Beginning with Women and Children First, though, Dave brought the party to the albums. On the first few Van Halen albums, Dave concentrated on his vocals and kept the parties mostly on the stage and on the road. There’s no doubt that the party attitude of the band through their first twelve years was mainly attributable to Dave. Dave could be heard in bootlegs of the time encouraging people to get on the dance floor. Simply put, if a song didn’t make you want to get up and dance, it was taken off the set list. When Dave joined Van Halen, he applied his philosophies about the danceability of rock music. He held other jobs, including one as a hospital janitor. Dave learned the value of a dollar the hard way, working in Pasadena stables. The band was never given anything they didn’t earn. Rumors about the Roths’ funding of the band in their club days were unfounded. It was his father’s eventual success in his trade that allowed the rehearsal space in the Roth home that Van Halen used to write many of their first songs. His father was in the Air Force and later became an eye surgeon. He attended Pasadena Community College for a while, where the Van Halen brothers were also studying music theory, and took to the piano and the saxophone. A teenage David Lee Roth on the right! Seven years before Van Halen’s debut. It was at this time that he began his lifelong karate disciplines. Dave was expelled from his junior high school for fighting and attended the Webb School for Boys for a semester. The Roths, who included Dave’s sisters, Lisa and Allison, moved around quite a bit, first to New Castle, IN, then to Swampscott, MA, then to Brookline, MA, before settling in the Los Angeles area in 1963. He taught the psychiatrists that there was nothing wrong with him that being a rock star couldn’t cure. He jumped his way out of the braces and onto the stage. So what made him what he is? Until the age of five, Dave was forced to wear leg braces, and by the age of six he had visited his first psychiatrist. His life story is a tale of unusual events that eventually molded a great performer. Just a little over twenty years later, David Lee Roth would begin his reign as one of the world’s most well-known rock frontmen and one of the best entertainers in the business.

A real rock ‘n’ roll superhero!īorn to Nathan and Sybil Roth on born Octoin Bloomington, IN. David Lee Roth’s two-page spread inside the Fair Warning tour book.

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