INDIO, Calif. — David Lee Roth had just finished his spot with singer Teddy Swims on Friday, April 11, singing the Van Halen hit “Jump” with that Diamond Dave zeal, when he made his way to the press tent to talk with reporters about his first Coachella appearance.

As a performer, that is, he clarified with a big grin and a twinkle in his eye.

“OK, here’s my experience with this place,” Roth began, and launched into a story that was surprising but also not, because with Roth, sometimes the strangest things are true.

As 50 approached, the singer decided to take a break from rock ‘n’ roll to trade tight pants and big stages for the anonymity of an emergency medical technician. Yes, that’s right, Roth trained to work as an EMT and then went out and did the job in tough neighborhoods around New York City and the Southern California desert, too.

“I shaved my head, I weighed about 12 more pounds of solid muscle,” he says. “I’ve never been a one-job-for-a-life kind of fellow. Periodically I stopped to sing and show you some of the fury and joys from that. And I became an EMT. Nobody knew me.

“And I worked the hospitals here at Hemet, Indio, Palm Springs,” Roth continues. “For Coachella, and New Year’s Eve, twice for Coachella, three times for New Year’s Eve over in Indio in the emergency room.

“So everybody who gets driven from here, I was the one who said, ‘You’re gonna be OK,’” he says. ”‘We’re gonna cut your boots off and you’re gonna need new boots. Your leg is broken.’”

Hundreds of calls, from the California desert to the Bronx, Bed-Stuy, Queens, he says. They people he met on that job became part of who he has become.

“There’s no pictures; I didn’t do it for publicity,” Roth says. “And now, all of my patients are in my voice. Everybody I worked with, they’re in my dancing.”

And all of that was present in his performance with Swims on Saturday, part of a lifetime desire to contribute to the world in anyway possible.

“My contribution tonight was to make every female in that audience feel eminently desirable, and every adult male in that audience feel like you could get hit by a pickup truck, and I hope I didn’t hurt your truck,” Roth said.

“You can take that like hot sauce and mix it with everything,” he said of making contributions where you can. “Scrambled eggs in the morning, your goodbye shot of vodka at night. You can mix it with your politics, you can mix it with your love life, your family, you can teach your kids with that.

“What I contribute is laugh to win.”

As for singing with Swims on Friday?

“Oh, I know his music inside and out,” Roth said. “R&B for me is my driving wheel. For me, you might not know it from my rusty old pipes, but starting back with Anita O’Day and Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, those were my mentors.

“Most of my musical heroes wore suits to work. They had nothing to do with rock and roll. And when rock and roll happened, Eddie [Van Halen] and I brought all of that to what we do.”

Of course, Van Halen and Roth’s solo bands played many a festival. In 1983 Van Halen headlined the massive US Festival in San Bernardino County, still one of the biggest music festivals in Southern California history.

“Most art forms become a ghetto,” Roth said when asked how Coachella compares with the US Festival, or any festival for that matter. “For example, power trio, hard rock from the ’70s, obligatory amp wall, hair extensions. Tight pants.”

He points to his own shiny silver and black tight pants from his performance and cackles with laughter.

Today, Coachella remains unbound by conventions, still the kind of free-sprawling landscape of every kind of music under the sun, Roth says.

“This festival is all knees and elbows,” he says. “That’s poetry for freestyle. Very accepting.

“Here, if you really mean it, you’re acceptable. My kind of town.”

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