In 2002, for reasons that may have been clear only to him, former Van Halen singer and professional outsized ham David Lee Roth spent a reported $600,000 making a disjointed longform music video featuring himself cavorting with a dwarf, chugging beers with pregnant women, playing with an Asian sword to the tune of “Baker Street,” doing a totally unnecessary cover of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” brandishing military weapons, cavorting with models, playing jazz guitar…
It’s a lot like what might happen if a 14-year-old boy with a brutal case of ADHD was given a generous supply of alcohol and money, a shitty ‘80s VHS camcorder, and the chance to make the music video of his dreams.
The video was manufactured as a 2xVHS package—one tape was the regular video, the other was the video with Roth’s stream-of-Ritalin commentary, which would have to be exponentially more bonkers than the video alone—and it may have been sent out to entertainment industry movers in a quixotic endeavor to score a reality show, but it’s only been available to civilians as a bootleg, or in bits and pieces on YouTube, until a couple of days ago when Roth uploaded the whole damn thing to his own video channel, so that it can at last be seen uninterrupted in all its awkward-segue glory.
If your tolerance levels for Roth and/or the puerile display of women’s bodies are low, don’t even bother, you’ll definitely hate this 100% as much as you’re imagining you will. If you’re a sufficiently advanced ironist or a big enough actual fan of the guy to handle an hour of his mugging, you’ll be treated to a deliriously spastic mashup of early MTV and low-rent Jodorowsky for connoisseurs of breast implants and mind-bogglingly inept cover songs.