“Hippity bip-bop-bop-boppin’ down in Glen Ellen Regional Park baby! That’s right, Van Halen in Glen Ellen—makes sense to me see! I’m talkin’ a full moon, a sea of faces, oceans of beer, have no fear! Heard ya missed me, I’m back! Diamond is here.”

I have a gut feeling that words similar to this were uttered from descending rays of glorious light, peeking from behind silvery clouds in the heavens on October 10, 1954 into the small town of Bloomington, Indiana. And there were those who, upon hearing these boisterous and prophetic phrases, traveled to the town of his birth. While the entire town must’ve felt something of this charismatic new presence, some all-encompassing force, there were three who heard exactly and foresaw what would come. They traveled from great distances, following the glow of a neon strip club sign to the east. They came bearing spandex, hairspray and a microphone. They came to greet the Diamond One. That one bright shining star that was sent to give entertainment to the world… in abundance.

Bosely bosely bop. Ditty bop.

I am here to show the haters and drop some learnin’ on all y’all about the single greatest song and dance man that ever sang and swayed on this swingin’ sphere! Compared to this dynamo, all the rest are dust in the wind, dude. Dust. Wind. Dude.

P.T. Barnum, Will Rogers, Al Jolson, Bob Hope, Albert Einstein, Superman, Wilt Chamberlain, Sasquatch.

Amateurs.

That’s right; I am of course speaking of the man, the myth, the deep Copernican. The man that transformed “Zippity-Bop-Do-Wow!” from a phrase to a lifestyle. The man whose kinetic energy, if properly harnessed, could jolt the earth out of its orbit. The Consummate Entertainer. The Diamond One. David Lee Roth.

Now for all of you rolling your eyes at the screen and making that pretentious “I’m better than everyone else” sigh, I’ve got a news flash for you. You don’t count. When the Big Electron passes judgment on us all, it will make that same sigh as it pulls your sphincter through your mouth with its gargantuan electron mittens. But I digress; for my pity far outweighs my disdain for your attitude. It’s kind of like sympathizing with the blind for their lack of vision. You, sighing sirs and madams, have no vision. So go fetch me two bean pies and a porkchop sammitch!

Since that’s out of the way, let’s talk about just how great the Diamond One is.

After his birth, the Son of Rock traveled west in search of his destiny. During his travels with his parents, he became lost at the age of 12. His parents found him after three days conversing with the strippers, staff and owner of The Eager Beaver. They were amazed to find that his tips and suggestions, such as “no, no, leave the stockings on,” increased business tenfold. C’mon folks, I can’t make this stuff up.

We all know what happened next. The Diamond One ended up in California, the only place a Diamond One can really settle down, and quickly began his rise to superstardom with the mega-party-rockers Van Halen. Assisted by another great, caricature-ego laden mega-rocker, Gene Simmons (odds are 3 to 1 he slept with your mom), they gigged incessantly, built a following, and eventually recorded 10 tracks of in your face, the folks are gone—let’s get a keg, doin’ it in your parents’ bedroom, smoking cigarettes under the bleachers adolescent cock rock to pure perfection. To this day, entering a house party to the opening of “You Really Got Me” is literally the coolest you will ever look. In addition, if you are wearing a denim jacket sporting a sweet patch or some kind of bird of prey on the back, award yourself 20 additional cool points. Congrats, chief. You’re gettin’ laid.

Call it party rock, cock rock, symphonies of unbridled genius, or just good tunes. Van Halen kicked out some incredible music from Van Halen to 1984 (I will not sully this piece by mentioning anything that Van Halen did after the 1984 album). It didn’t make you think about all the pain in the world, it didn’t show us how to fight against the older generation, it didn’t prophesize with its pens or blow in the wind, it didn’t make you want to change the world and it didn’t preach defiant righteousness. But listen to it with your eyes closed, and it will bring you the closest you’ll ever come to living in a beer commercial. As a slow-motion scene of the Diamond One waving you into a barley and hops paradise filled with giggling, bikini-clad bisexual ladies and stretches of beer trees descends upon your brain, feel free to sing with the chorus—

Everybody Wants Some!
I want some too!
Everybody Wants Some!
How ‘bout you?

And yes, of course he’s wearing his Tour Guide hat.

Yeah, some folks need all their music to be serious and meaningful, each song with a specific message on how exactly they should save the rainforest that week. If this is the case, then you probably also have a pickle up your ass. But enough of my yammering on the subject of the brilliance of Pop; let’s let the words of a true Suuu-per Geeen-ius quell any doubts:

“I think people want the balance more than ever. You know, plant an Ethiopian, feed the rain forest, save the ozone layer—you gotta have that! ‘Oh woe is me,’ as a form of self-dramatization, is always fun. It shouldn’t be replaced, but there should be a balance. Sooner or later, it’s Miller time! Sooner or later, there is some hallelujah, watusi-tailgate, light-up-the-goddamn-sky-it’s-finally-the-weekend, okay? And I don’t care whether you wear a cowboy hat or your hair is purple, I don’t care if you have a wedding ring or a clit ring, sooner or later, there’s Miller time! That doesn’t mean simple belly laughs, and it doesn’t mean high-brow. It just means, “Wanna go have a drink?’”—David “Dammit You’re Brilliant” Lee Roth

Anywho, after the party H-Bomb known as Van Halen I exploded all over this great nation, it was nothing but love for the Diamond One. As the years and albums progressed, his tops became more shredded, his spandex became tighter, and his stage acrobatics rivaled that of a team of ninjas. Actually, there were many rumors in the late seventies and early eighties as to Roth’s ninja status; however, he kept to himself about this subject, as a true ninja would. Not that he was a ninja. Or anything.

