Alex Van Halen doesn’t sugarcoat his complex relationship with Eddie in new book ‘Brothers’

If the history of rock music has taught musicians anything, it’s this: don’t start a band with your brother or sister. Just ask the co-founders of Oasis Liam and Noel Gallagherwhose well-documented mutual enmity makes their upcoming reunion tour as much a source of morbid curiosity as excitement.

However, Van Halen was something different. The powerful hard rock band co-founded by Alex and his brother Eddie has sold more than 70 million albums in its nearly four decades of existence. It was Alex and Eddie who founded the group as teenagers in their Pasadena basement, who recruited locals David Lee Roth and Michael Anthony to join the line-up, and who guided Van Halen to the greatest top echelon of rock stardom. When Eddie, a revolutionary prodigy who changed the way electric guitar was played, died of cancer at age 65 in 2020, it was not only the end of the group, but also a close bond that took Van Halen from suburban parties to football stadiums.

With his book “Brothers,” Alex wrote an elegy to Eddie and their complex dynamic that was tested by drug addiction, power crises and all the other common pitfalls that fall on the megastars who once shared the same room. “It’s a happy and sad moment for me,” Alex says of his book, written with writer Ariel Levy. “I tried to take an objective view of things and bring everything to light. But I didn’t want to be selfish. I tried not to sugarcoat the story.

“Brothers” has its fair share of “hey, look at us!” sets, but it’s surprisingly candid when it comes to Van Halen’s tense dynamics, particularly the back-and-forth between the two brothers and singer David Lee Roth. But it begins, like all rock stories, with young men brimming with ambition and self-confidence, eager to prove themselves and willing to work hard to get there. What is visibly absent is the rejection of elders, the anger of parents.

Their father, Jan Van Halen, was a professional jazz saxophonist, a man who prided himself on his professionalism and his ability to make people dance by any means necessary. When the Germans invaded Holland in 1940, Jan decamped to Indonesia, where he met Alex and Eddie’s mother Eugenia. It was Eugenia who pushed her sons to take piano lessons, even though they preferred the hot swing of their father’s music. When the family moved to California in 1962, Jan took a job as a janitor and moonlighted as a freelance jazz musician with other Dutch musicians.

“My dad taught us everything we needed to know to become pro,” says Alex. He is the presiding spirit of the book, the voice in their heads when things get dicey with the group, or when they find themselves pondering their next moves. “He set an example for us,” Van Halen says. “He was so dedicated. He had all these maxims, like “obstacles in the way become the way forward.” He intended to play no matter what was thrown at him. He was disciplined and nothing could stop him. We took this as an article of faith.

Once the family settled in Pasadena, Alex and Eddie quickly discovered the wonders of rock and roll on guitar – Cream, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath – and a new perspective opened up to them. Alex was first drawn to electric guitar and Eddie to drums. That all changed when Eddie tried out Alex’s guitar during one of their epic garage jam sessions. “I was like, yeah, I think you should go for guitar, man,” Alex says. “We both knew he had a talent for it from the start.”

In just a few years, Eddie Van Halen would become one of the most influential musical innovators of the 20th century, a nimble-fingered, melodically sophisticated virtuoso who changed the way guitarists approached their instrument. “Ed was born with a gift, but he knew he had to cultivate that gift,” says Alex. “There was never a waking moment when Ed wasn’t with his guitar. He worked day and night, dismantling and then reshaping his guitars to fit his sound, practicing endlessly. That was all he cared about.

An extremely rare photo of Van Halen during his club days, at the Whiskey A-Go-Go in Hollywood in 1977.

(Kevin Estrada/MediaPunch/IPx)

Van Halen singer David Lee Roth was an exception, a flamboyant decorator whose tastes ranged from show tunes to the Latin lounge music of Louis Prima. Yet, as is the case with great bands, the disparate elements coalesced into something unique. “David sang ‘Ice Cream Man’ at his audition, which we thought was his song, but it was this old blues number,” Alex explains of the song that concluded their mammoth 1977 self-titled debut album. “We thought there was something unique about this guy, even if it wasn’t what we liked.” Jan Van Halen also liked Roth; he knew his sons needed a visual venue for their band, something that could appeal to an audience beyond teenage air-guitar aficionados, i.e. cream of the crop boys. buttons.

“That was another lesson from our father: you always need visuals, something the audience can understand, to get the music across,” Alex explains. This tension – between Roth’s love of visual flash and the brothers’ purist musical approach – paid off. Van Halen’s first three albums — “Van Halen,” “Van Halen II” and “Women and Children First” — all sold in the millions. Then MTV, which debuted in 1981, changed the game, quickly becoming the main driver of record sales. It was around this time that Eddie, who had built his own home studio, began listening to a lot of orchestral music and playing along with the riffs played on his Oberheim OB-xa keyboard. When he played Alex the opening chorus of a song he was working on, his boredom bristled, but “Ed’s attitude was, ‘Let’s take a risk, let’s step outside of what we know.’ “, he said.

Alex and the group capitulated, on the condition that the video be free of gimmicks. The resulting song, “Jump,” from the group’s album “1984,” became a global earworm, the song that Alex said “will be the one we remember.” The video, a stark affair with the band lip-syncing in front of a white background, became ubiquitous; “1984” became Van Halen’s first record to reach No. 1 on the Billboard album chart.

Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar of Van Halen at Staples Center.

(Steve Granitz/WireImage)

Then, without warning, Roth jumped. “He couldn’t stand the fact that Eddie was getting more attention than him,” Alex says. “He kept asking Eddie to play fewer guitar solos. Dave was convinced he was going to become a movie star. And so the incarnation of the band Alex calls “the real Van Halen” disbanded at the height of its popularity. “1984” has sold more than 10 million copies.

Van Halen didn’t miss a beat, recruiting Sammy Hagar as lead singer and producing a string of multiplatinum records. But Hagar’s macho vocals and generic pop-rock songs couldn’t summon the Sherman tank stomp of the Roth incarnation. When the band wasn’t touring, Eddie would hunker down in his home studio for weeks, drinking heavily and smoking cigarettes non-stop – burdened, Alex writes, by the burden of being called the greatest guitarist on the planet.

Van Halen was diagnosed with neuropathy in his legs a few years ago and no longer plays drums. But his old group is still very present in people’s minds; he’s currently digging through the band’s coffers, trying to find unused material to release that won’t come back as a cheap cash grab for fans. “IF…I miss Ed like crazy,” he said.