ROTH, DAVID LEE

ROTH, DAVID LEE (1954– ), flamboyant, cocky front-man and lyricist for hard rock giants Van Halen during their 1978–85 heyday, and successful solo artist in the late 1980s and 1990s. Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Roth spent several years in Massachusetts before moving to Pasadena, California, in 1963. Roth attended Hebrew school, and later said that singing during Sabbath services gave him a feeling of belonging and strengthening his self worth. After his bar mitzvah, his Jewish education took a back seat to a lifelong devotion to karate and to the verbal street poetry he was hearing from people like Wolfman Jack and Cassius Clay. He visited his Uncle Manny Roth in New York who owned the famed Cafe Wha?, which further exposed him to varieties of music. During his senior year of high school in 1972, he joined a covers band, and it was on the party circuit that he met the Van Halen brothers, Eddie and Alex. After briefly studying music theory at Pasadena   State College, Roth and the Van Halens joined forces in late 1974 along with bassist Michael Anthony, and at Roth's urging named the band Van Halen. They released their self-titled debut in 1978, and their metal-meets-melody style and the Jagger-Richards combination of Roth and Eddie Van Halen made their albums instant hard-rock classics. Wearing spandex and strutting around the stage like a rooster, Roth used his fast-talking huckster persona, self-deprecating smile, and athletic pyrotechnics to become one of the most riveting frontmen in rock. One critic wrote that Roth "simply updated vaudeville. He wrapped himself in Hollywood hype, plugged in, turned the volume to 11, and voila, created 'Diamond Dave,' a hedonistic rock & roll character." For Roth, it had more meaning: "Every step I took on that stage was smashing some Jew-hating, lousy punk even deeper in the deck … if you were vaguely antisemitic, you were under my wheels." With tension between Roth and Van Halen mounting, Roth left the band in 1985, just after releasing a successful four-song EP Crazy from the Heat, featuring remakes of The Beach Boys' "California Girls" and the vaudeville medley of "Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody." His solo career kept him in the limelight through the mid-1990s. In 2004, Roth disclosed that he had trained to become a paramedic and began working on an ambulance in the Bronx. He took over howard stern 's national radio talk show in January 2006, but was removed in April due to poor ratings. He is the author of a well-received autobiography, Crazy from the Heat (1997). (David Brinn (2nd ed.)