REPORT: =vh = to headline australian festival april 20-21

[Dave's Bitch]

Who wouldn't look young standing next to Aerosmith ??

David Coverdale

[Fairwrning]

Keith Richards?

[ELVIS]

LMAO !!!

[sonrisa salvaje]

Dave looks so kick ass and he is the only one out of that entire group that looks like he is thrilled to be there!!!!

[sonrisa salvaje]

There should be a caption competition for this ...

The three Aerosmith guys in the middle look like they got caught in a police lineup.
Tyler is doing the Flamingo. Does Perry need the cane or is he making a fashion statement there?
Check out Dave's multi colored socks. They are cooler than anyone else on the stage.
Kiss the ring bitches!

[Cato]

he was wearing the same socks in Tokyo....

[Nickdfresh]

Who gives a shit what he looks like ??

I'd go see Aerosmith just to see Hamilton...

He won't be with us much longer...

They'll still have tapes of him to air-bass too after he dies...

[VHscraps]

he was wearing the same socks in Tokyo....

Let's hope it's not these socks, which he was wearing 1973 - with a pair of strides that ain't a million miles away from the new favourite suit ...





(An iPhone snap from the Elizabeth Wiley Kindle book, Could This Be Magic)

[sambo]

We spent two hours with David Lee Roth and no one got pregnant-Faster Louder article

http://www.fasterlouder.com.au/features/35444/We-spent-two-hours-with-David-Lee-Roth-and-no-one-got-pregnant

DAVID SWAN gets a whole lot more than he bargained for when he encounters one of rock’s great personalities, Van Halen’s David Lee Roth.

There are interviews, and there are interviews. The standard format is fairly known and accepted among journalists, and artists themselves. Chat for 15 minutes or so about the new album, the upcoming tour, a bit of band history and maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get something controversial or news breaking. This wasn’t one of those.

It’s 9am Melbourne time, which is 9pm New York time, and I get a call direct from “Diamond” David Lee Roth’s mobile ahead of Van Halen’s visit for Stone Festival, which takes place in Sydney this weekend. Five minutes in I throw away my question sheet. This wasn’t an “interview”, but a conversation, as unadulterated as they come, littered with stories, ramblings, life advice, Japanese and a bit of Van Halen, too. All up it was a two-hour chat, both exhaustive and exhausting, and even the still-virile 57-year-old frontman was well and truly spent by the end.

One day it might make a great book or screenplay, but for now here are the best bits of _FL_’s two-hour chat with David Lee Roth, one of rock and roll’s last great showmen and unequivocally one of its most genuine characters.

David Lee this is David Swan on the line. How are you going?
Going very well thanks, pleasure to meet you. What is FasterLouder? Please share with me. Is this high-performance automotives? Is it for porno? Which in my country is the same thing. Is this musically informed? What is the nature of our program today?

We don’t go into porn very much, that’s our adult sister website. It’s rock music mostly.
And in reference to which rock music? Is it era-specific, or is this all the way up to this phone call and including from the very beginning of a genre? Like I said, I’m learning here, teach me.

It covers a wide range of stuff.
Sounds superb. I’ve been spending the last year living in Tokyo. And something with a name like FasterLouder would be very specific to Japanese style. Japanese style, well it’s wonderful, but it has virtually no connection to the rest of the world. I’m not sure what movies and TV shows they’re watching over there, and even the names of their acts are different, for example, Pay Money To My Pain. [Laughs] That’s a pretty great title for a band. And the singer just died. How do you compete with that? Dave, you can’t compete with that! I don’t care how good of a writer you are. That’s just sterling. Pay Money to My Pain … that’s not even the name of the song, that’s the name of the whole band [laughs].

Were they any good?
They were excellent. They were heavy metal with a disc jockey. And what’s curious also is Japan accesses everything without the actual social connotation. For example, there’s a tremendous number of lowrider tattoos walking around out there. They have no idea what they mean. The two catholic hands praying, with the rosary draped around them. We see this on the shoulder of every third hip-hop video in the United States. If you have an even faintly Hispanic nickname, or a name like Pitbull, or anything in between, then you have that tattoo. They have no idea what that is in Japan. There is no religious connotation to it.

