A profile of rock star David Lee Roth, who has had a diverse career and life. He’s now 57 years old and back doing shows with Van Halen:
“He eventually became a certified EMT in New York and then completed a tactical medicine training program in Southern California. Not famous enough to headline Madison Square Garden, plenty famous enough to stand out in a tactical medicine training program.
‘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.’ For years he went on ambulance calls all over New York City, and found that a life in the music business was good preparation for rushing to the aid of grievously injured people in the less picturesque corners of the city. ‘My skills were serious,’ he says. ‘Verbal judo, staying calm in the face of hyper-accelerated emotion. Same bizarre hours. Same keening velocity.’”
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