It’s the Saturday after New Year’s, and if David Lee Roth, bouncing around his midtown Manhattan hotel room, seems to be feeling as if the holiday season festivities haven’t yet ended, well, that’s perfectly understandable. It’s been, after all, a pretty above-average week for Diamond Dave, even by official Party Animal standards. Not only did Roth help ring out the old year—you know, the one named after his band’s last album—as a celebrity emcee on MTV’s New Year’s Eve lollapalooza, showing up for the event escorted by his new “bodyguards”—two bikini-clad female bodybuilders—and loudly proclaiming his lone New Year’s resolution (“This year, everybody has to decide if they’re going to be a great big hot dog or a tiny little wiener; I myself am going to be a little wiener”). Not only did he ring in the new year the very next night as David Letterman’s very first guest for 1985 as part of a bill featuring none other than Dr. Ruth Westheimer (“You know what they say,” Roth later reflected, “Whenever you have a member of Van Halen on the television, you’d better have a sex therapist within the immediate vicinity”). No, what made this week different than all other weeks was that it marked the appearance on planet Earth of David Lee Roth’s first-ever solo record, a four track EP of cover songs originally done by the likes of the Beach Boys (!), the Lovin’ Spoonful (!!), and Louis Prima (!!!), an EP that is just so alien to what one might expect from heavy metal’s Mr. Splits that it makes, well, almost perfect sense. Especially when David Lee, er, explains it.

“With me, you’ve always got carte blanche.”