DAVID LEE ROTH TRIVIA
Trivia
By early 2013 Roth had moved to Tokyo. He said he first held a Japanese sword at nine or ten, and in Tokyo he trained four times a week with a professional instructor and spent two to four hours a day at Japanese language school. Having arrived alone, knowing neither the language nor anyone there, he admitted that the first three months were hard, but with Konishiki as his teacher he went to a sumo tournament and to a sumo stable, and he broadcast his internet show, The Roth Show, from the city.
Roth got his first tattoo in 1977 or 1978, a little seahorse on his ankle, at Cliff Raven Studio on Sunset Boulevard. In a 2018 interview he said he waited until he was 60 to get a full Japanese bodysuit, which took 300 hours of sitting over two years; the design, his own, is kabuki faces rendered in the Edo style so that it looks like a woodblock print. He was also a partner in INK the Original, a skin-care line for tattooed skin, which was reported in March 2022 to have closed.
As a child, David Lee Roth spent part of his time with his uncle Manny Roth, who ran the Café Wha? nightclub in New York's Greenwich Village. In the early 1960s he lived above the club and saw performers such as Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce up close. On his official site Roth recalled missing Jimi Hendrix one summer, because his uncle had fired Hendrix for being late. Manny Roth ran the club until 1988.
Roth has been nominated for a Grammy twice: Van Halen's "Jump" was a nominee for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal at the 27th Grammy Awards in 1985, and at the 30th, in 1988, he was nominated in his own right for Best Concept Music Video. He has not won.
Before Van Halen, Roth sang in bands including the Red Ball Jets. Mammoth, the band of Eddie and Alex Van Halen, sometimes rented Roth's PA system for its shows, and Roth eventually joined it. Years later he teamed up again with Terry Kilgore, a fellow member of the Red Ball Jets: Kilgore was his main songwriting partner and guitarist on Your Filthy Little Mouth and played guitar on DLR Band.
The Monsters of Rock show in Nuremberg, Germany, on 2 September 1984 turned out to be Van Halen's last with Roth for more than two decades. Roth had travelled separately on that year's tour, yet when he released the Crazy from the Heat EP early in 1985 he still insisted on Late Night with David Letterman that the band would go into the studio within a month "to start arguing again".
In the video for "Goin' Crazy!", the two record executives watching the band in disbelief from the control room are played by Roth, in a fat suit, and his manager and creative partner Pete Angelus, who together went by the name the Fabulous Picasso Brothers. Producer Ted Templeman wrote in his 2020 memoir that on the set an actor in a fat suit, dripping with gold chains, came up and chatted with him in character, and only after a minute revealed that he was Roth. The single reached No. 66 on the Billboard Hot 100.
For Eat 'Em and Smile, Ted Templeman wanted to set all-out metal alongside the big-band and vaudeville material of the Crazy from the Heat EP; in his 2020 memoir he said he was aiming for something like Van Halen's Diver Down meeting Fair Warning. On the opening "Yankee Rose" Steve Vai's guitar talks back to Roth, and "Shyboy", which follows it, is a song by Billy Sheehan's former band, Talas.
Sonrisa Salvaje ("wild smile"), the Spanish-language version of Eat 'Em and Smile, lays newly recorded Spanish vocals over the existing tracks; Roth said in a 2002 interview that he spoke fluent Spanish and Portuguese. After a very short run on vinyl in 1986 it was out of print for years, and it first appeared on CD in 2007. The song titles were translated too: "Goin' Crazy!" became "Loco Del Calor!" and "Big Trouble" became "En Busca De Pleito".
The cover of Skyscraper was shot on the face of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park by the adventure photographer Galen Rowell. In a 2005 post on a climbing forum, Werner Braun, who rigged the shoot, recalled that the piton Roth was to hang from had less than an inch in the rock; when Roth balked, Braun told him it was a foot long and buried seven inches deep. Rowell shot 20 rolls of film in record time, and afterwards, Braun said, the piton came out with a single jerk of his hand. Scenes for the "Just Like Paradise" video were filmed on the same shoot.
Billy Sheehan recalled in 2023 that his last moments with Roth were in the studio, singing all the background vocals for the Skyscraper tour so they could be played from samples, which went against his grain; later that day came the meeting that ended his time in the band. Sheehan has also said he disliked the album's keyboard-heavy sound. Yet he credits Roth with the idea of the back-and-forth bass and guitar solo with Steve Vai, which Roth wanted because separate solos were not entertaining enough, and he has said working with Roth was like getting a PhD in show business.
"Just Like Paradise", the first single from Skyscraper, was co-written by keyboard player Brett Tuggle and co-produced by Steve Vai. Vai has said that Roth preferred the solo he played in one pass on the first rough demo to the different one on the proper demo, so for the record Vai learned the old solo again. He had wanted a double solo, two guitars panned left and right answering each other, but the first solo had become everybody's favourite. The single reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.
