![]() ![]() Offers immediately began pouring in from people looking to persuade Jeffries to take them along as his guest. ![]() The then 20-year-old had mailed in eight postcards to MTV, and a month later got the phone call that he would be going on tour with the band. The contest would promise one lucky winner and a guest a weekend of full access and rock star treatment with Van Halen, and Pennsylvania resident Kurt Jeffries was that lucky winner. In 1984, when MTV had the attention of every teenager in the country, the network launched a contest of previously unheard of rock n’ roll access: The Lost Weekend. The band was traveling with a photographer from LIFE magazine and two dwarf bodyguards, and the whole scenario was glaringly obvious to Stern that “these guys are having the times of their lives.” There would be a ‘David! David!’ and they’re banging on the doors and stuff and I’m like, ‘David’s not here.’ “ And there were just women banging on doors - they thought I was part of the entourage. “Just by coincidence, when I was a disc jockey in Detroit, my first week on the air, these guys were playing and I was on the same floor with them. While speaking with Howard about how he was once passed around among five groupies like a party favor, the DJ recalled the insanity that followed the band when they came to his first radio gig in Detroit. The book details Roth’s childhood, entry into the music business, and – of particular interest to Stern – the band’s indulgence of rock-star excess. In 1998, Roth released his autobiography, Crazy From the Heat, and went on Howard Stern’s radio show to promote the book. Howard Stern recalls VH chaos at a Detroit radio station. The program was so efficient that it ended up cutting stage breakdown time in half and led to Roth actually asking his lawyers if they could insure his “little Elvis.” The roadie who picked the girl(s) who ended up going to bed with Roth was awarded $100 and commended the next evening at dinner. ![]() Roth had launched a program where members of his road crew would be given five backstage passes to hand out to women eager to meet the frontman. This meant groupies, and to ensure that he had an abundance of willing females to choose from, he had his road crew play talent scout. While Eddie Van Halen would often skip the afterparty to toil away in his room with a guitar, alcohol, and cocaine like a mad scientist, David Lee Roth enjoyed the spoils of fronting hard rock’s newest sensation. While the guys did have to perform an 18-song set, the rest of the time truly was a world vacation for the guys. ![]() It was the band’s first world tour as a headliner after blowing Black Sabbath off the stage every night the previous year. In 1979, Van Halen embarked on their World Vacation Tour in support of Van Halen II, which would eventually go 5x platinum. In celebration of Roth’s 61st birthday and the completion of a Van Halen tour that actually ended rather pleasantly, let’s look back at some of the many highlights on Roth’s party resume. I wonder if I even see that in people’s eyes.” Not just the partying, but the travel, the late nights, not just with groupies, but with all kinds of colleagues in a variety of other pursuits. I wonder if it’s still a dream to live the way we lived. “We lived our lives like roughnecks,” he says. In typical Roth fashion, he told BuzzFeed about those days. Roth’s party days have long faded, but during those first six albums the singer cut with the band, the guy lived it up. Yes, David Lee Roth is a singer, but, as reviews will attest, you don’t go to a Van Halen show to hear Diamond Dave’s voice, you go to see the human cartoon that is David Lee Roth (and Eddie’s guitar wizardry). You could probably count on one hand the rockers who truly created a mystique simply based on their reputation for debauchery: GnR, Keith Richards, Ozzy Osbourne, Mötley Crüe, and, of course, David Lee Roth. The list of rock-star party stories spans six decades, but few rockers truly rise to the level of party rock god. ![]()
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