VAN HALEN Frontman DAVID LEE ROTH - "The Reason I'm So Funny Is Because I Ain't Even Vaguely Happy"
April 3, 2019, 5 years ago
Steve Baltin recently conducted a 45-minute interview with Van Halen singer, David Lee Roth, for Forbes, and has now published the second part of his interview. Part 1 is available here, while an excerpt from Part 2 can be found below.
Baltin: Who were your performing role models?
Roth: "When I was doing rock and roll and learning stage craft we were imitating all the European acts, who were schooled from old British music hall and Vaudeville. All those Odeon's and theaters were still open when I did my first tours. And all the old guys and everything, Alfred Lagarde, in Holland and he would comment and stuff. And he would comment, he was a critic as well as a supporter. Old school, so that was very much in our DNA. I came from classic training, which was [George] Gershwin, [Leonard] Bernstein, classic music like this. That edge is in Van Halen music. That dark minor key tone is in everything we ever made and that's why we have two diamond albums [Van Halen and 1984]. Elvis [Presley] doesn't have two. He has one and it was Christmas tunes and he didn't write them. That darkness, that little shot of sea salt in the caramel is what makes it work, the John Lennon note. Not the [Paul] McCartney note. The reason I'm so funny is because I ain't even vaguely happy. And that's in your music all the time, from midrange down to here."
Read more at Forbes.
David Lee Roth joined Dutch trance DJ Armin Van Buuren on stage at the Ultra Music Festival last weekend in Miami. The duo performed a remix of Van Halen’s “Jump”.
Roth and van Buuren spoke with Rolling Stone from an L.A. recording studio about a week before the performance, keeping mum on how it would sound and how they’d present it.
“‘Jump’ is 128 beats a minute, 126 depending on which printing plant did your vinyl back then,” Roth says. “What’s the new track?”
“It’s 130,” van Buuren offers. “I sped it up a little bit so it matches the tempo of the rest of the songs in my set.”
“It matches the general blood pressure and adrenaline, serotonin, alcoholic, indelicate house blend that is happening about 100 meters north of [Ultra’s] tent city,” Roth rejoins.
Read more about how the collaborative effort came together at Rolling Stone, and check out the performance from Ultra Music Festival below:
