David Lee Roth on early songwriting sessions with Eddie Van Halen: “His mom wouldn’t let him plug into the amp. So I have to listen to the electric guitar without one. It’d be so close that our knees would touch”
David Lee Roth has opened up about his earliest songwriting sessions with Eddie Van Halen, recalling how songs were created in such tight spaces where the pair were often “so close that our knees would touch”.
Speaking during a recent solo show at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, Pennsylvania, the former Van Halen frontman became visibly emotional as he revisited the “tiny little space” where much of the band’s early material first took shape.
READ MORE: Steve Vai recalls hearing unreleased material at Eddie Van Halen’s house: “Nobody plays like they do when they’re in their room alone… It was such great stuff”
Tracing those early writing conditions back to his own upbringing, where space was just as limited, Roth explains [via UCR]: “Most of these songs that I wrote with Ed, we wrote in a very, very tiny little space. I myself started off in the exact same space. My dad was just starting in school on the GI Bill when I happened. Back in 1954, the Fender Stratocaster was released, and so was I.”
“And we lived in student housing for about the first 10, 12 years of my life,” he continues. “It was very tight, about the size of the drum riser here. And I had a little space that was for the washer and the dryer, and just enough for me on some cinder blocks with a foam rubber cushion.”
That kind of environment, he says, felt strangely familiar when he first met Van Halen.
“When I first walked into Ed’s [room], it wasn’t even a room,” Roth recalls. “It was identical to the way I grew up. 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.”
“The beginnings of every song we sing to you tonight, I started with Ed,” the musician continues. “He had an electric guitar, and his mom wouldn’t let him plug into the amp. So I would have to listen to the electric guitar without an amp, and it’d be so close that our knees would touch.”
“And those first couple of years, God, how many hours did I spend leaning over like this? Tape recorded on a Sony little thing with the push buttons and the cassette player. Take it home, write the lyrics and bring it back and go, ‘I think it’s a song about runnin’ with the devil or something. What do you got next?’ It would be so quiet that our knees would touch the whole time. We never noticed.”
“And these were the days when I’d say, ‘Hey, you wanna have a cigarette?’ He’d go, ‘Yeah,’ and that’s what we would have,” says Roth. “The two of us, one cigarette. ‘Don’t fuckin’ hotbox it. You’re lipping it. No, fuck you, too. Oh, fuck you twice. He fuckin’ runs with the devil, what’s that fuckin’ mean?’ There was friction early and we loved it.”
That push-and-pull dynamic, Roth adds, didn’t disappear with time. It resurfaced decades later during the band’s short-lived 1996 reunion, where they wrote two new songs, Can’t Get This Stuff No More and Me Wise Magic. By then, both he and Eddie Van Halen had moved into very different worlds – but the creative rhythm, he suggests, remained unchanged.
“I guess about 30 years later, whatever it was, Ed and I had both gotten tombs with a view. That’s what I call those big houses. As big as this whole building,” he says. “And Ed built himself a multimillion-dollar studio, and it had all the most modern equipment. And I’d been away from the band for a while, but hey, great healing. We come back, and he says, ‘Okay, we’re gonna write two more songs.’ That’s great.”
“I was sitting in the middle of the room… and I was on a chair, and I was reading a paperback, waiting on him,” Roth continues. “And when he came in, he put a cigarette in his mouth, came over, 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.”
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