[Reading] David Lee Roth’s autobiography CRAZY FROM THE HEAT back in 1999CE surprised me at the sheer depth of mystical understanding that he had brought to a supposedly intuitive rock muse. He wrote about getting down on his hands and knees and scrubbing every arena stage before a show, just so he’d have a direct relationship with the wood on which he danced. Roth wrote about Alex and Edward Van Halen goofing on him and telling him there were people in the organisation to do that shit for him, but Roth still had to do it at every show. And yet here was a man who’d spent his whole career giving the impression to the public that to have been seen to have been emitting anything less than a truly transcendental shallowness at all times would have meant appearing before the Great Wazzir of the Things that Creep Guild and having his ‘License to Drywank’ revoked, a man whose determination to haze the line between womaniser and woman molester allowed almost no-one with their own IQ to even approach his band’s music without severe Inner Questioning; whose Bound & Chained Godself (photographed by Helmut Newton, no less – Ross Halfin who he!) appeared on a 3’ x 2’ poster in all copies of WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST, and whose slavish commitment to his whole deplorably self-serving Dave TV schtick got him ejected from the group he so obviously adored playing with.

Man, I love the guy for all of it.