![]() ![]() Totally better." He laughs, a great wheezy crackle. I've been rich and I've been poor," he says. It didn't belong to anybody, which was why it was great."īut was it ever hard work appearing to be having that much fun all the time? "I was a surgical tech right out of high school, I sold clothes I shovelled shit at a horse stable for years. "If you stop at that island – we recommend you do, but abandon all hope – do not back up! It was like Port Royal in the 1700s. "Van Halen was an island unto ourselves," Roth says. There were masterpieces – their debut, a shock as seismic as punk, and Roth's final album with the group, 1984 (the one that gave us Jump and the marvellously goofy Hot For Teacher with its apocalyptic drum intro) – and there was the tossed-off, 31-minute long Diver Down, from 1982, heavy on covers and instrumentals. And the world lapped it up: the Roth-era Van Halen sold 35m albums, despite their sometimes variable quality. If Sunset Strip in the 1960s had been the party, Van Halen, a decade later, were the after-party. They were mocked for the supposed excess of demanding a jar of M&Ms in their dressing room at each show, with all the brown ones removed (though the reason for that was to check the promoter's attention to detail: if he couldn't get such a simple task right, what else might he have missed?). He was never much of a student, bouncing around schools – for disciplinary reasons he's evidently ferociously bright, even if he often chooses not to show the world – until he moved to Pasadena, California, as a teenager, where he enrolled at Pasadena City College and met the man with whom his life would become entwined, a young guitarist called Eddie Van Halen.įor seven years – from the 1978 release of their debut album, until Roth's departure as frontman in 1985 – Van Halen were a living, breathing cartoon of the rock'n'roll lifestyle. His Uncle Manny ran the New York bohemian hangout Cafe Wha? until 1988, putting on the likes of Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce, and Roth would hang out there as kid visiting in the early 1960s. Though Indiana-born, Roth was hardly your typical farmboy. But while he was just starting college when I was born we lived in a little house at the edge of a farmer's property and I grew up chasing muskrats and collaring dogs." Training a sheepdog, then, is coming "full circle".įull circle in another sense, too, for next week's release of the new Van Halen album, A Different Kind of Truth, marks the first recordings Roth has made with the band since departing amid a cloud of bitterness in 1985, when he was replaced by his arch-enemy Sammy Hagar (as far back as the 70s, Hagar was calling Roth a "faggot", Roth responding by saying Hagar had "a social problem"). Just down the street is Indiana University where my pop went to school – he later became a doctor. "My grandparents came from Europe in 1917 and made their living working in a general store, and selling beer by the pail for four cents in the 20s in Newcastle, Indiana, which today is still bib overalls, livestock and the great outdoors. It's hard to tell why – because Roth's answers are circumlocutory, filled with metaphor and grandly entertaining – but my guess is it's to illustrate how his life has returned to its beginnings. Namely: why did I have to watch a video of him putting his sheepdog though its paces before I was allowed to speak to him? T here's something to clarify before David Lee Roth gets down to business, talking about his life with and return to Van Halen, arguably the most important American hard rock band ever. ![]()
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