‘Yankee Rose’: how a horrendously patriotic anthem earned David Lee Roth a solo career
Somewhere, in the depths of music industry basements and backlots, there is an ever-expanding landfill of failed vocalists who naively believed that ‘going solo’ and abandoning the band that made them would be a good career move. Back in the mid-1980s, David Lee Roth was at risk of joining those hordes.
After establishing himself as the voice of hard rock heroes Van Halen throughout the 1970s and early 1980s – the band’s defining period, as far as most fans are concerned – Roth had carved out a pretty idyllic rock and roll life for himself. After all, the benefit of being in a band like Van Halen is that, by and large, Eddie Van Halen does most of the heavy lifting and, as a result, bears the brunt of any criticism, too. At the end of the day, it’s his surname on the record sleeves.
Conversely, that same argument meant that the guitarist had carte blanche to dictate the musical direction of the band – it was, after all, his name on the record sleeves. That inner-band inequality never sat right with Roth, who ended up leaving the band following their 1984 tour, ushering in the ‘Sammy Hagar era’ of Van Halen. Then, pretty quickly, the vocalist had to turn his attention to striking while the iron was hot and establishing a bold new solo career that would keep his name relevant.
Instead of attempting the impossible task of recapturing the spirit of his recordings with Van Halen, without the aid of Eddie’s otherworldly guitar stylings, Roth instead decided to call upon American patriotism in an effort to shift a few records. Seemingly, that plan worked out for the best, and his early solo effort ‘Yankee Rose’ became a landmark hit in 1986, marking the true arrival of David Lee Roth’s solo years.
Patriotism has always been a surefire way to make a quick buck in the American economy – just look at the current sitting president, for instance – but Roth took it to the next level on ‘Yankee Rose’.
Aside from the stars-and-stripes title of the song, the lyrics also draw from the national anthem of the United States, as well as Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’, which might as well be an unofficial national anthem in and of itself.
Not stopping there, Roth namedrops everything from the Fourth of July, the War of Independence and apple pie. None of those inclusions is all that surprising, though, when you take into consideration the fact that Roth wrote the song as a kind of hair metal love song to the Statue of Liberty.
If, by some miracle, you have never heard the song, you might assume that a glam metal track cramming in as many Americanisms as humanly possible into just under four minutes would be a rather convoluted, cringeworthy effort. While there is certainly some degree of truth in that, and even Roth himself surely wouldn’t consider the song among his finest efforts, it succeeded in its aims of establishing the singer’s solo career away from the sound of Van Halen.
Peaking at number 16 in the US singles charts and even breaching the top ten of the ‘Mainstream Rock’ charts, ‘Yankee Rose’ might not have been the biggest-selling track of 1986, but it nevertheless formed an essential, nationalistic milestone in the solo outings of David Lee Roth.
