Access Backstage Pass
David Lee Roth had to fight back tears at a recent show as he reflected on his friendship and songwriting partnership with Eddie Van Halen.
The pair achieved rock superstardom together in Van Halen, and though Alex Van Halen has since blamed the failed Van Halen tribute tour on DLR’s refusal to play tribute to the late guitar hero, at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday (May 19) Roth did just that.
“Most of these songs that I wrote with Ed, we wrote in a very, very tiny little space,” Roth told his audience with a classical guitar in his lap (via Blabbermouth). Roth's current tour finds him playing Van Halen material exclusively.
“When I first walked into Ed’s room, it wasn’t even a room. It was identical to the way I grew up,” he remembers. “You had to go from the backyard to the kitchen, and you moved through what they called his room, but it was just a little alcove for a washer and a dryer – and then, ultimately, me.”
He pauses as he starts to well up, with cries of “we love you” coming from the crowd.
“He had an electric guitar, and his mom wouldn’t let him plug into the amp,” he then says. “So I would have to listen to the electric guitar without an amp, and it’d be so close that our knees would touch.
“I’d sit there with a tape recorder, go home, write the lyrics, take it back, and go, ‘I think it’s a song about running with the devil. What have you got next?’”
Roth admits that there was “friction” in their relationship, but notes that “we loved it.”
Some 30 years, world domination, and an era with Sammy Hagar at the helm later, Roth and Eddie Van Halen were reunited. Despite now being couped up in Eddie’s “multi-million dollar recording studio,” it was just like old times.
“I was sitting in the middle of the room, and I was on a chair, and I was reading a paperback, waiting on him,” the singer remembers. “When he came in, he put a cigarette in his mouth, brought a chair right in front of me, and sat down in it and scooted forward till our knees touched. That’s how I wrote the last two songs. Full circle.”
Van Halen released A Different Kind of Truth, their first album with Roth since 1984, in 2012. But for Roth, the closeness of their songwriting partnership never changed.
In related news, Alex Van Halen has teamed up with Steve Lukather to bring one final Van Halen record to life. Steve Vai has heard archival tapes of Eddie’s unreleased work, and he believes fans are in for a treat when the album is finally released. But they need a singer first.
