David Lee Roth has released a video of an unplugged performance of Van Halen's Mean Street, originally the opening track from Van Halen's fourth studio album Fair Warning. The undated video, which finds Roth performing an exuberant version of the song with a group of unidentified musicians, arrived on the day that Sammy Hagar began his Best Of Both Worlds tour, which finds the Red Rocker's setlist filled with Van Halen songs.
Roth has a history of using social media to amplify his various beefs, and last year he released another acoustic song, Manda Bala – titled after a Portuguese expression that translates literally as "send a bullet" but more usually used to mean "go for it!" – on the day that Hagar celebrated his 76th birthday. Coincidence? Quite possibly, but it wouldn't be the first time Roth has made rather oblique references to his successor in Van Halen.
In 2020, Following Hagar’s comments to US radio presenter Eddie Trunk that Roth wasn't "user friendly", he posted an illustration in which the former Montrose man was referred to several times. The image, which was posted on Roth’s Twitter account, was styled in the form of a newspaper titled The Daily Catastrophe, and made more than one mention to Hagar, who was labelled as “the Bottom’s Favourite Front Guy‘. Whatever that means.
Sometimes Roth's postings are much less cryptic, as in the bizarre attack on Wolfgang Van Halen made earlier this year, in which the Mammoth WVH frontman was taken to task for alleged misbehaviour on Van Halen's North American Tour in 2015.
Roth's video, which features two members of his touring band from the early noughties (drummer Ray Luzier and guitarist Toshinori Hiketa) as well as a pair of musicians who've been cropped out of the frame, is below. It's pretty good.
