Diamond Dave
The Best Interview Ever Known To Mankind: David Lee Roth at 7:30 A.M.
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» CALEY COOK | CONTRIBUTOR
For an entire generation of MTV viewers "California Girls" is a David Lee Roth song. The Beach Boys? Hell, to a 5-year-old in 1985, schizophrenic fat men in Hawaiian shirts do not star in pop-tart wet dream music videos of boob-baring, roller-skating excess. To a 5-year-old "Punky Brewster" fan in 1985, the Beach Boys have never known such wonderful panache. A former frontman of Van Halen on the other hand…
And there’s the rub. An entire bloc of people remember Roth as the spandex-stretching white guy that "Jump"-ed through the '80s and attempted to party his way into the '90s, and even more remember that this attempt was for naught – to the populace in 1990, Roth simply didn’t get the joke. Few, however, recall Roth's appeal to begin with: Roth brought along a sense of showmanship and overtly kitschy visual persona to a rock genre that was lulling itself to sleep in the face of MTV in the early '80s. America had heard Roth’s song and dance routine before from various talking heads, but rarely had anyone owned up to manufacturing it on purpose and, GASP, simply not giving a flying fuck.
Roth gets the joke now, and arguably, he always did.
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David Lee Roth: My pleasure to meetcha.
NATN: Good to meet you too. How are you this morning?
DLR: Like a thunderbolt in your Cheerios, hot stuff.
NATN: You’re really, really awake this morning.
DLR: A missile in your "Pop Tart!"
NATN: Do you always get up this early?
DLR: I’ve been asleep since the late '70s. Where you been?
NATN: I wasn’t born in the late '70s.
DLR: Well, then you’re just in time for the dance contest.
NATN: Well, OK. Yeah, you’re going on tour man. Tell me about it.
DLR: My life is a video, [so] why stop now. People say, 'hey, what’s your life like,' and I say, 'my life is a cabaret, old chub.' It doesn't even matter where I play anymore. Between the millions of people you and I entertain by the time this stuff gets on the Internet, I think I'll be upgraded to action figure. I'm no longer a vocalist!
NATN: What would you action figure look like?
DLR: I'm the patron saint of larceny! A lot more fun than the prince of darkness!
NATN: Are you?
DLR:Oh yeah! I detect a little larceny in your voice. Does anybody else know you're a larcenist?
NATN: Me? No.
DLR:Oh! It goes with everything, are you kiddin'? You can start with a little larceny first thing in the morning and finish it up at happy hour. You have to like it, especially as a writer. There's always a little bit of the monkey stealing the coconut, then the other monkey has rage and then you have art (laughs). No rage? No art! No art? No larceny! No media!
NATN: Man, you are up. You must take your coffee at 4 in the morning.
DLR: Mmmmm, no, I have a surgically implanted disco beat. (laughs).
NATN: Is that what your album is going to be like?
DLRmimicking Transformer/He-Man voice) Do not be afraid (laughs).
NATN: I won't.
DLR:I am energy. It's not fabricated. People used to say I was hyperactive; now they say I'm really really self-motivated. They like what I do! I've done a lot of other jobs. This one is really good.
NATN: What other jobs have you done?
DLR: I worked in surgery for two years out of junior college. I was a surgical assist and what they call a nuclear janitor. Nuclear medicine was just coming in – MRIs and CAT scans were just barely starting and you had to have a nuclear designation on your union card. And you know, you had to go through all kinds of stuff and training and so forth. And I worked at all state hospitals, burn wards and so forth and I worked night shift in the barrio. I've got expertise in interesting areas, I guess.
NATN: Can you use that on stage?
DLR:I've actually used it on a few people! I've actually run into some serious accidents along the way. Rock and roll is pretty predictable -- it's the other 38 stamps in my passport that I spent the money on. Don't ask me how to spell New Guinea but I've got the pictures of both of us there (laughs)!
NATN: OK, so you're touring and you've got a new album (Diamond Dave). Is it deja vu? ?
DLR: No, it's not déjà vu. It's only deja vu if you're doing the same show and the same routine over and over again. There are some bands that are extraordinary at that. The Rolling Stones have been playing the same song over and over and over again for, what do you think, 25, 30 years? I like the song though! AC/DC has been playing the same song, album by album for 30 years but we dig the song. I do believe, however, that mankind was destined for change. There are only two things that really look exactly the same from the moment you first see them to the moment they are dead and they are a sea anemone and Neil Young (laughs).
NATN: Neil Young? There's no way he came out like that.
DLR: Oh, absolutely, I'm convinced.
NATN: Soooo.. what was this video shoot thing I read about?
DLR: Oh! Three days of fun and music. No, that was Woodstock. What I was doing was the VH1 Classic "Diamond Dave's No-Holds Barbeque and Christmas Special." Is that what you're referring to? 'Cause if you weren't, you should be.
NATN: Fourth of July? Christmas?
