10 minutes backstage with David Lee Roth at Coachella

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David Lee Roth popped out at Coachella on Friday to sing Van Halen’s classic “Jump” with Teddy Swims.After the show, we grabbed a few minutes with the 71-year-old rock star, who wore a beaded vest and tight silver-and-black trousers and sipped from a red plastic cup.Ted, Teddy, Theodore — what do you call Teddy swims?I call him Teddy.

Teddy Swims is one of the best names ever — everybody’s saying it.All around in the city here are visitors from Germany, Holland, Japan, China, and they all know that name.

Something like Greenberg? Helfenbein? [Shrugs]What if you’d been Dave Roth?My full name is David Lee Roth — it’s an anagram.When I was born, I had a traumatic birth — I was backwards, I had the cord around, I was hyperactive.

My grandfather, who was a 70-hour-a-week physician — graduated medical school in 1920 — took a look at me two hours after I was born and told my mom, “He’s gonna be trouble.” And Mom’s way of saying “Go schtup yourself,” she added the middle name Lee.If you reverse the letters, it comes out the devil.You ever been to Coachella before? This is my first time on this stage, and it’s the most forgiving audience.

What a colorful, noisy bunch.A forgiving audience? What does that mean? It means if you go to Kenny Chesney, you gotta have the hat — the girls have to have the cut-offs.There’s rules.

If you go heavy metal, you gotta cut the sleeves off a black shirt — not blue.And here it’s catch-as-catch-can? It’s inventive, creative, imaginative without rules — the way artwork perhaps used to be in the middle ’80s.In 1985, graphic art, sculptural art, automotive art — there were no rules.

Today, you’re not getting on any gallery walls without a political bias.And today, here, I’m not sure what the bias is.

I can wear something like this and it’s like, “Too bad you showed up in your day clothes.”Wha...