For all the mythology surrounding Van Halen’s rise, David Lee Roth says the band’s earliest songs were born in a space barely big enough for two people.
Speaking during a recent solo appearance at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, Pennsylvania, the singer became visibly emotional as he recalled the tiny room where he and Eddie Van Halen first learned how to write songs together — a place so cramped, he said, that “our knees would touch.”
The memory resonated with Roth because it reminded him of his own upbringing.
“My dad was just starting in school on the GI Bill when I happened,” Roth told the audience. “Back in 1954, the Fender Stratocaster was released, and so was I.”
When I first walked into Ed’s, it wasn’t even a room. It was identical to the way I grew up.”
— David Lee Roth
For much of his childhood, Roth said, his family lived in student housing that was “about the size of the drum riser here.” His own corner of the apartment was little more than a washer-and-dryer space outfitted with cinder blocks and a foam cushion.
Years later, he encountered something remarkably similar when he first visited Eddie’s home.
“When I first walked into Ed’s, it wasn’t even a room,” Roth recalled. “It was identical to the way I grew up.”
According to Roth, you had to walk through the space to get from the backyard to the kitchen. Officially it was Eddie’s room, but in reality it was little more than a small alcove.
“The beginnings of every song we sing to you tonight, I started with Ed,” Roth said.
Eddie would sit there with an electric guitar that he couldn’t plug into an amplifier because his mother wouldn’t allow it.
“So I would have to listen to the electric guitar without an amp,” Roth remembered. “And it’d be so close that our knees would touch.”
For hours at a time, the pair would hunch over a small cassette recorder documenting riffs and ideas.
‘Hey, you wanna have a cigarette?’ He’d go, ‘Yeah.’ And that’s what we would have. The two of us, one cigarette.”
— David Lee Roth
“Those first couple of years, God, how many hours did I spend leaning over like this?” Roth said. “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?’”
The future rock stars were hardly living large. Roth joked that when one of them suggested having a cigarette, it usually meant sharing a single one.
“‘Hey, you wanna have a cigarette?’ He’d go, ‘Yeah,’” Roth recalled. “And that’s what we would have. The two of us, one cigarette.”
That arrangement often led to arguments.
“‘Don’t fuckin’ hotbox it. You’re lipping it.’ ‘No, fuck you, too.’ ‘Oh, fuck you twice.’”
The singer laughed as he remembered the constant friction.
“There was friction early, and we loved it.”
What struck Roth, however, was how completely that dynamic survived success.
Roughly 30 years later, he and Eddie reunited to write the two new songs that appeared on Van Halen’s 1996 Best Of Volume I collection: “Can’t Get This Stuff No More” and “Me Wise Magic.”
By then, Roth said, both men were living in what he jokingly called “tombs with a view,” and Eddie had built a multimillion-dollar recording studio packed with state-of-the-art equipment.
Yet when it came time to write, the guitarist instinctively recreated the conditions that had sparked their earliest collaborations.
Roth remembered sitting in the middle of the enormous studio reading a paperback while waiting for Eddie to arrive.
“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,” Roth said.
“That’s how I wrote the last two songs. Full circle.”
