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It might be more than a decade since David Lee Roth played his last gig with Van Halen, but it seems that the singer is still keen to remind everyone just how big his creative role in the band actually was.
Speaking to Rolling Stone after a surprise appearance at Coachella last weekend – he joined Teddy Swims during his set to sing (what else?) Jump – Roth was seemingly in vibrant form, and quickly turned to the subject of his former band. Specifically, he wanted to talk about the depth and quality of Van Halen’s back catalogue.
“Our stuff is like West Side Story,” he began. “You can play it on a ukulele. You can play it in an orchestra. You can play it alone on a harmonica. And each variegated rendition reveals a different kind of emotional content to it.”
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Explaining how the Coachella collaboration came about, Roth went on to say that Swims is a “a longtime fan” of his and, finding themselves in the same rehearsal space prior to the festival, asked if he could come and sit in as Roth put his current band through their paces.
“He asked, as soon as he found out that I was in there, can he come over and watch the rehearsal?” says Roth. “We got along like pirates.”
It certainly helped that, according to Roth, Swims “knows every word of my classic Van Halen songbook” – ‘my’ being the operative word here.
“As a vocalist, every word I sing in the Van Halen songbook, I wrote,” Roth says. “I wrote every word. I wrote every line, every melody, every harmony stack, organised everything that the vocals do. For better or worse, if you’re singing it — Roth was bringing it.”
This isn’t the first time that Roth has reminded everyone of his importance to Van Halen’s development. In an interview with Missouri radio station KSHE 95 in 2019, he was asked if he would be seeking his former bandmates’ blessing to sing the songs that they made together at his upcoming Las Vegas residency, and was quick to explain why that wasn’t necessary.
“No, because I wrote the songs,” he argued. “I wrote every word you heard, every syllable, every melody,” before adding that “even the guitar solos on that first album,” were structured out by him.
Recalling his early days with Van Halen, he went on to say, “I designed the backgrounds on the stage. I came up with the album covers. I thought of the stripes on the guitar. I’m the one who said, ‘Call it Van Halen.’”
