David Lee Roth on the Origins of Van Halen

the jurgen experience this is our 50th anniversary alex and i that's crazy why is it crazy? It's just amazing you know it's crazy in a wild and amazing way you know the fact that you guys have been making music for so long I mean it's pretty amazing we came out of this music three weeks after high school graduation it's Well, our parents were very insistent, I feel like I'm watching a movie, I've seen it all right now, yeah, it's Van Halen, their dad, their mom said you're moving is fine, they had jobs lined up for them at the airport No, she had her luggage antlers okay um mom had kicked me out of my house almost halfway through high school okay halfway through high school she said yeah what did you do?

Well I worked my way up eventually I moved in with dad but I finished high school no but I mean what did you do to get her to kick you out of the house? I was a problem child. Okay, I was in and out of the transportation program. It was a wild and colorful time, okay this is the '60s you're following and there was constant conflict in terms of where the Van Halens went to school, for example, Pasadena High School is 90s Caucasian, we'll call it and another I went to schools that were all black and Spanish speaking, so when I say I mean Van Halen owns a 1956 Bel Air coupe, okay, with the slick tires on the back, now you're talking, It's sad okay that's Pasadena high school I have a lowered 66 volkswagen with a 383 chevy engine on the local front it's like the balance that made our music colorful.

My nickname Diamond Dave comes from when I was next to Van Halen which is like Ridgemont High. I went to Coulee High and their music was all Led Zeppelin Stones, the Who sabbath like that and starting in the seventh grade, a dance at the youth club for me, that was all Motown, which you know later, my record collection was everything from Rick James and you know, funk, I took Eddie Van Halen to his first Black Concert at the Forum, I think the only one he attended was Earth Wind and Fire. Whoa, did you see Earth Wining Fire live in 1976, when all the hits raised all the famous Earth Wind and Fire like this because I was a gang signing the entire alphabet from seventh grade on, come on, we knew where to go to get ties with clip and see-through socks at a dinner party when alex van

halen

and i filed our first lawsuit for $150 against someone who turned down a check, we went to a dinner party and got clip-on ties and got proper socks and went out and shot him, you go on, you sued someone from someone said uh, it was the uh and I say with respect, the Mayfield school, the holy child of Jesus incorporated joke and uh they said this was 1973. they said according to the contract that we had been smoking marijuana no, I know, I came to the place right but keep your romance as a fact, we didn't, that wasn't possible because we didn't have enough money to If we would have full disclosure, full disclosure, yes it's for 150 bucks so Al and I know Al is listening right now, we're laughing like pirates on the phone, okay, and uh, uh, uh, he and I went to um, uh, emails that we received. on the links, okay and we went and filed in the small claims division, okay, we stayed there and, uh, uh, the school showed up, there were two nuns and a family, a father, a mother and two little daughters, It was quintessential, it's 1973.

These days like, say, here in Texas, with long hair, you better be careful above your shoulders, very, very different environment, okay, now any kind of haircut these days, but remember long hair in 1973 in a court of law, wow! We were already against you and we stood up, we thought we were fooling the magistrate that you follow with our long ponytails. Remember how I used to look like Joe, he'll look like Tarzan, who read some paperbacks, come on, I was you, Joe, look at you. Look at yourself exactly and you know the cheekbones for days, man, you can sharpen a hunting knife on those cheekbones, look at those girls, that's right, beautiful manual, here we go, he was a beautiful and beautiful man, I threw a thousand hips, I'm not a sex symbol .

I am not a sexual object, I symbolize it when you feel sexy. I am the m.c. I make other people feel sexy. You come and listen to Van Halen music. Give me three songs. You will feel young and skinny. You, Joe, will feel invincible and your old lady will feel eminently desirable. How much is it? It is priceless. You have good marijuana. I'll tell you that when I entered here, like when I arrived at the studios, it was like the fog was thick. the building when I passed by, I thought Dave must be here, yes well I think it is definitely beneficial for children to learn martial arts safely and for them to learn martial arts in the same uniform, there is a real benefit and that too because you realize that it's not about The uniform is not about how you look, it's about doing things and then as you learn and grow and become more successful, you receive these belts and then you achieve goals and achieving goals is something amazing for kids, something amazing for adults. there's a real benefit in knowing that you worked hard and now there's something that means it oh my god i have a blue belt and they tie that blue belt around your waist and you're no longer a white belt and you feel proud you put that thing on you feel that I've done a job and that elevates your perspective in terms of the way you look at yourself and look at your abilities, it gives you more confidence and it also gives you this goal that one day I want to be a black belt and think about it like I would someday reach a rank of proficiency where I will be someone who has actually mastered, at any level, a very specific style of martial art that is incredibly difficult to learn.

I'm going to apply that now to the arts we do for a living. McCartney can't get through an interview without telling you about his six years in Germany's red light district. He wears it like a general's insignia. Can you understand it? He is proud of it. Alex is healing and the same thing we put in five years compared to year three, the average is two and a half, maybe just improvising constantly, doing multiple shows constantly, isn't that it, it's detailed in the book, the Outliers, right? Are the outliers? I think there's a book with outliers, yeah, talking about how when the Beatles came out, people didn't realize they'd played so many hours, it's one of the reasons they're so good, they played so often.

It's constantly a really hard workout and that's when you build who you are, that's where you develop your ingredients, yeah, when I was starting out in music, that was the norm because there were bands in every club, every bar had to have a band in I live to be able to pay for the speakers, the record player and the music, you had to have a live band and you would tear off the left side of the billboard and learn it. Alex and I went through a list we recently found of 120 songs we could play at the hat drop by everyone you can imagine from the smoke in the water to get down tonight that's where we learned to sing get down tonight get down tonight we didn't have a keyboard so you better sit down you better sing a version of that ball that's why mike anthony was so unique his way of playing bass now we can find bass players but no one sounds like that that's garfunkel simon is good but simon and garfunkel where do you think they built those thousands and thousands of hours of vocal training so that when mike and i sing to you?

Recognize it as Hendrix's guitar, you may have never heard the song before and that's it, that's Hendrix's signature sound like Rod Stewart's voice, you may have never heard the song before go, that's right, yeah, It is, and in our

origins

, like Motown, it only comes from thousands. of hours where you learn to have the right temperature that I learned in the dojo I learned it in my first singing lessons you understand my first singing coach Jesus that was also my first real experience with tattoos we started talking about it tattoos my first singing coach he sang he had two tattoos he had a number here and a number there and he said at least once a year this is my camp number and this is the number he was still alive for he played the piano and he sang in auschwitz jesus was there for three years old kurt blumenthal is fine and he used to tell me mister

roth

sing like your life depends on it can you imagine a concert where a bad review literally puts you up in the chimneys and that was another expression I would use? use it it's in the music it's in my voice it's in every van

halen

song you listen to mr van halen taught it to his children jan van halen and i were very good friends and he told his children when the bombing would start and everyone They move to the subway tunnels and he played the saxophone for everyone who was hiding during World War II every time I sing, I sing like my life depended on it catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily switch between the video and audio experience on Spotify you can listen to the jre in the background using other apps and you can download episodes to save on data costs all free Spotify is absolutely free, you don't need to have a premium account to watch new episodes of jre, you just need to search jre on your spotify app, go to spotify now to get this full episode of the joe rogan experience