David Lee Roth
I spent the 70’s locked in the prison that is school. For some, school can be a wonderful learning experience. It was for me. I learned that I truly hated it. The way I got through the ordeal was with the power of music. I lived for my records. The bands that I was into came to my rescue. The effect that a good piece of music has upon me is beyond words. I think that John Coltrane’s music, if used correctly, could stop war and cure cancer. When Ted Nugent would come roaring into town, I was there. Ted was the man—a real Rock and Roll Animal. I can remember being on my feet with barely any room to move because of all the seats and people, hearing him do "Free For All." All I wanted to do was wreck shit.
One night, me and my pal Ian McKaye ventured out to see our main man "The Nuge." We saw an amazing thing happen. The opening band was up there playing and they weren’t acting like any other opening band. If you didn’t know any better, you would think that this band was the band that you were there to see. The guitar player had a thing that I had never heard anywhere. It was absolutely savage. And then there was the singer…the guy wasn’t trying to get your attention, he knew he had it, whether he did or not—whether you liked it or not. There was no way you would have been able to convince these guys that they weren’t in total command. They got a mixed reaction between songs. The people who weren’t going apeshit in their favor were doing so in the opposite direction. The point is, EVERYONE was going apeshit. By the end the set, most of us in the crowd were soundly and sonically in favor of this young Southern California band with their first album out, still warm from the pressing plant. Soon after their set was finished, The Motor City Madman took the stage. Something wasn’t right. It was as if someone had come into his house and re-arranged all the furniture. Between songs the crowd started to chant the name of the opening band. At first The Nuge didn’t seem to care. After a few more songs, the crowd was really going for it. Ted got pissed off went up to the mic and screamed, "FUCK VAN HALEN!!!" The rest of the gig was bullshit. Ted had kicked his own ass and he knew it. Van Halen had blown him off his own stage and they had so much fun doing it. You knew you had to go get that record so you could re-live it in your room. After that night, I became a big fan of the band and especially their singer, David Lee Roth. I read every interview I could find. The man never stopped smiling and newer shut his mouth. He was always enjoying himself, or so it seemed. People I knew who didn’t usually voice their opinions always had an opinion about that guy. Either they were into Dave or they wanted to punch that grin right off his face. I could see why a lot of people hated his guts. His band kicked ass, he looked great, you knew that he was rich and getting down with beautiful women. He talked loud, he was funny and very smart. He knew that he was the ringmaster in the greatest show on earth. One thing that I knew infuriated people was that he was in such good physical shape but would never talk about the long hours of training it takes to build and maintain a body like that.
"I used to run but the ice kept falling out of my glass."—This is basically saying that looking this great and kicking this much ass is no problem.
"What’s the matter, aren’t you having his much goddamn fun all the time? Cheer up!" This kind of thing can really piss some people off. "Don’t give me shit pal…I’ll fuck your girlfriend!" The man is one of my heroes. A few years after my introduction to Van and the Man, I was singing in a band myself. Dave became a different kind of inspiration because now it was I who got to go out and unleash the beast every night. I now understood where that big shit eating grin came from. It came from totally blowing all opening bands and audiences away. The hairier it gets, the wider you grin. Fuck ‘em.
I used to get so much shit from people for being into the guy. People telling me that he was a clown, or that he was sexist. I always countered my opinion that he was into being a showman and if he was down with the ladies, more power to him. Hell, I wish it was me. Sexist? Give me a break with that bullshit. People would always ask me how I could identify with this guy. I told them that I identified with the rage in the music and the delivery. Looking around at what was happening then, you want to talk about rage and power, pure fury, the first Van Halen album makes Johnny Rotten out to be what he really was and still is, a hairdresser. While writing this article, the first VH CD is in its third play. That record is, I don’t know how many years old, and it wipes the floor with most records coming out these days.
For several years, world tours and six awesome albums, Van Halen destroyed the earth and everybody who went to the show had a damn good time. I know I did. Dave dressed the sets and choreographed all the moves. "If all the world’s a stage, I want better lighting." Their sixth record 1984 was their best seller. I played that one at hard volume this morning and yes, it makes ALL of these MTV dudes pale. Poison? I’m supposed to be into that? Get the fuck out of here.
Speaking of getting the fuck out, Roth quit Van Halen and from the interviews, it wasn’t very clean split. To say that there were some hard feelings would be approaching it. In the meantime, the band hired on a new singer. Sammy Hagar, one of the most incredible turn-offs known to mankind—diabolical.
Around the same time Dave split from the band, the band I was in broke up. I was either going to destroy or sink. Right on time, Dave’s first solo album Eat ’em and Smile hit the racks. It was a good shot in the arm. Soon I was in the studio doing my first solo record. I played Dave’s record all the time. The first song on it is so great. "Yankee Rose"—so crass and thunderous. "…Guess who’s back in circulation, now I don’t know what you may have heard, but what I need right now is the original good time girl…"
Dave was now the underdog, out on his own. The LP and Dave garnered all kinds of awards in Rolling Stone: Worst LP, Dressed and Male Vocalist. Awesome. Everybody had an opinion. It made me pull for him even more. I saw the tour, the second of two nights at the Inglewood Forum. It was so cool. He came out and introduced himself, "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, DAVID LEE ROTH!!!" and then fire, lights, explosions and the set started. What a crass motherfucker. What if you could do that kind of thing when you went into restaurants and funerals. Make no mistake, he and the band kicked ass that night.