I got kicked out of an onsen [Japanese hotspring] for having a tattoo when I was in Tokyo a few weeks ago. I was holding my hand over it but didn’t get away with it. Apparently tattoos are still linked to the yakuza and organized crime?
It’s a curious connection, and right now it’s being defeated. Right now if you look at the back of one of the tattoo magazines, and they’re gorgeous, they’re not just cheapy newsprint, they’re the full eggshell bond varnished paper. They look like National Geographic year-end annuals. If you look in the back, there’s over 400 tattoo shops, within the three main cities, Tokyo Osaka and Kyoto. There’s hundreds of them. But those are folks who are 35 years old and under. From that point up, it’s a lot like the baby boomer connection, in that it’s connected with bikers, it’s connected with disenfranchised people [puts voice on] “What does that mean Mr Roth? Well I’m not sure, I think it means merchant marines in Bohemian. What’s a bohemian Mr Roth? Knock it off kid.” [Laughs]

Do you feel like a local yet?
Yeah I think so, it’s immersion. I’ve been going to Japan since a million years ago. But you don’t really see anything going through the window if you’re touring. Particularly if you approach it what I consider appropriately. If you go to the Olympics and you were going to compete in a specific event, would you be out at night sampling the local cuisine the night before your event? Of course not. You might be sampling one the local natives, but then she’s still gotta go kind of early because you’ve got an event tomorrow.
And when we’re on the road, this was always of interest to us, people thought they were always strolling and whatnot. No, we were like racehorses. Sleep race win. Sleep race win. Just repeat that 100 times, and that’s how you deliver just a stellar performance, every night, or damn close to close to it. You won’t be able to discern the difference without the binoculars. A solid 10, 10, 9.8, 10, 9.9, again and again, just pulling that trigger. Steady and steady and steady. And then, if you wanna live like a pirate, and we doooo [laughs]. What about pirates Mr Roth? That’s correct, we’re getting to that. That’s my conscious speaking. Then we go back. For how long sir? Very long. And we set up camp. And I have done that. In a variety of cities, I have yet to do it in Australia. I would do it in Sydney. And I know my way around Melbourne is fairly well.

When was the last time you came to Australia?
Oh, years and years ago. A million years ago. My godfather was Australian. He was Australian government, Roger Shipton, he was the boss of the Olympic committee in the mid-’80s. He was my uncle Dave’s roommate when they were in college and he was my godfather. So I was around that accent and that family, and that whole connection to things, from before I was a teenager. That being said, I picked up and went to Tokyo about a year ago, and I had no idea where I was going, I just Stevie Wondered it. There’s an adverb that I just made up for you … I’ve travelled so much now, I’ve seen I guess 22 or 23 different countries, from the inside out. And I get lost intentionally. You do it like an Apollo moon shot, you know, where we’re not sure where we’re gonna land.

You’d get some good stories, travelling like that.
You crash into all kinds of interesting people. You will arrive in the most ordinary of skins, so to speak. You don’t arrive with an entourage, you don’t arrive with the tour bus, it’s not like somebody wakes up and gets out of bed drowsy, rubs their eyes, opens the window shades and there’s an aircraft carrier parked in the backyard. It’s not that. That’s fun, and I’ll teach you how to do that in about a couple minutes [laughs]. No, you’re supposed to show up like the postman. Just knock at the door and say, “Excuse me, are you still open?” and I’ve learned how to do that in 20 different languages. I know how to wake-up first thing in the morning, and call a taxi in 26 different languages. That’s a whole different adventure, to the aircraft carrier thing.

