Roth opens the door to the downstairs study, filled with rows and rows of wardrobe racks and lorded over by an 8-foot statue that he's decorated with Japanese tattoos, another interest he's engaged with characteristic vigor. If you're in need of a yellow embroidered matador jacket but aren't sure what kind of yellow embroidered matador jacket, have we got a room for you. Road cases are scattered on the patio outside the study — after nearly a year of unplanned dormancy owing to Eddie Van Halen's bout with diverticulitis that scrapped what had been one of the most successful tours of last year, the machine is cranking up again. There's a one-off show in Australia in April, Japan in May, and a festival in Wisconsin in July.

"I've read all these," he says, gesturing to the swollen bookshelves. The most important one he's read recently is Christopher Hitchens' memoir Hitch-22. He refers to the art books regularly, overseeing design needs for Van Halen. "I look forward to the longer flights because I'm actually able to read a full paperback uninterrupted. Here there's a barrage of stimuli: the phone, email. Books shaped who I am early on — Jack London, Mark Twain. All those adventure magazines, like Argosy. Guys who went out into the territory and became merchant marines or opened up a bar somewhere in the South Pacific but then somehow came to own banana fields in Ecuador and then and then and then. And now I'm writing The Innocents Abroad in cyberspace."

When Howard Stern left for satellite radio in 2006, Roth took over his time slot — his first guest was Uncle Manny — but almost immediately bristled against what he thought was a restrictive format. The idea of parlaying his loquaciousness into something approaching a day job isn't anything new. He's excited by the prospect of no one telling him what can or can't work.

Just as reading Jack London books as a child fueled his wanderlust, he's trying to pass this tradition on, using his own war stories to educate a generation driven to complacency. A generation that may not necessarily know who he is. He wants to be stopped by fans who tell him he inspired them to go to Borneo as much as he's stopped by fans who tell him he inspired them to start a band.

The upstairs hallway is lined with platinum records — and platinum cassettes, god bless — monuments to the kind of career a rock band would barely think to aspire to today. At a moment when Mumford and Sons can fairly be called one of the biggest bands in the world, it's hard to understate the relative ubiquity and range Van Halen possessed — highbrow and lowbrow, butch and flamboyant, appealing to stoners and jocks, men and women, boys and girls. Who else would Jeff Spicoli hire to play his birthday party?

Sitting in the upstairs office, Roth fishes a Marlboro Light out of a pack and tosses it back onto a small wooden school desk — they're good for what he calls his "rusty pipe" of a voice. Lolita Holloway plays on a loop from a stereo in another room. CDs and DVDs line the bookshelves in woozy, haphazard stacks, Russ' crate sits next to a bowl of water and an exercise bike. On the wall by the bathroom door are scribbles that look from a distance like height markings for a growing child, but they're actually ideas and song titles, chicken scratch. The windows open out onto the vast backyard as the sun goes down. "It's the last refuge of the great outdoors without having to leave the city. You're not going to find this in Beverly Hills."

In December 2011, Roth posted an eight-minute black-and-white video scrapbook, compiled with the help of editor Shelly Toscano, that served as a de facto (re-)introduction to Roth and his interests. Another, showing Roth herding dogs, was shown during breathers on last year's Van Halen tour. Toscano came on to work for Roth full-time, primarily editing Van Halen promo materials, but his inherent hamminess had discovered a new outlet and a new purpose.

Last October, The Roth Show launched: It's a YouTube series shot at the house or on the road, with an audio version available as a podcast, and it's nothing more or less than David Lee Roth speaking for a half hour on, more or less, a single topic. Tattoos. FM and underground radio. The history and semiotics of pop videos by way of Picasso. A long-ago trip to New Guinea. His personal history with drinking and smoking. Slideshows from an unending vacation. The episodes are monologues, history lessons, personal taxonomy, but really, mostly just talking and more talking, social-studies lectures by way of rock 'n' roll Babylon, at carnival-barker cadence. He speaks in dog years. He is the Ken Burns of David Lee Roth.

The effect is overwhelming. The show has already amassed hours of Roth unpacking himself, and it's hard to think of any figure of his status, in any field, who has put himself or herself out there to this degree, unfiltered and unabridged, exhaustive and exhausting. His 1997 memoir, Crazy from the Heat, is a jewel of the trashy-bio genre — most of the book is the stuff you'd dog-ear in other trashy bios — but that will soon be a cocktail-napkin scribble by comparison. At a half hour, guest-free, every three weeks, his pace is ferocious. The shows do fine; the podcast is regularly in the iTunes top 200, and each episode has around 20,000 views on YouTube.

