Share via Email Van Halen in on roller skates in front of a mural of the planets. David is in the stylish red jumpsuit. 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? It's hard to tell why β because Roth's answers are circumlocutory, filled with metaphor and grandly entertaining β but my guess is it's to illustrate how his life has returned to its beginnings. Just down the street is Indiana University where my pop went to school β he later became a doctor.
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. Full 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 , 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".
Though Indiana-born, Roth was hardly your typical farmboy. He was never much of a student, bouncing around schools β for disciplinary reasons; he's evidently ferociously bright, even if he often chooses not to show the world β 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. For seven years β from the release of their debut album , until Roth's departure as frontman in β Van Halen were a living, breathing cartoon of the rock'n'roll lifestyle.
They celebrated sex and drugs and drink. Then they celebrated them some more. If Sunset Strip in the s had been the party, Van Halen, a decade later, were the after-party. And the world lapped it up: the Roth-era Van Halen sold 35m albums, despite their sometimes variable quality. There were masterpieces β their debut, a shock as seismic as punk, and Roth's final album with the group, the one that gave us Jump and the marvellously goofy Hot For Teacher with its apocalyptic drum intro β and there was the tossed-off, minute long Diver Down, from , heavy on covers and instrumentals.
It was like Port Royal in the s. It didn't belong to anybody, which was why it was great. I've been rich and I've been poor," he says. Totally better. The Van Halens [Eddie and his brother Alex, the drummer] and I have had steady jobs since we were 12 years old. Mine was working before and after school at a horse stable.