Around the same time that Van Halen was exploding, another incredible natural wonder was rising to a state of limitless power: cocaine. Yup, good ole Pablo Escobar and his happy-fun-sniffy-powder was making everybody snowblind. It was time for the Diamond to truly shine.

So, how to properly explain this phenomenon. Let’s see. Oh, have you ever had a cup of delicious coffee? OK, good start. Now, have you ever had 500 cups of coffee per day for 10 years? Or maybe you’ve just eaten pure coffee grounds constantly for a decade? No? Yeah, it’s almost impossible to comprehend the amount of coke snorted off of 16-year-old groupies’ asses by our lord Roth.

Which brings me to another major point in this homage: David Lee Roth had the most fun of any single human being living in the 1980s. End of story. And I know I don’t even need to defend this, because when I discuss my Dave-Is-The-Light-And-The-Way philosophy (much like others discuss the existence of time or the deliciousness of flapjacks), this aspect of the man is always agreed upon. The man skeetily-bopped his way through more than a decade, armed with enough coke and booze to turn Satan into a sobbing, step-following rehabber and a steady intake of hot-and-cold flowing women.

Just try comparing this to your own lifestyle, gentlemen. You know that friend of yours that has actually, let’s say, slept with two women at once? Hell, a lot of times it’s just the friend who came really close to setting something like that up. Think of the pedestal you secretly put him up on in your head. Now imagine The Diamond One coming into the room as said friend is finished telling his triumphant story for the eleventeen-billionth time and chimes in with “ZIPPITY-FLOO!! One time I fucked a mother-daughter gymnast act while a midget tickled my sack with his probing midget tongue and their scientist grandfather gave me a reach-around while whispering into my ear the secrets of genetic engineering! Sure enough, the next day I created a Nordic blonde goddess in a test tube. Her saliva was 98% cocaine and her gloryhole contained thousands of tiny vibrating pleasure-modules. All six of us got plastered the next night and had a 15-day orgy that ended only when my midget friend’s heart finally gave out. Boy do I miss ‘Gene the Tiny Machine.’ ZAPPIDY HEY!” And out of the room he goes. “Fuck, Jimmy, I think he may have just one-upped you there.”

One might argue that with all of this decadent behavior, your life would become a blurred and meaningless existence, completely clouded and bereft of hope, feeling or thoughtful analysis. Well, y’all just jealous. Just because you’ve never had the ability to buy a mansion just to fill it with Jell-O and supermodels for a five-day bender, don’t come whining to me about your feeble argument. Naysayer.

In fact, I’ve found quite the contrary. As you can infer from the above quote alone, the man is a fountain of incredible ponderings, interesting views, fantastical anecdotes and mind-shattering philosophical insight. We are talking about the man who wrote the autobiographical masterpiece Crazy From The Heat, including its awesome, balls-out introduction that includes this accolade: “A super ultra hyper thanks to Paul Scanlon, who whittled this monster manuscript down from 1200 pages to the gem you now hold in your hands.” Fucker was writing the bible, and this guy Paul had the nerve to scale it down? Actually, Paul was right. The world, including myself, is just not quite ready to witness the Diamond One kickin’ the new ka-nowledge in such an unfiltered way. But rest assured, one day, much like the Dead Sea Scrolls, signs of these truths will appear.
Until then, I’ve been perusing Roth’s vast collection of quotes and, I have to say, they should replace the entire content of Bartlett’s. My words seem like gibberish compared to these nuggets of truth, so I’ll just let them speak for themselves:

David Lee Roth on Women and Love:

“People think I have this strange concept of women, but they’re wrong. I’m a family-oriented kind of guy. I’ve personally started four or five this year already!”

“It’s not who wants to sleep with you; It’s who wants to sleep with you again.”

“I was with a girl not terribly long ago and she said “Mr. Roth, I think you’re the oldest person I’ve ever been with.” I said “Honey I was gonna say the same thing to you.”

“The perfect woman has an IQ of 150, wants to make love until 4 in the morning, then turns into a pizza!”

And, the single greatest pickup line, EVER:

“I only have two flavors baby, bubblegum and dick… and I’m all out of bubblegum.”

David Lee Roth’s Philosophical Whimsy:

“He who knows how will always work for he who knows why.”

“[Life] doesn’t get better, it doesn’t get worse, but it sure gets different!”

“I think the two most difficult things to deal with in life are failure and success.”

“There are two rules to living well. The first is, don’t sweat the little shit. The second is, it’s all little shit. In other words, it’s all okay. We may be lost, but we’re way ahead of schedule.”

“Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.”

