A wild persona like David Lee Roth certainly has so many stories to tell. In a recent episode of his the Roth Show, Diamond Dave took fans back to the time he almost got eaten alive by hungry piranhas while drifting in a canoe in an uncharted Amazon jungle.
DLR is back with the second season of his podcast, the Roth Show. Apart from sharing important highlights from his musical career, Roth also tells interesting stories through the episodes. In the recent sixth episode, the singer recalled when he went to Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil, to camp with his friends. According to Roth, they had no map, GPS, or anything and were in the middle of nowhere.
Drinking pinga with the natives, a distilled spirit from sugarcane juice, they got drunk. After listening to music and dancing for a while, they decided to take a canoe trip in the Amazon river back to their camping site. As soon as they got in the water, piranhas surrounded the dugout canoe, which was a quarter inch above the water. As Roth recalled, the natives were laughing at them because they had forgotten to take their oars and started drifting out into the river’s current.
After around two hours of drifting in the river and hopelessly trying to redirect the boat with their hands while piranhas waited underneath, they finally got close enough to the land to jump out. According to David Lee Roth, it was a moment of Shakespearean comic relief — they started laughing before getting their foot on the ground. They then towed the canoe in the mud and walked back through the jungle, all in one piece.
Here is what David Lee Roth recalled about that day:
“The sun’s coming up, and we’re crammed into the little dugout canoe. The water is literally a quarter inch below the boat’s rim. You’ve been in the boat so deep that there’s about a third of a cigarette between the top of the boat and the water. Here, with the stereo, totally drunk is piranha-filled water, and I mean the real sh*t. You can see the water bubbling — I saw it dozens and dozens of times; it starts off as a bubbling froth about mattress size, maybe a third of a football field away, and you can hear the water bubbling before you see it.
It heads for you, then it looks like two mattresses, then three, and suddenly ten from side to side, and they swarm your whole boat. A swarm, a pack like that, can finish a calf in 30 minutes. And this is what’s waiting under our boat; this is where they invented piranha! We climb into the thing, head out into the river, and get into the current. Everybody is cheering and laughing on the shore. We realize that they’re cheering, laughing, and giggling because we forgot our oars and started drifting out into the river, into the current.”
He continued:
“We’re drifting sideways in the slow current, and they’re holding up the oars, laughing and cheering. I see it like yesterday. We drifted and drifted — you might splash your hands in the water a little bit to try and redirect the boat, but remember what’s living and waiting for dinner right underneath your boat. We don’t dare touch the water. And after about 20 minutes, we pass our boat and continue to pass the boat till the boat is behind us, but we can’t even put our hands in the water.
We drifted again for about another hour and a half down a tributary of the uncharted Amazon jungle. Before we got close enough for sure to jump out, we just started laughing. It’s Shakespearean: Things get bad and worse, and you just have to laugh. After about an hour and a half past the boat, we finally jumped out and had to walk back through the jungle, towing that f*cking boat in the mud.”
So, it appears like things could get worse, and David Lee Roth could have been tragically eaten by the piranhas during his Amazon trip. Thankfully, luck was on Diamond Dave’s side, and he got to the shore in one piece.