I was watching your YouTube show [The Roth Show] and on the latest episode you talked about how your one responsibility as a artist is to be 100 percent honest, through the music. And I’ve always wondered if you’re an artist that is chauffeured around, and being constantly managed and minded, when you then make music it would be surely challenging to make real honest music, compared to if you’re just out there living, and being more a part of the world.
I think that’s astute, and accurate at that. If you are a lyricist, and you are doing words, well there’s a Freudian slip right there, I didn’t say writing them, I said doing them … If you do lyrics, it means you’re living them first. And you have to have a story, as a writer, whether you’re writing novels, whether you’re a journalist perhaps, whether you are fiction or non-fiction, lyrics are marvellous combination of all the above … That’s why there are no child savants in authorship. There will always be child savants who can play music instrumentally with great genius at a very very early age, before they’re even teenagers, and that’s because you don’t need a story. You don’t need the emotional content that only comes from having being hammered and beaten and polished and hammered and beaten and polished. It’s hard to tell which of those three elements, that are hammered and beaten and polished, are the most supportive and positive and which ones are negative and abusive sounding, do you follow? They all add up to the final moment of perfection, hopefully.

And you have to go out and get some living. It’s like when you buy one of those cool leather jackets now at the designer place, it’s got the tag which says, “All imperfections and damage to the hide are the result of the animal’s natural environment, the indication of its real conditions.” You’ve gotta get the scars and the stars. You’ve gotta get the scars on your heart and your face and you’ve gotta get the stars on your collar. I’m four stars now. [Laughs]

Do you feel like you’re a better writer now than when you started out?
Oh clearly, is a process of distance, and enthusiasm for the art form. Most people who write lyrics for a living approach it with disdain or they approach it with an apprehension, the kind that comes with having to do homework. And homework is the antithesis of what I’m supposed to doing for a living, nevertheless you have to sit down with a pad of paper. You will have to sit down, even at most of the high end of the sport, you will have to sit down with some machine, and transcribe what we just discussed, then you’ll have to edit it, then you’ll have to structure it, then someone like yourself may have to deal with an editor, or a video editor, and the list gets longer. The higher up the mountain, the more people live up there as it turns out. And it all just screams of homework and I understand why some people trouble with it. School and academia and blergh. There’s a lot of folks down here at Club Dave, where the debris meets the sea, where they don’t want to deal with the implications of time involved, “You mean I’ll have to put my beer down and actually write something?” Yes. You can write it on the same napkin, and there’s a certain poetry to that. And you’ve still gotta pick up the pen, kid. If you want to write carpe diem, seize the day, carpe diem. Yeah great, but in order to do that though, you have to carpe rutilla. Which means pick up the spade… [Laughs]

Anyway, so circling all the way back to your original question, what is required is a discipline to simply continue. And if you do continue to show up you will improve. Whatever improve means. It will get easier for you, that’s an improvement. Or it will get easier on your audience. They will give up trying to understand, and they’ll go, “OK, Bob Dylan, we’ve got it, we think.” The audience will acquiesce, whatever that means, they’ll do it. It’s like your family, finally they’ll just give up and go, “Oh, it’s Dave. Leave him alone.”
You’ll become more fluent in what you do, your language skills will improve.

It’s like the first time I showed up for a kung fu lesson. I asked the teacher, innocently enough as a pre-teen, how hard is it to learn kung fu? He said it’s easy. Showing up every single day that you’re supposed to on time – that’s very hard. He said if you can do that, if you can show up at this door with your uniform, every day that you promised, he said, “You’ll learn kung fu in no time. I’ll handle that. You’re in charge of showing up.” And boy was he accurate. And I’ll sometimes ask people, I’ll usually throw this one under someone’s feet just to have some fun with them, I’ll say, “Can you describe art to me in three sentences?” Go for it!

That’s putting me on the spot … Well I’d say it’s self-expression, in the purest form. And whatever comes out of that, that’s art.
Of course it is. Of course it is. I’ll have a crack too … Keeping nice tight columns and keeping your writing in the margins, that’s an artform. Sewing drapers perfectly is an artform – you can make art out of that. But art – the really good stuff – is something that was created that compels us to think and argue and question. Like Andy Warhol’s soup can. Is that art, or is it hype? Is it dazzling concept, or dazzling bullshit? It’s like the phrase, “Pick up the shovel.” I have forced you to question, seize the day is where most people stop. If you want to seize the day then one must pick up a shovel. Seize the shovel. Now you’re being compelled to question: “Is Mr Roth just being a jerk? Is he being a joke for a good reason though? What if he’s being a jerk for a bad reason?” But now you’re thinking and you’re thinking, and that is art. Everything else is decoration.


