I have a weird relationship with Van Halen and David Lee Roth. Weird in the sense that their music as Van Halen doesn’t move me, but every guitar player I love was heavily influenced by Van Halen and his playing. I share this exact type of relationship with The Beatles. Not much of their music moves me, but the music of their musical children inspires me. That being said, I got into this album when my guitar teacher told me the line up of this band. Once I heard Steve Vai and Nilly Sheehan were on this album, I was sold, and the fact Gregg Bissonette was on drums was an added bonus. This album changed a lot for me.
For context, I was very familiar with Steve Vai’s “Passion and Warfare” and some of Billy’s bass playing on live Vai recordings. That was it. Hearing this album opened up my eyes to a lot in the sense of virtuosos fitting into a band context with a singe. Of course, Van Halen did this, but I feel that Vai did this in a more interesting way, personally, by splicing his unique style along with a bass player that could keep up with his ludicrous lines.
Hearing Shyboy was a moment in time for me. I felt time stop for almost 3 and a half minutes as I was transfixed on a song that had crazy guitars parts, stellar vocals, drums and bass that were incredibly groovy and flashy, and an overall groove and structure that just moved me. I was seeing what musicians could do at the highest level, while still remaining catchy and poppy.
Another standout track to me is “Ladies’ Nite in Buffalo?”. It differs from the other tracks in the album with it’s bass oriented groove and Gregg holding down the pocket with Vai adding flourishes and a funk that I’d not heard from him at the time. When he hit that solo, I distinctly recall feeling the hairs on my arm stand up as he laid down a perfect solo that slunk right back into that groove from the verses. Even more importantly, as a teenager, this song opened me up to DLR and the fact that a singer could draw from various places in terms of style and influence. I associated singers as a mono-style musicians, entirely due to ignorance, but DLR pulling off this jazzy tune vocally, and also “That’s Life” at the end of the album really expanded what I understood about musicians and people.
At the time, as a guitar player, I had only listened to a few styles of music and was still an infant when it came to consuming music. “Eat Em’ and Smile” is one of those albums that I think big fans of each individual musician would know about, but this is definitely a seminal album in my brain and an album that really mad me re-evaluate everything I understood about music at 16 years old.
Memories In Wax 
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