“Tobacco Road” by David Lee Roth

"Tobacco Road" shows up on Eat ’Em and Smile, David Lee Roth's 1986 album, and it's a song with plenty of miles on it: John D. Loudermilk wrote it and put it out in 1960, loosely drawing on his own boyhood in Durham, North Carolina. Roth grabs that old blues and hauls it out of the dirt and into the neon.

He brought serious firepower to the job. Steve Vai plays guitar, Billy Sheehan plays bass and sings backup, Gregg Bissonette is on drums and Jesse Harms on keyboards, and Ted Templeman produced, with Jeff Hendrickson engineering. A back-porch song handed to a hot-rod band: the collision is the whole point.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.