I get the feeling you’ll be one of those guys that never retires, because you’ll never stop thinking and never stop questioning. Some of your peers retired maybe 20 years ago, but you’ll always be curious. You’ll keep going. Do you feel that?
Yes. If you’re an author, you want to leave a nice big shelf of books behind. If you are a musician, if you don’t leave behind a huge shelf of music, then I feel you would want to be able to point at the research bills. I only did 12 albums in my entire career, but look at what I spent on research. “This was when I lived in Brazil, and here’s when I was in the Army. That’s when I met your mum, well your first mum.” [Laughs] That’s a shelf, man.

Do you have half a shelf, or where are you at?
I’m on my third shelf. And you know what? It’s not even so much accomplishment. Yes, there was accomplishment early on in the career. You want to rule the world, you want to sleep with every great looking chick who has two legs, and I’m even flexible there. She doesn’t have to have both [laughs]. I’ve seen some hotties in the Paralympics, and I’m prepared to talk, Dave. I’m modern, I’m capable of a relationship, or half of one. She’s got to a have a sense of humour, at least half of one. [Laughs] That being said, you want to rule half the world, and you want to sleep with the other half. And you want to charge both heavily for the inestimable privilege. [Laughs]

And if you’re lucky, after a couple of decades of that, you will find a resource that you didn’t know was there, hopefully. There’s a whole other set of reasons why you’re going to keep showing up at the dojo door. And for myself, it’s the thrill of the unpredictable finish. That’s all adventure is, I think. It’s mystery. Mystery is absence of information. We don’t know, so consequently we are mystified. There was nothing on the page, so it’s a mystery. It’s that simple. And, the thrill of the unpredictable finish. I feel it thins the blood, keeps the skin looking good, and it encourages you to use your skills, starting with your mind, all of those mental and spiritual capacities. And then, depending on what context you just threw yourself into, test the deep water with both big toes. That sounds presumptuous, unless you’ve been training those toes. I’m not just walking into the unpredictable blind.

Moving to Tokyo completely by myself without any language skills, I’m a wanderer. I’m a professional wanderer. I have been for almost 40 years. And I know how to make friends quickly, by being around a campfire, or a downtown tabletop candle. I know how to spend long periods of time by myself without fidgeting. I’m hyperactive but I have no attention deficit syndrome…

And circling back to what we were talking about earlier: Why spend so much time in these loops of training the great intangibles, playing things like Go and chess. Why practice the martial arts? Why do these games of patience, like language school? Well, the first thing you’re going to learn in sword school is don’t blink … Men only behave when we have to. And when you start dealing in the sums of money that Van Halen does before and after a show, you know what happens to our brotherhood? As soon as there’s a bag full of cash and five different guys who are not blood related, people turn into all kinds of Spielberg-ian creatures. We turn into raptors, man.


You’ve had such a long career, you must have a few regrets.
My biggest regrets has nothing to do with the fights, the health practices, it has nothing to do with the money. I’m still getting raped and stolen from in terms of my record royalties, or whatever. I have no complaints. I’ve no real regrets in terms of deciding not to jump off that stage or whatever so my left knee would still work. No, my biggest regret is when I was growing up I didn’t have a computer. I didn’t have YouTube, I didn’t have search engines, and I didn’t have the internet … We used to have to wait till we got to New York City with two cassette playing stereos which you would have to position in the window of the hotel, so you could tape the radio station, because there’s radio stations in New York City that played music you couldn’t get anywhere else in the country. If you really wanted to dance to downtown jazz, you had to wait til you got to Manhattan, man. That was all the way up until the ’90s. If you wanted house mix, rap, that kind of thing, in the ’70s and ’80s, you had to come to New York and tape it off the radio. If you dig country and western, and I mean the stuff with the flavour, where the DJ had the same accent, you had to wait til you got to the greater Dallas Fort Worth area. You would have to get a hotel room where the windows open and you would have to set up your stereo, and tape-record it onto cassette, onto a 20-minute tape deck.