David Lee Roth on the Rock ‘n Roll Lifestyle:

“We took these two little people with us on tour, Jimmy and Danny, as my bodyguards. They’re probably 3 1/2, 4 1/2 feet tall. We had ‘em in S.W.A.T. uniforms. If nothing else, I can wake up in Tunafish, Wyoming, nine in the morning, hung-over; even if I’m miserable, I can look out the door to the hallway and there goes a midget in a bath towel holding the hand of a girl he was with last night—and I know I’m in rock ‘n’ roll!”

“When you’re on the road for nine months a year and you always have these cute little chiquitas running around in their halter tops, it’s kind of hard to worry about things like nuclear proliferation.”

“I always wanted to be an outrage to public decency and a threat to women. And this is one of the few occupations where you’re not only allowed that, buy you’re encouraged.”

Man, I don’t know about you, but my brain just had an orgasm. I’d love to comment on these morsels individually, but that’d be like Sloth from Goonies giving a dissertation on Shakespeare’s musings.

While many of the Diamond One’s proverbs are together and thought-provoking, there are also those special quotes of his that only provoke a single question: “What in the flying fuck is he talking about?” But don’t be mistaken, these are just as great, if not better. Here are some of my favorites.

Diamond Dave “What the Fuck” moments:

“What I represent is attitude, point of view. What I represent is some sort of spiritual neighborhood. If you hate me then you hate your most favorite parts about yourself. Ozzy is the Prince of Darkness and I’m the Patron Saint of Larceny. Who would you rather be?”

Dave during a radio interview in 2002
Interviewer: You’re five minutes early! How rock and roll is that?
Diamond Dave: Like a thunderbolt in your Cheerios, son, wake up and smell the toxic waste. They took it out of my pop tarts just when I was getting used to the taste. Actually, I haven’t been to sleep since the late Eighties. How do I look?

“When they make my gravestone, it’s going to be a cement copy of Huckleberry Finn with a pair of cement handcuffs on top of it.”

“These two new songs on the ‘Best Of,’ for example, should come with a kit including a bong, a thesaurus, and a driver’s side air-bag!”

“People are always asking me, ‘Dave, what’s it mean when you say somebody’s rockin’ or somebody’s not rockin’?’ and I say, ‘I’ll illustrate: a guy with black shoes, black socks, blue and white bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian luau shirt, a Nikon and a jackknife around his neck, zinc oxide on his nose, a pair of sunglasses, a fishing hat with all the badges on it, and he’s staring up at buildings—that’s rock ‘n’ roll.’”

Mankind will not be able to wrap its collective head around those words unless we evolve to use the other 90 percent of our brains. Until then, we can just wonder and wait.

As you can obviously tell, the Diamond One is indeed one of my heroes, in a furthering wasteland populated by fewer and fewer supermen. His legacy is boundless, and I didn’t even elaborate on his bitchin’ solo work, the nothing-less-than-perfect art he produced in the music video genre (Hot For Teacher = Citizen Kane of music videos), his work as a New York City EMT (I shit you not—he saved lives with Rock ‘n Roll, and then he just plain saved lives), or his resurrection as Howard Stern’s replacement.

As for the latter, I just have to say that I’ve heard all kinds of opinions on the subject, but I have the utmost faith in the Diamond One, for he will entertain me until that darkest of dark days when his heart finally putts its last flabbity-do. I just hope that Dick Clark shares his serum.

As to how he will be remembered (besides that crazy fucking headstone), Roth once said that “I won’t go down in history, but I will go down on your sister!” As hysterical as this line is, I think the Diamond One is being much too humble here (we all know humbleness is one of his most apparent traits). Like the mighty Sasquatch, he will always be sought, and his legacy will never die. But he has thought ahead to those restful twilight years when his kicks won’t be quite as high, and he paints a beautiful picture:

“People are always coming up to me and asking me what I’m gonna do when I’m like 80 years old, and I think about it for a little while—not for too long. And I say, granted, when I turn 80, I think I’m gonna hang around with the kids, you know. I’ll be sittin’ on the rockin’ chair, on the stoop, you know, and the kids’ll come up to me, and go ‘Mr. Roth, Mr. Roth, tell us about when you wuz a rock-n-roll star!’. And I’ll have to act the part, cause I’m kinda dramatical. And I’ll go, ‘Weeeeell, seems to me I don’t really remember that, boys.’ And they’ll go, ‘Yeah you do, yeah you do. Tell us about when you went on tour to Paris, France, and you fell in love with the blonde lady.’ And I’ll go, ‘Weeeeell, seems to me I do remember something like that.’ And they’ll go, ‘Yeah you do, yeah you do. You gotta picture of her in your pocket.’ And so, I’ll reach into my pocket real slow, and I’ll take out the photograph, and I’ll go, ‘Yeah, I think it was Paris, France. I think it was 1987. Look at that booty!’”

In the end though, I could only imagine one headstone:

“Diamond” David Lee Roth 

Born October 10, 1954
Died October 10, 2123,
From complications
Due to Rocking

“I don’t feel tardy.”

All hail the Diamond One.

NOTE: Art by thegoldenghoose.blogspot.com