Dave is part huckster, part Al Jolson. A song and dance man. He might not be on the cover of every rock magazine like he used to be, but no one lasts in that arena forever. He lasted longer and better than a lot of them. I am not going to name names, but looking at the trades and listening to what’s out there, I think it best to leave the mag covers to these new guys who grew up listening to him. What the hell.
When I caught up with Dave, he was on a break from shooting film for his next video. Dave is high--high energy, high impact. He takes his fun seriously. "Yes, I take what I do very seriously…it’s what everybody thinks about what I doing that I don’t take seriously." At first, I was nervous about talking with him. That didn’t last long though, he had me laughing too fast.
When not onstage or in the studio, Dave has been known to punctuate his life with voyages to distant locales to deal up close and personal with the terrain and its inhabitants. Such journeys include trips to New Guinea, the Amazon River and most recently, a trek through the Himalayas as well as a kayak mission in the South Pacific. These experiences give him a perspective that you might not get here in town. Take it Dave:
"Here in the city, not getting eaten by something is down around number twenty-eight on your priority list…when you’re deep water kayaking in the South Pacific, not getting eaten suddenly up around two or three…This is healthy."
I ask Dave about the steaming jungles of New Guinea, where the paper on your passport rots right there in your hand. He told me about seeing a three day dance ceremony called a "Sing-Sing," where tribes from all over come and try to outdance each other. It’s a big throw-down, a party out in the jungle to see who has the scariest looking crew. Dave described it as "Christmas and the Tet Offensive rolled into one." After dealing with that for a few days where "the breakfast of champions isn’t cereal, it’s the opposition," a stadium show in front of fifty thousand people is not really anything to get nervous about. This is perspective.
I hit Dave with a quote of his, a thing that I had been doing all night (I am a well-versed Rothologist).
"Dave, I read in an interview that you said your main motivation for performing was ‘Fear and revenge.’ That was a while ago, how about these days?"
"I was very competitive then, with the powers that be. I still make the joke which I got from John Wayne in ‘The Alamo’ ‘There’s a lot of pretenders to the throne here, we can’t stop them from coming on, but we can arrange for them to limp home.’ I always took that to heart. I had something to prove. There was a lot of rage there, a lot of fury, and a lot of fun and celebrations along the way. After a while I realized that I would never be happy unless I was doing it for myself and not doing things to compete, not even concerning myself with it because I don’t consider myself a part of any specific musical group. It’s not heavy metal, it’s not pop, although there’s elements of both. It’s not purely vaudeville or big band yet those elements are intact. I used to be worried about what it is. Now I don’t care, I guess it’s the difference between the way Tom Selleck and Marlon Brando act. One is a result-oriented performance and the other is just being it."
"We take the Honda principle which is, ‘If two is good then five is better,’ and we go with the Cecil B. DeMille kind of vision, with a cast of thousands or as many as we can afford. Most of the characters in my films are passive, se you really are drawn into the scene. There are layers to it so you can watch these videos fifty times and find things in the background. It takes up a long time to put one of these together—roughly about a month and a half. You have one inspiration at 5:30 in the morning in some after-hours dive on the East Coast and you spend the next four and a half weeks getting up at 5:30 in the morning trying to make it transpire onto the screen just like you dreamt it between your ears or in your pants as the case may be—the visceral stuff’s even harder to get up there."
Dave and the band have been hitting the bricks almost every night, practicing over and over the songs that they will take on tour. "It’s a labor of love. If you’re in this for things other than the music—and we’re all in this for things other than the music… The guy who said that money can’t buy happiness didn’t know where to go shopping. I’m not ruling out greed and avarice at all. But if those things are higher up on the list for you than the music, the whole parade will pale for you in the hundredth hour of vocal practice."
So where does this guy get off? Probably more often than most.
"My whole thing is based on—and this is for me, mind you—that you have to discipline yourself, and through his discipline will come some level of achievement, and from this achievement will come your pride. There’s nothing else but pride in all of this. The money comes and goes, the women come and go—but your pride can remain. It’s pride that gets John Lee Hooker up the hill. It’s pride brought Muhammad Ali back, It got Quayle elected to Vice President. Absolutely I’m not a supporter there, but I can salute the pride."
When the David Lee Roth band hit the road, they bring the gear: bicycles, cross-country skis, mountain climbing equipment.
"What we call it in the basement, in slang, is ‘expert sportsman, world class mountaineering athletic type,’ the medical term in Latin is ‘Fun-Hog.’ I’m not good at any of it, but hey, we do dozens of things. To me, music always has to look like it sounds. Whatever that means to you, it should transpire. I like to use a lot of knees and elbows."
Dave relates how he and some of the crew go for long bike rides in cities on tour. They don’t worry about remembering which way they went, they just go and when they are ready to quit, they call the hotel and get the courtesy van to bring them in. Sometimes Dave and Company have ended up in some ‘hoods that made the hotels downright nervous. Many nights on the tour, Dave and a handful of fellow Fun-Hogs will get in his bus and drive overnight to the next town where they will hook up with local climbers and spend the time before soundcheck repelling of the local range. Sometimes they hit it five days straight. "You’re dropping dead, but hey, you did it."
Our talk went from New Guinea to Erie, Pennsylvania, from mountain climbing to meeting James Brown, videos, all kinds of stuff. It was great. I left feeling good. I told the cab driver that I had just spent the evening hanging with Diamond Dave. The guy lit up, looked into the rearview and said, "Day-veed Lee Roth! Cally-for-nee-ya gurr-ells!"
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