And you had to go and shop, just in the same way I learned chess, by forearm. You’d pile up all the cassette tapes onto a table with the middle of your forearm and scoop them into a garbage bag. It would take as long for the guy at the cash register to ring them up as it took you to actually select them … I would just shop until I couldn’t carry any more, and we would use special duffle bags for hockey gear, the duffle bags used by the goalies, because the goalies have the biggest kneepads and stuff like that, and those are the biggest duffle bags. And I’d carry around two of those full of hundreds of pounds of cassette tapes for years. Well, that kind of goes by the wayside these days. We have a little tablet now, a little wafer or something, my iPhone buckle pad thing.

But it’s harder for bands to break out now then isn’t it? If everyone’s putting out albums made on laptops in their bedrooms. Back then bands could be massive whereas now it seems almost impossible, don’t you think?
Good thinking, I’m going to agree with you almost all the way up to the end [laughs]. Yeah, if your presentation is primarily non-stage oriented, Van Halen is a live band, and has been called a club band, or a club act. We are an onstage, visceral entity. Our records are reclamations or souvenirs of that experience. Our best recordings sound 100 percent live, and for the most part they are. They are not representations. If you buy a record of Van Halen, our best performances are live for all intents and purposes. So in terms of the internet, well live it’s a lot easier to compete. In terms of who is better live. It’s like watching the Olympics, or a dance competition, where celebrities are dancing, it’s a lot easier to determine who’s the better dancer, who’s the better drummer or keyboardist. We were great.


Are there any plans for new Van Halen recorded material?
Yes. I was just on the phone with the fellas … We are going to be getting together, not this month, at the end of June to start preparing for some new recording and some new songs, but we’re touring a little bit this year. That’s kind of a surprise. We’re in Australia, we’re doing a Japan tour for a couple of weeks, and we’re doing some American stuff. That comes as a bit of a surprise. Van Halen projects are a bit like James Bond movies. They come around about once every three-and-a-half years. Any sooner and it’s like, “Weren’t you just here?” It’s like that third Johnny Depp pirate movie [Pirates Of The Caribbean]. Weren’t you guys just here? Oh, that’s a rough one right. Leave before the sun sets, quit just before the party begins to disintegrate, don’t be the first one back in next week. We’ve been around for so long that that is a deft kind of a tactic. And there’s politics. So with that in mind I imagine we’ll be doing extensive touring and travelling outside the United States after this upcoming tour.

We plan ahead by about two-and-a-half years in advance, which sounds extravagant … [But] from the time you go, “Let’s start to write some songs”, until all of the machines of production and humanity kick in, things move achingly slow. Achingly slow. Especially if you are art-centric, if you want something to last, it’s going to take a long time to put it all together. Quick up is quick down. We know about one hit wonders and we know about fast, but it’s about three years, it takes about three years.

Can you clear up what happened when you pulled out of Soundwave Revolution back in 2011? The promoter AJ [Maddah] described Van Halen as managed by idiots, did you pull out due to that, or was it something else?
Wait, I said I’m surrounded by idiots, or someone said that about me?

AJ said Van Halen’s minders were idiots.
I don’t know that I disagree. Van Halen’s represented by one of the biggest idiots in the history of the sport, Irving Azoff. If in fact, that’s the job description, if that’s his official title. Van Halen is a cantankerous bunch. It’s the war wagon, no doubt about it. I’m not gonna try and smooth over all of the wrinkles and imperfections. It’s probably one of the things that makes these interviews so interesting. That being said, yeah, we’re surrounded by all kinds of colourful characters. Promoters included.

