David Lee Roth says he may have had the coronavirus.
He tells the New York Times, “I’m not so unconvinced I didn’t have the corona. Man, they gave me enough prednisone to put boots on the moon! We left a trail of groupies, rubble and incandescent reviews. But I don’t want to go back through it.”
Roth also says he considers himself high risk. “The road will deteriorate you from the beginning or it will keep you alive forever. When we go out, we wear ourselves to a nubbin. I just had a lower back surgery. It was a spinal fusion where they take a chip from somebody else.”
Roth has been spending the downtime at home in Pasadena, and one of things he’s been doing to keep busy is drawing comics and posting them on social media. “This isn’t expressing myself. This is performance therapy. I’m venting. I’m angry. And I am not asking for forgiveness. And this is how I do it… Lo and behold, people have taken a real fascination. I am drawing and painting every night. And the fact that there’s an audience for it is quite a tickle. So of course I’ll make it available.”
Dave also says he doesn’t think we’ll ever see Eddie Van Halen on stage again.
He says, “I don’t know that Eddie is ever really going to rally for the rigors of the road again. I don’t even want to say I’ve waited — I’ve supported for five years. Because what I do is physical as well as musical and spiritual — you can’t take five years off from the ring. But I did. And I do not regret a second of it. He’s a bandmate. We had a colleague down. And he’s down now for enough time that I don’t know that he’s going to be coming back out on the road. You want to hear the [Van Halen] classics? You’re talking to him.”
Eddie’s camp remains silent on the status of his health. Recent reports say he’s had a relapse of cancer in his tongue and throat.
Roth was supposed to be on tour this summer opening for KISS.
