CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)
By:
October 2, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… creators switching art forms and/or careers! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
DAVID LEE ROTH, EMT
I’ve been thinking about David Lee Roth for 45 years. I used to put the good thoughts and the bad thoughts into separate pans of a scale.
The good thoughts: before he showed up, the brothers VH played endless Cream jams. Dave auditioned the band’s cover songs for maximum danceability, and the grooves stuck. With a different frontman, what would Van Halen have been? Foghat with better solos, probably.
He was someone for a nebbishy suburban youth to look up to. That didn’t mean I literally wanted to dress up like a day-glo Marvel superhero or bleach my hair white, I just wanted to capture some of that confidence and joie de vivre. His memoir Crazy from the Heat is a magical compendium of wisdom and sass, Groucho Marx bringing stone tablets down from Big Rock Candy Mountain.
The bad thoughts: His shameful mistreatment of Michael Anthony. His solo career, which started off promisingly as an attempt to recreate the magic of Van Halen in a laboratory…and then devolved into nothingness. His current tour, where Uncle Irving gleefully recounts that lost weekend in Nagoya when he woke up in a dumpster, heavily tattooed.
And yet, I’ve belatedly discovered that both the good and bad thoughts actually go into the same pan on the scale. Into the other pan goes this single fact:
At the age of 48, David Lee Roth got certified as an emergency medical technician and spent two years riding an ambulance in the South Bronx. Read that last sentence again.
He could have comfortably ridden out middle age on a raft of publishing royalties. Instead, he became the guy who cleans out the meat wagon after a night of transporting burn victims and seizure patients.
“The altitude drop is when somebody realizes who you are and they take you to task. Now you’re the guy who gets to do garbage five days in a row instead of one, and doing ambulance garage garbage is different from I just finished dinner and now I have to dump the garbage darling garbage. That will test you. But I was old enough and smart enough to know what I’d signed up for. These tactics are of value. They’re a contribution.”
48 years old.
Who does this? Someone with brass balls and a cast-iron constitution, that’s who.
My friend Ehrlich thinks that after you stretch the standard dude fantasies into the realm of “snorting cocaine off of twelve strippers simultaneously,” you need new fantasies. Like becoming a bandage monkey anonymously serving the public.
“I wasn’t someone until I put on that 5.11 uniform and went on my first call.”
Hat’s off to you, Dave.
CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | James Scott Maloy on DAVID LEE ROTH, EMT | Lynn Peril on HEDY LAMARR AND GEORGE ANTHEIL, INVENTORS | Crockett Doob on LARS ULRICH, TENNIS ACE | Mimi Lipson on DANIEL DAY-LEWIS, COBBLER | Mariane Cara on BRIAN MAY, ASTROPHYSICIST | Carlo Rotella on CURTIS COKES, FIGHTING ACTOR | Josh Glenn on GEORGE HARRISON, FILM PRODUCER | Crystal Durant on SKUNK BAXTER, DEFENSE CONSULTANT | Adrienne Crew on HENRY ROLLINS, PUNK POLYMATH | Deborah Wassertzug on JOHN LURIE, DISRUPTOR | Heather Quinlan on HARRY NILSSON, COMPUTER GENIUS | Adam McGovern on JOSEPHINE BAKER, SPY | Douglas Wolk on RICHARD McGUIRE, GRAPHIC-LIT INNOVATOR | Jake Zucker on SYDNEY POLLACK, CHARACTER ACTOR | Rani Som on RACHEL POLLACK, SEEKER | Jeff Lewonczyk on ANDY WARHOL, FORMER ANDY WARHOL | Nikhil Singh on ADOLF HITLER, FORMER PAINTER | Holly Interlandi on ADAM JONES, DIRECTOR | Jonathan Pinchera on PETER CAINE, CONSPIRACY STAR | Miranda Mellis on EVE KOSOVSKY SEDGWICK, ACADEMIC WEAVER | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on BRENT SPINER, SINGING NOVELIST | Christopher-Rashee Stevenson on QUENTIN TARANTINO, CRITIC | TBD on TBD | Marlon Stern Lopez on GREG GRAFFIN, HARDCORE ZOOLOGIST | Pichchenda Bao on WENDELL BERRY, FARMING POET.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!