Back in 2012, David Lee Roth uploaded an unusual video to his YouTube account. Titled "50 Rides On The Love Train", it featured 50 clips of the singer dancing to The O'Jays 1972 proto-disco classic Love Train.
Edited together, the clips last for almost two and half hours. 148 minutes of Roth doing his thing in various locations. The retro hustle. The bus stop. The funky chicken, the wrong-way sweetheart and the lateral dip.
To make matters even more peculiar, Roth can be heard singing along with the O'Jays original as he throws shapes, a-yelpin' and a-whoopin' and a-hollarin' with no small amount of enthusiasm.
Later that year he explained what the hell was going on during the fourth episode of The Roth Show – Roth's short-lived replacement for the Howard Stern show – revealing that "Love-Training" was the name given to his pre-show warmup routine.
"I'm a soul growler, a baritone," exclaims Roth. "You put up that song, and it has soulful testifying from beginning to end. You can sing the lead vocal, you can sing the background vocal, you can sing the scat – the intermittent 'woah-oh-yeah', the amen corner – you can sing any one of those three parts, or you can sing them all. You can sing continuously, from the beginning to the end of the song."
"That will test you," he adds. "That will test you to the nth degree. Because that's real singing. When I'm doing vocals for the Van Halen album I'll sing Love Train three or four times, just to get the pipes working. And then you're in a position to deliver the actual groceries, as it says in the Tora."
Roth then goes on to reveal how singing live onstage is exponentially harder, describing the experience using an analogy involving showjumping cavalry horses and comic books in a bewildering stream-of-consciousness delivery that – quite frankly – leaves us only slightly the wiser.
Enjoy the Love-Training video? There's more.
Ten years earlier, the singer put together David Lee Roth's No Holds Bar-B-Que, an outlandish, hour-long video project which featured Roth flailing about with nunchaku and other martial arts-related paraphernalia, hosting a "traditional" Hawaiian luau, heading into the jungle to hunt gorillas, engaging in much swordplay, and horsing around with women in silver catsuits while his cover of ELO's Shine A Little Love played. It's almost too much to take in. Almost.
Love of or loathe him, David Lee Roth will eventually leave this world having had more fun than the rest of us put together. And for that he should be celebrated.