I think probably the biggest issue last time around was Ed’s health [he was forced to undergo emergency surgery for Diverticulitis]. We have been struggling with that since we started recording this last record, but we’re tough. A lot of artists are very fond of checking into the hospital with “exhaustion”, whatever that is, and making sure everybody knows about it – and we don’t do that. But behind the scenes, there’s a lot of fragile politics, there’s a lot of world weary bodies here. You’ve heard the expression 40 is the new 30 … Well, for me, 58 is the new 80 [laughs] So we’ve been struggling with Ed’s health, but he’s fine now, he’s doing great. But we were up and down before we even started recording that record [A Different Kind Of Truth]. It took us quite a while to get the record out of the factory, because of that. And then we cancelled a whole number of shows in the United States and Japan etc. to accommodate Ed. But he’s doing quite well now. So stay tuned.

Last question then Dave – well, it’s only the second or third of my planned questions but we’ll go with it – tell me about the dynamic of the band now, especially with a 20-year-old in the band [bassist Wolfgang Van Halen], compared to all of those years ago, onstage and off?
Back then the goals were a little bit different, but the energies were a little displaced, I think the band is more focused now, on all of the details of what we do. So things like the website, show up a little more colourfully, as opposed to hiring it out to other folks. As you’re learning and new moving along, you have to subdivide, you have to have somebody else do your video, you’re gonna have to have somebody else working on your stage design, because those are languages you don’t know. We speak those languages now. And the band is, if nothing else, a bit more thankful for the privilege of the job that we have, compared to a lot of the other jobs that we’ve had … I think the Van Halens have the same perspective.

Having someone who’s 20 years old in the band? Well you’re gonna have to keep up with us. The brothers and I are still skinny and full of victory. ‘Gonna Fly Now’ and all those great theme songs [laughs]. It’s pretty rare that somebody our age just signs up for the first stop time and can just keep up, but there’s a thrill of competition, the band ensemble competing with the world, then individually we still compete with each other, and it’s not really soured notes in the symphony. It’s volition, it’s sparks, and I think you’ll find that with any good team. And I find Wolfgang fits right in. Now that the three guys look the same, and I’m the one that’s different, I feel like Sammy Davis Jr. I’ve got a better sense of how he felt in the Rat Pack [laughs].

Van Halen will perform at Stone Festival at ANZ Stadium this Saturday, April 20, along with Aerosmith, Jimmy Barnes, The Living End and “supergroup” Kings Of Chaos.

[Va Beach VH Fan]

You really didn't think we wouldn't have that interview already, did ya ??

http://www.rotharmy.com/forums/showthread.php?67982-I-m-interviewing-David-tomorrow-wanna-help

[sambo]

You really didn't think we wouldn't have that interview already, did ya ??

http://www.rotharmy.com/forums/showt...row-wanna-help

Lol, I thought so - but a quick 1 minute scan could not find it. my bad.. delete at will..

[Va Beach VH Fan]

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/entertainment/music/david-lee-roths-mutual-love-affair-with-the-audience-20130419-2i3vz.html

David Lee Roth's mutual love affair with the audience
April 19, 2013 - 10:10AM
Peter Vincent

Rock and pop icons Aerosmith and Billy Joel were in fine form in Sydney yesterday, but the Van Halen frontman stole the show.

When Aerosmith, one of America's best-loved and best-selling rock bands, were rushed into the line-up of this weekend's Stone Music Festival, many assumed they'd be handed top billing ahead of Van Halen. Aerosmith is, after all, a rare retro act that still writes albums good enough to hit the top of the US charts.

But Van Halen held on to the prized headline spot and will close day one of the new two-day festival at Homebush. Part of the reason why was clear from events at Stone Fest's media conference yesterday – laaaadies and gentlemen, he was born to entertain: we give you stadium rock's No. 1 showoff, whoops, we mean showman, David. Lee. Roth.

Roth is the most unusual of frontmen, and that's saying something when blending into the rock milieu is a sackable offence in his line of work.

Sit him in a room with a reporter and tape recorder and, in a fit of windy guru-like exposition, he can stretch a metaphor 'til it disappears over the horizon. But get him in front of any audience – even a bunch of hacks – and it's showtime folks!