MTV banned the video for "A Lil' Ain't Enough", the title track and first single from A Little Ain't Enough. The publicity helped the album crack the Top 20 of the Billboard 200 and earn a gold record, but it never caught on at pop radio and had run its course by the summer, although the title track and "Sensible Shoes" were both Top 10 rock hits.
For Your Filthy Little Mouth, Roth surprised many by bringing in Nile Rodgers, the mastermind of Chic and a celebrated producer. The songs range from rock to "Cheatin' Heart Cafe" with country singer Travis Tritt, horn-driven pop with female backing vocals, lounge music and even the reggae of "No Big 'Ting". The first single, "She's My Machine", reached No. 12 on Billboard's rock chart.
"Me Wise Magic", recorded with Van Halen in 1996, began as a piece with the working title "The Three Faces of Shamus", which Roth picked from about 20 pieces of music Eddie Van Halen played him. In his 1997 memoir Roth wrote that he bristled when the brothers brought in lyrics and a melody written over the phone with the producer and an outside songwriter and told him to sing them. At just over six minutes it is the longest piece the band ever recorded with Roth, and it spent six weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart, yet no video was made, no physical single was released and it was never played live.
According to Roth, the double A-side single "Slam Dunk!" and "King of the Hill" was written and recorded in four days. Guitarist John 5, then known as John Lowery, was preparing for a European tour with Rob Halford's 2wo, so Roth had the sessions start at six in the morning; John 5 remembers being told that, as in the Van Halen days, anything that could not be done in two takes could not be done. John 5 played guitar and bass on about half of DLR Band, and the other guitarist, Mike Hartman, had just turned 21 and arrived from Marion, Indiana.
The track list for Diamond Dave reported on 4 April 2003 ran to fifteen songs: alongside the originals "Medicine Man", "Thug Pop" and "Act One" it had "Slip Away" and Jimi Hendrix's "Bold As Love". The album that came out on 8 July has fourteen, without those two and with "She's Looking Good", associated with Rodger Collins and Wilson Pickett. "Ice Cream Man", already on the first list, has Edgar Winter on saxophone and Nile Rodgers on guitar, and Winter's saxophone is on "Bad Habits" too.
On 3 January 2006 Roth took over the CBS Radio morning slot left by Howard Stern, who had moved to satellite radio. The show aired in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and four other markets, but it was dropped after little more than three months; on his last show, on 21 April, Roth said he had learned of its end in the car on the way to the WFNY-FM studios in Manhattan. He later joked that the stations wanted familiar morning radio, while he gave them a warm little corner candy store with Tony Soprano selling guns out of the back room.
The tour that brought Roth back to Van Halen, with Eddie and Alex Van Halen and Eddie Van Halen's son Wolfgang Van Halen on bass, ran to 74 shows, ending on 2 June 2008 in Grand Rapids, Michigan; close to a million people attended, and it grossed more than 93 million dollars. News of it had first broken on Billboard.com in January 2007.
Roth's opening set for Kiss at the United Supermarkets Arena in Lubbock, Texas, on 10 March 2020, which he closed with "Jump", was his last official show for five years. When he next played a full set, at the M3 Rock Festival in Columbia, Maryland, on 3 May 2025, singing sixteen songs from Van Halen's repertoire, he joked from the stage that this was the end of his "first retirement" and asked how many retirements Rocky had had: nine?
At the first show of his 2025 US tour, in Paso Robles, California, on 22 July, Roth paid tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, who had died. Recalling that Van Halen had played 22 dates in the United Kingdom supporting Black Sabbath in 1978, he said that he and Osbourne had become very good friends on that tour, then sang "Atomic Punk" and raised both hands in Osbourne's trademark peace signs.
"Somewhere Over the Rainbow Bar and Grill", released on 30 October 2020, was dedicated to Eddie Van Halen, who had died on 6 October, and the artwork carried a farewell message to him. The title nods to the Rainbow Bar and Grill in West Hollywood, a post-show haunt of Los Angeles rockers, and the lyric touches on "Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz and Elton John's "Crocodile Rock". The song comes from an unreleased album Roth made early in the 2010s with John 5, with Gregg Bissonette on drums.
On 3 May 2022, at Henson Recording Studio in Hollywood, Roth recorded fourteen Van Halen songs in two hours with Al Estrada on guitar, Ryan Wheeler on bass and Francis Valentino on drums, playing and singing live with no samples and no Auto-Tune. He later released songs from the session, such as "Jump", "Unchained" and "Panama", one by one under his own name.
Backstage at Coachella in April 2026, Roth told the Los Angeles Times how he came by his middle name. After a difficult birth, he said, his grandfather, a physician who worked 70 hours a week, took one look at him and told his mother he was going to be trouble, and her retort was to add the middle name Lee. Roth added that if you reverse the letters, you get "the devil".