But Roth is envisioning bigger things. He is only starting to sift through and digitize and catalogue a dozen or so hours of no doubt incriminating video and Super 8 footage he shot backstage and on the road during Van Halen's bacchanalian prime that can serve as the springboard for future episodes. (There has never been an authorized Van Halen documentary; he's taken it upon himself to be the band's de facto archivist.) He seems no less consumed with chronicling himself than a teenage livestreamer, and not just for the benefit of fans he has in the bag.

"If I narrate this appropriately, I can illuminate," he says. "Partying means something very different now than it did back then, and there are relatively few individuals in my position who are both willing to discuss it and articulate enough to make it accessible. Do you want a Victorian-style painting with your foot up on the buffalo and a teak wood settee in front of a tent — 'Yes, wonderful hunting foray, can't wait to return home, cheeksie' — or do you want a no-holds-barred truth-told-at-every-juncture reiteration that compels questions? If your only question as a 20-year-old is, 'How did you become a success?' a fair amount of explanation is in The Roth Show." Beyond it being an erudite scrapbook of bad behavior, he wants the show to be a travelogue. He wants guests. He wants sponsors.

"You can't just go into a sumo stable and get an interview," he says — he's in pitch mode now, which does not sound markedly different than any of his other modes save for a slight uptick in urgency. "We have an opportunity to talk to a marvelous group of people that few others have access to. I'm pretty conversant on a lot of subjects, and I'm good at asking the questions."

It doesn't even matter much whether the stories are apocryphal. The legend that Van Halen wouldn't play if they found brown M&Ms in their backstage jar is cited as a prime example of the era's excess and hubris; the reality is that the request was buried in their contract rider as a test to see whether venues were abiding by the intricate technical specifications for the stage and sound — at first blush, that's more boring, but as a whole, it's a proper snapshot of frontier life. By now these legends add up to a bigger story that is true, even if it's not all, you know, true.

There are no lights, not in here, not in many of the rooms; at night in the office, Roth uses the TV for illumination, and beyond that, he's got 25 years of walking in the dark here, he knows every corner, there's not much to bump into. When it gets too dark to see across the desk, he calls downstairs to Mark Rojas, who was a kid when his mother worked for Roth and now shoots The Roth Show. Rojas enters wearing a wool overcoat — it's downright cold now — and holding a flashlight and a floor lamp. He plugs in the lamp, turns it on, and exits.

Even a casual music fan might feel intimately familiar with Eddie Van Halen's recent medical chart: oral cancer, hip replacement. Meanwhile, David Lee Roth has been quietly paying the price for a lifetime of hard landings. He's undergone two major lower back surgeries in recent years. The office chair is missing its right armrest — Roth also had his shoulder reattached in four places and needed to be able to sleep in the chair when it was too uncomfortable to lie on his back. "See that?" He points to a framed picture of Elvis Presley mounted on the wall just a foot or two off the floor, between two open French windows. "I had to move that down because I slept with my head against that wall. Dog is here, dog watches door."

But Roth doesn't seem fragile — he barely has crow's-feet — and he's inspired and challenged by technology and youth culture in ways that he thinks a lot of his peers aren't, downloading house mixes from Beatport, hailing David Guetta and Skrillex and Deadmau5 ("I'm always curious as to who's got the biggest boom in the room"), marveling at the stagecraft of J-pop boy-band Exile. He can barely name a younger rock band that interests him or that he thinks may bear traces of Van Halen's spiritual DNA. Maybe Kings of Leon.

And he's not afraid of the contentiousness of the internet, built to destroy, or at least to embarrass — very different from the unconditional adoration from a hockey arena full of paying fans shouting along to "Panama" in unison. A few years ago, someone posted an isolated vocal track of Roth singing "Dance the Night Away" in the studio, maybe not quite pitch-perfect. "People like to feel superior to someone who's famous," he says with a shrug. "If that had happened in the '80s and was sent out to radio, that would have been a problem. But taken in the main, one lousy vocal take on the internet next to hundreds of non-lousy ones, that just describes a human being. One of the most basic definitions of art is something that compels commentary."

Even if that commentary is cruel and unbecoming and coming from entitled peanut gallerists who haven't done a fraction of what he's done in his life? "Sure," he says. "I enjoy the entitlement."