DLR: I just finished 70 spots of my own creation – completely of my own creation – with all the guest characters that I served you up in "Gigilo" and "California Girls," which I wrote and directed. In this we have the Dom triplets from Playboy, as pregnant white chain smoking trash and I know you're thinking, 'Diamond Dave, you don't have to be white to be pregnant chain smoking trash,' and I'll tell you, 'sweetheart, it sure helps.' Why can't they be heroes too, goddamn it (pause for laugh)? I have a low-rider donkey – don't ask, just watch – I have the security guy from the circus, Jumbo Jimmy. My hallucinations are what your reality caused me to have after happy hour. Ridicule and sarcasm were refined arts in my family and I have a black belt (laughs). I came out of the Roth family history with the scars and the bars (laughs). Stars and the scars.
NATN: You deserve it, I guess.
DLR: I don't base what I do in the eyes of others. [In French accent] What was it, Sartre? He said the most famous single sentence in all of philosophy study, um, [in French] 'hell is in the others.' You may have heard it. They teach you that within the first 30 days of any philosophy class at any university and what it means is, if you are looking to find yourself reflected in the eyes of the others or you are judging your performance or whatever it is you do by how others see it, you will be in hell. Somebody may say, 'well Dave, what about those hardcore Van Halen fans,' and I said, 'they grew up and stopped buying records.' I never really considered what 40-somethings think about music, any more than what 20-somethings think about it. For everyone reading this right now, I think I know what's best for everybody. That's where we're going.
NATN: Don't you kinda have to consider it since you enjoy your fans?
DLR: I love my fans, but it's not a love affair. What I'm doing is a vision of the world around me and all I'm really responsible for, if there's a responsibility to be had in the fine arts, is to make a perfectly clear picture of the artists' point of view at that time. Now it turns out that I'm just commercially minded 'cause that's what I grew up on. It's as simple as if you grow a little kid up in Japan, they're gonna think a squid on a stick means a Saturday afternoon. If you grew up with cheeseburgers and fries like I did on the East Coast, than that's what you'll want. Can you dig?
NATN: I can dig.
DLR: Um, I spun off for a second, umm…
NATN: That's OK. You're probably a busy guy doing these interviews in the morning.
DLR: No, you're asking interesting questions as opposed to simplistic, one-dimensional answers. Who knows? There may be a musician here who may read some element of this and who might actually go out to make a contribution to something you and I will want to buy later on. If there's any responsibility to what we do, it's to commit myself completely.
NATN:Well, it seems like you do that.
DLR: Oh! Visions of what people want amounts to Ricky Martin, which is proof positive that just because you're young don't mean you rock.
NATN:You don't think he rocks?
DLR: I think the expression "just because you're young, you rock" is not true. Proof of that is…
NATN: Some people might think he rocks.
DLR: The committee who designed him? There's nothing wrong with Ricky that wasn't wrong or right with The Monkees but it's the difference between The Monkees and The Beatles. I bought both and I can sing you songs from both many summers later. Which one was better? You can't really tell. If they made you smile, great. That's what I sell! I brought a smile to the hips of people for many summers.
NATN: Man, you must enjoy being on tour. You sound like the touring type.
DLR: Yeah, well, I have a general sense of humor about it, even if it is larcenist.
NATN: Well, what's an average day on tour. Give me an average day.
DLR: Tour is like living on a submarine. You know, there's long, long periods of absolutely nothing followed by brief intense panic. And whatever happens after the show, well, what I do before the show in preparation: the video, the interview, the recording process and so forth is kind of a combination of Groucho Marx and Kurosawa. What I do onstage is somewhere between, I don't know, Bruce Lee and the scarecrow from "The Wizard Of Oz" and what I do after the show is somewhere between Errol Flynn and that other basketball player (laughs).
NATN: Do you still have some California girls backstage then?
DLR: Absolutely. California girls now have a range – I have a huge audience at college level, I'm always on a bicycle and going places and I can't go through any college campus in 22 countries without somebody going, 'hey, you're that white guy.' Now, I've also been upgraded. I have become the king of what I call The Stairmaster Nation. I married really, really fit moms with one kid under 4. I didn't know that was a whole nation (fit of laughter).
NATN: How many?
DLR: It is a formidable voting block (fit of laughter)! My lower back has been getting a harder workout than J. Lo (laughs)! Always a good time to bring that up, huh kid?
NATN: OK. Here's one last one for you: What happened at your house recently -- an incident we all read about?
DLR: Oh, we had a little disturbance. Anybody caught here at night will probably be caught in the morning. I saw this guy race quietly across the backyard here. So, you know, I made a lot of noise and made him lay down in the sprinkler system and the cops came and took him away. You know, one of the beauties of a 20-gauge shotgun is that you don't have to point it at anybody. In 20 languages, racking that thing twice in a silent night says, 'what are you doing here?' The police said I was insensitive to the guy's needs and I said, 'oh, excuse me, was that low fat Crank in his pocket?' Shit.
NATN: So he was all drugged up?
DLR: Oh, they found some methamphetamines in his pocket or whatever, that could be anybody! That could be the mayor and that could be what's left of Axl's last band. That's anybody these days. What are you doing in my backyard at 3:15 in the morning without a backstage pass (laughs)?
NATN: Well, good. I'm glad you got him and you are all safe.
DLR: Jesus. You know, some people said that I never had a gun and that came out and I said, 'well, I never went down the driveway to show it to them and nobody asked if I had one in the house.' I said, 'well, maybe you're right, maybe the new low fat meth makes you wanna just lay the fuck down and go to sleep in the sprinklers' (laughs)! Give him my connection's phone number!
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