'I hate the word maturing,' singer David Lee Roth once said. 'I don't like the word evolving – or any of that bullshit. The point is to keep it as simplistic, as unassuming, and as stupid as possible.' In keeping with Roth's sentiment, Van Halen: Exuberant California, Zen Rock'n'roll follows the band's pursuit of the art of artlessness, and describes how they characterize what historian Kevin Starr terms 'Zen California' – a state of mind and way of being that above all celebrates 'the now'. In rock'n'roll terms it stands for the unregulated expenditure of energy, for a youthful exuberance that seems destined to extinguish itself.