Alex Van Halen doesn’t sugarcoat the complex relationship he had 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. Just ask Oasis co-founders Liam and Noël Gallagher, whose 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, sold more than 70 million albums during their almost four decades of history. It was Alex and Eddie who founded the band as teenagers in their Pasadena basement, who recruited locals David Lee Roth and Michael Anthony to join the lineup, and who guided Van Halen to the highest rung of rock stardom. When Eddie, a groundbreaking prodigy who changed the way the electric guitar was played, died of cancer at age 65 in 2020, it was not only the end of the band but also a close bond that led Van Halen to play. from suburban house parties to football stadiums.

With his book “Brothers,” Alex has written an elegy for Eddie and their complex dynamic that was tested by drug abuse, power trips, and all the other common pitfalls that befall the megastars who once shared the spotlight. same bedroom. “This is a happy and sad moment for me,” Alex says of his book, which was written with writer Ariel Levy. “I have tried to have an objective view of things and bring them all to light. But I didn’t want to be selfish. “I tried not to sugarcoat the story.”

“Brothers” contains its share of “hey, look at us!” set pieces, but he’s surprisingly frank about Van Halen’s tense dynamic, particularly the back-and-forth between the two brothers and lead singer David Lee Roth. But it begins, like all rock stories, with young people brimming with ambition and self-confidence, eager to prove themselves and willing to work hard to get there. What is conspicuous by its absence is the rejection of the elders, the anger with the parents.

His 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 moved to Indonesia, where he met Alex and Eddie’s mother, Eugenia. It was Eugenia who encouraged piano lessons for her children, 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 worked as a freelance jazz musician with some Dutch companions.

“My father taught us everything we needed to know to be professionals,” Alex says. He is the presiding spirit of the book, the voice inside their heads when things get complicated with the band or when they find themselves pondering their next steps. “He showed us by example,” Van Halen says. “He was very dedicated. He had all these maxims, like “obstacles in the path become the path forward.” He intended to play, no matter what was thrown at him. He was disciplined and nothing was going to stop him. “We take it as an article of faith.”

Once the family settled in Pasadena, Alex and Eddie soon discovered the wonders of guitar rock and roll (Cream, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath) and a new perspective opened up to them. Initially, Alex was 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 thought, yeah, I think you should go for guitar, man,” Alex says. “We both knew he had the talent for it from the beginning.”

Within a few years, Eddie Van Halen would become one of the most influential musical innovators of the 20th century, a melodically sophisticated, fleet-fingered virtuoso who changed the way guitarists approached their instrument. “Ed was born with a gift, but he knew he had to cultivate it,” Alex says. “There was never a waking moment when Ed wasn’t with his guitar. He worked day and night, disassembling and then remodeling his guitars to suit his sound, practicing endlessly. “It was the only thing that mattered to him.”

Van Halen singer David Lee Roth was an outlier, a flamboyant landscape-eater whose tastes ranged from show tunes to the Latin lounge music of Louis Prima. Still, as 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 an old blues tune,” Alex says of the song that ended up on his mammoth self-titled debut from 1977. “We thought this guy’s got something. unique, even if it wasn’t what we liked.” Jan Van Halen also appreciated Roth; He knew his kids needed a visual venue for their band, something that would appeal to an audience beyond teenage air guitar fans, i.e. pimply kids.

“It was another lesson from our father: you always need visual elements, something that the audience can grasp, to be able to convey the music,” says Alex. This tension, between Roth’s love of visual flash and the brothers’ purist musical approach, paid great dividends. Van Halen’s first three albums, “Van Halen,” “Van Halen II” and “Women and Children First,” sold millions. Then MTV, which debuted in 1981, changed the game and quickly became 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 started playing around with riffs played on his Oberheim OB-xa keyboard. When he played Alex the opening track of a song he was working on, his annoyance flared, but “Ed’s attitude was, ‘let’s take a risk, let’s go outside of what we know,’” he says.

Alex and the band capitulated, on the condition that the video be free of gimmicks. The resulting song, “Jump,” from the band’s album “1984,” became a worldwide hit, the song that Alex claims “will be the one we remember.” The video, an austere affair in which the band lip-synced in front of a white background, became ubiquitous; “1984” became Van Halen’s first album to reach No. 1 on the Billboard album chart.

Then, without warning, Roth pounced. “He couldn’t stand the fact that Eddie got more attention than him,” Alex says. “I kept asking Eddie to play less guitar solos. “Dave was convinced he was going to be a movie star.” And so, the incarnation of the band that Alex calls “the real Van Halen” disbanded at the peak of its popularity. “1984” ended up selling more than 10 million copies.

Van Halen didn’t miss a beat, recruiting Sammy Hagar as their lead singer and producing a string of multi-platinum albums. But Hagar’s macho voice and generic pop-rock songs couldn’t evoke the Sherman stomp of Roth’s incarnation. When the band wasn’t on tour, Eddie would hole up in his home studio for weeks, drinking heavily and smoking cigarettes incessantly, overwhelmed, 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 band is still the most important thing; He’s currently going through the band’s vaults, trying to find unused material to release that won’t turn out to be cheap money for fans. “I DO miss Ed like crazy,” he says.