David Lee Roth Quotes - Page 3

Being a rock star is being a rock star, I don't need to go into the details. What would you do if you were a rock star?

I just wanted to be in show biz. I wanted to make music and sing and dance, tell jokes and stories, make ya smile, make ya cry - and charge you $ 8.50

It's always irritated me that people say, 'Where's the action? Oh wow, there's no action here; let's go somewhere else.' These people will never find the action.

They make this drink in Brazil Called cachaca. It's sugar can alcholho. Costs 35 cents a quart. One quart of that stuff and you see God. Two quarts and you graow a pair of tight pants and an electric guitar.

Whether I'm on for a day or whether I'm on for a year, at the end of the day, I sing for my dinner.

I change as the times change. I'm a reflection of what's around me without trying at all.

I live and breathe and do four times as much four times as fast as anyone else.

I am a one-trick pony. If you tell most people to draw a picture of a tree, they'd draw 35 branches and 10,000 leaves. I will draw you a tree with four branches and three leaves, and I'll spend the rest of the week drawing inside of each leaf. In terms of the grand gesture, I reserve that maximum turbo blast energy for what I do as an artist, and I sing and dance for dinner.

I'm gonna abandon my spirit to them, which is actually what I attempt to do. You work yourself up into that state and you fall in supplication of the demon gods.

Audience participation should extend from on-stage to backstage to under the stage

Critics like Elvis Costello because critics are like Elvis Costello.

You know what rock musicians are? They are hung up, neurotic, over-weight hippies with sex problems.

A song without a hook is like a train without rails. It skitters all over the place, bangs into everything. Boom! Crash! There goes Grand Central Station. Crushed by a train.

Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.

The only thing I'm allergic to is criticism.

I take my personal upkeep real seriously; my sense of organization and attention to detail; my memory; my business - I love the business.

I believe more and more that this business is about people. People, people. The idea is to make friends at the retail level, the warehouse level, let people see you exist, can form sentences and have an interest in something other than yourself.

Self-tragedy is always a great way to dramatize yourself - ask any teenager.

In front of the camera and in front of the lens, there's no lawsuits, there's no agent, and there's most frequently no time limits... There's a longevity that's kind of built into it. I spend most of my time behind the scenes, and when it is time to perform, I'm genuinely delighted to do it.

Nine times out of 10 when people do a tribute album or tribute songs for somebody, it's what I call 'white boys playing reggae'. They know they can't, we know they can't, so they sing like they can't and play like they can't. They gently make fun of the idiom or sing in a false accent.

Of course building a kitchen makes all the symmetric sense in the world because everybody's burning calories at 120 beats a minute. You could even register it on a graph at the DJ booth. "How fast are they burning calories, sir?" "126 a minute." "Are you sure?" "Oh, I'm very sure." You can meter that out.

My ambition is to further create a signature sound, a signature spirit, that makes some kind of contribution to music in general.

You want a hero in the music world? James Brown. He brought a feeling to music without really using words. He's just famous for his sound.

You can really bring so much more to rock'n'roll. Rock'n'roll is the most accepting, is the most fertile ground for creating hybrid forms of music and hybrid forms of show, if you draw from many, many different wells. It's just unfortunate so many rock'n'roll stars only bother to learn how to play like Led Zeppelin and/or the Rolling Stones and that's what you get, disc after disc and show after show.

Van Halen can keep providing the rain and I'll keep providing the parade.