Back in 1998, a pre-Marilyn Manson and -Rob Zombie John 5 (then John Lowry) backed David Lee Roth on the Van Halen singer’s rather underrated album, DLR Band. For years now, John 5 has also talked in interviews about the fact that, around 2014, he recorded another album of material with Roth, which has yet to see the light of day.
Now, in a new video interview with Masters of Shred, John 5 actually unveiled some of that music, pulling out his phone to play a clip of one of the songs.
Before doing so, he recalled the circumstances of the recording. "So here’s what would happen,” he said. “Dave would call me. He'd be like, 'Come on over. Let's write some songs, get some burritos.' And I would always hang out with Dave. For years and years and years. So I'd just go over and we'd just talk about everything and play music and write songs, you know, all the time.”
John continued, "So there was this time where we would write songs early in the morning and then he would rent out the studio at night. So we'd write, write, write and then we'd go into a studio. And we did that for a long time. And we were recording and writing and recording and writing and we had a collection of music.”
After telling the story, John 5 played a roughly 40-second clip of music from what he calls the “California Sessions.”
You can hear the tune, which consists of John 5 on acoustic guitar and Dave on vocals, at roughly the 22:50 mark of the interview.
"It reminds me of, like, 'Damn Good' [from Roth’s 1988 album, Skyscraper], something like that,” John says.
