The extensive photo section of David Lee Roth's new autobiography reprints a photo essay from Life magazine during the former Van Halen frontman's early-'80s heyday. Titled "Rock's Rowdiest Rogues," one spread contains before-and-after shots of a hotel room; the after photo features crushed lampshades, strewn food, and tastefully unremarkable artwork knocked askew. Roth has freshly captioned this photo, "Wouldn't you?" Good question. While there's probably not a style of music more out of fashion these days than '80s MTV metal, it's not so much the music that's lost approval (heard "Gone Away" by The Offspring yet?) as the lifestyle. No one symbolizes the musical overindulgence of the 1980s better than Roth, who portrays himself in Crazy From The Heat as a basically nice, smart Jewish kid from California (by way of New York and Indiana), who took the chance to live out a very public, over-the-top version of adolescent fantasies from Mad and Playboy, Lenny Bruce and Rudy Ray Moore, Alice Cooper and Led Zeppelin. Wouldn't you? Maybe not, but Roth did and lived to write the book. And it's clear on every page that it is Roth, the perennial bombastic showman, who is writing what you're reading. It's often painfully clear: Sentence fragments and organizational chaos dominate the work, as Roth leaps from tour antics to travel anecdotes to recording hijinks with only the leanest chronological structure. More of a problem is Roth's self-absorption, which is no real surprise coming from the man who rechristened himself Diamond Dave. He does an excellent job conveying who he is, but a poor one portraying anyone else; we know that he's angry with Eddie Van Halen, and we know the facts surrounding that anger, but we never learn who Eddie Van Halen is, exactly. Still, Crazy From The Heat is a fun read, as could be expected from someone who's made a career of supplying more and flashier entertainment than anyone else around. You want tales of sexual and narcotic excess, of midget sidekicks, of unique uses for frozen fish, of TVs thrown out of windows with extension cords long enough to assure that they're functioning when they hit the ground? It's all here, without an abundance of self-reflection or a hint of regret. It's this refusal to change with the times (or ignorance that the times have changed) that makes Roth such an oddly touching figure. He's still the life of the party, even if the party moved down the street a while ago, and reading Crazy From The Heat is both a good reminder of what was fun about the moment and a reminder of why things kept moving.