later, Roth teamed up with Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers for his Your Filthy Little Mouth album, and landed at #12 on the rock chart with "She's My Machine". Since then he's had a couple turbulent reunions with his Van Halen bandmates, resulting in a couple tours and much bad publicity around them being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where he ended up skipping (along with the Van Halen brothers themselves).

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..and here's Dave performing "Just Like Paradise" on Japanese TV in 1988..

Up tomorrow: a soul legend and her clan jumps ship.