Roth had some serious competition for the limelight at yesterday's media meet-and-greet. Aerosmith's icons, Steve Tyler and Joe Perry, looked every inch the rockgods: sporting peacock hairdos (with highlights), dripping in bling, wearing some deadly boho duds and probably botoxed-up (c'mon: no other 65-year-old looks as frozen in time as Tyler). The three lesser-known Aerosmiths: bassist Tom Hamilton, drummer Joey Kramer and guitarist Brad Whitford lack Perry and Tyler's star power, but 43 years after forming, Aerosmith remains one cool-looking band. (Bonus points went to Kramer for being the only person to name-check an Australian on the Stone Fest bill: "Jimmy Barnes... that boy can sing.")

David Lee Roth, infamous for decades of wardrobe crimes, looked sharp in a tailored dark-blue-and-pink plaid three-piece Hackett suit and sunglasses.

Billy Joel, on the other hand, dressed like a hotdog salesman outside a Yankees game. That's not to say Joel was without charisma; he entertained with a nasty little troll voice, to parody the "gold chainers" who sit in the front row of his gigs demanding "Enter-tain Me Pianoman!". He also spoke with a disarming honesty about the possibility of retiring from playing live if the magic didn't return after his 90-minute Stone Fest set.

So what would a retired Billy Joel do? He'd continue composing "whether it gets heard or not". He'd play "grease-monkey" in his New York motorbike shop and spend more time on his boat-designing business.

Joel riffed entertainingly with Roth throughout – remarkably this was the first time they'd met.

"To do a whole show, it'll be like putting my toe back in the water," Joel said, referring to Sunday's headline slot. "And I said 'if I suck, I'm not going to do it any more'."

Roth (horrified): "You're not gonna do it any more? Like for life? Or you're not gonna do it any more this year?"

Joel: "If I stop, I'm gonna stop."

Roth (still in disbelief): "Like permanently stop?"

Joel: "Yeah."

Roth: "Hey can we do that? I want to do that."

He was in everything: playing on-stage interlocutor to a deadpan Joel, the fatherly head coach answering questions about troublesome team Van Halen, and the armchair cultural philosopher. But mostly, Roth played the class clown brilliantly, with a dry-as-dust delivery and comic timing Robin Williams would be proud of.

When asked why Van Halen has returned to Australia after 25 years: "I was up in the air and I decided to stop." Asked whether he'd been "hanging out" with Tyler: "We've been on the same radio show for the last how many decades. It's the same disc jockey! It's the same Saturday night!"

Or when the Aerosmith boys free-associated the "Stone" in the festival title with the effects of smoking pot: "Don't combine it with motorbikes," Roth intoned. "But if I had to take a choice ... [that's why] I don't own a motorbike."

And when quizzed on whether groupies still chase him: "At my age, sleeping with someone half my age is no longer a felony, let's get that out of the way."

Roth knew when to shut up too. Aerosmith hail from Boston and this week's bombings came up. Tyler sent his love to those affected but it was Hamilton, a tall, no-nonsense guitarist who'd rather dine from a hotel minibar than a hatted restaurant, who best described the band's confusion at what was unfolding while en route to Boston airport in a cab. "It had this feeling of unreality. Then you realise: some asshole planted a bomb in Boylston Street. How dare you come in and hurt people who live in this city."

Another question from the floor takes us to safer territory: What behaviours from the old days would these rock-stars want to revisit? Roth: "Sell records. Actual vinyl records." Like the best class clowns, he'll take laughs from anywhere, even at his own expense.

[envy_me]

I love how Dave looks like a total nutjob in those pics where he is next to the Aerosmith guys. LMAO. It reminds me of one of my favourite Dave quotes - "I feel like a shining example of something - but I'm not sure what!" This one is my favourite of the ones I have seen so far ...






There should be a caption competition for this ...

Lmao, I KNOW :D that was exactly what I thought when I saw the first pic that was posted here :D

[vaijuju]

no rumours about the set list ? songs that they never played since 2007 ?

wolf on twitter :
fyi, I'm really counting every one of your song requests, so if you haven't given me one, do it! You could see it on a future setlist...

[sadaist]

Does Tom Hamilton have aids or cancer or something? Dude is unrecognizable. If he weren't up there with the rest of the band I wouldn't know it was him. Wow he looks awfully gaunt.