My Brother, Eddie Van Halen

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FTER HIS BROTHER DIED, Alex Van Halen fell apart. He can prove it. There’s photographic evidence right here on his phone, which also happens to be a repository of unheard, unfinished Van Halen songs. Spend the day with him, and he might play a few. But first, he’ll scroll to that image, an MRI of his spine with a gaping hole in it, a missing piece.

Eddie Van Halen died at age 65 in October 2020, leaving the world without its greatest post-Sixties guitar hero, and Alex without his brilliant, maddening, agonizingly sensitive baby brother, his best friend and bandmate of five decades, the “sweet guy” he jammed with nearly every day. Alex spent a lifetime protecting Eddie, but now, at last, there was nothing to be done, no bully to beat up, no lead singer to swap out. He was awash in what he calls “oceanic grief,” an onslaught of suffering so profound it left him with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. “I shut down,” he says. “I was yelling and screaming. I was beside myself.”

Four years later, the loss still feels fresh, “more than fresh,” Alex says on a Friday afternoon in mid-July. He’s eased himself into a director’s chair in the sunny living room of a ranch house on his rural weekend property in California’s Ventura County, a working lemon farm that’s also home to some 20 horses with names like Sir Heinrich VH. The place is hard enough to find that he’ll come out to the main road to guide the way, smiling from the driver’s seat of his supercar, a black Porsche 911 GT2 RS with racing stripes and a “VH” logo on one side. At 71, his only other visible rock-star affectations are a gold stud in one ear and a black beaded bracelet on his left wrist. His cropped hair is tucked under a plain black baseball cap that matches a new-looking black T-shirt; his greenish-blue eyes are clear and bright.

Alex is about to publish a book, the frank, funny memoir Brothers, tracing his life with Eddie from their childhood to the end of the original Van Halen lineup in 1984. He took on the project in search of emotional closure, which remains elusive. Today, in his first interview since Eddie’s death, he’ll reveal even more, maybe get a bit closer to turning the page. “I just miss him,” he says. “I miss the arguments. I live with it every day. And I can’t bring him back. I can’t make things right.”

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Alex hasn’t been able to play drums for the past couple of years, thanks to that spinal injury, but lately, he’s been able to hit practice pads again. More important, he can walk, albeit with a slight lurching limp, which is more than he could manage for a while. All those multiplatinum records and sold-out arenas left him with considerable resources, and his brother’s cancer battle connected him with doctors pursuing bleeding-edge treatments. He sought out an experimental stem-cell therapy from one of them, with miraculous results. “Had you seen me six months ago,” he says, “you’d go, man, I’m in sad shape.” His other plan was even more exotic. “You know DARPA, the defense arm? They have robotic stuff that you can do, exoskeletons and all that. I was looking into that — because worst comes to worst, I’ll get one of those. I’ll jump in it.” Like Iron Man? He grins. “Bingo.”

There were warning signs beforehand, but Alex’s spine finally gave way when he went to a shooting range with some friends in 2022. “The rifle kicked me on my ass,” Alex says, “and broke my back, instantly. And then I spent a year on the floor. Just staring at the ceiling. We became best friends.” As an addict in recovery, he forewent opiates, so the agony was boundless. He’s still in pain right now. “Pain is good for you,” he says. “When you’re looking at the ceiling, lots of times it can be philosophical. They say life is suffering. If you don’t get what you want, you suffer. Even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer, because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind wants to be free of change, free of pain.… But change is law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.”

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Alex Van Halen is, indeed, pretty philosophical for, well, the drummer in Van Halen, who used to bang a flaming gong with a flaming mallet onstage, who once registered 4.5 on a bar’s breathalyzer machine. (“4.0 was ‘dead,’” he notes. “I’m proud of it. Abso-fuckin’-lutely.”) Overall, he is not quite what you might expect, especially if you formed your idea of him from 40-year-old interviews where he was titanically drunk. “I wish I had more than one dick,” he said in front of a Rolling Stone reporter in 1984.

Unlike his brother, Alex was a straight-A student, at least until adolescent rebellion kicked in. (Have you seen Junior’s grades?) He immersed himself in Buddhism and other spiritual modalities early on, but also started drinking “from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep.” He had his first drink at age six. His father gave it to him.

Alex first quit drinking right after the 1986 death of his dad, Jan Van Halen, who, like his sons, was a gifted musician and an alcoholic. Eddie also made his first, instantly unsuccessful attempt at sobriety around the same time. Both brothers continued to struggle, but unlike Eddie, Alex has spent the entire 21st century sober. He found stability with his wife of 24 years, Stine, an artist and equestrian — those are her horses in the barn. “There is a part of me that’s common sense,” Alex says. “If this is going to fuck me up, why would I do that?… Common sense was not Ed’s strong point.”

THERE WAS A MOMENT WHEN it seemed like Van Halen, the band, might survive the death of its guitarist. Rumors of a planned post-Eddie tour, with Alex back on drums behind frontman David Lee Roth, were true. Shortly before the shooting-range incident, Alex and Roth began early rehearsals for that tour, with two musicians from the singer’s solo band serving as “seat fillers.” The idea was to eventually bring in Joe Satriani on guitar, and maybe even original bassist Michael Anthony, who hadn’t played with Van Halen since 2004, after which Alex and Eddie replaced him with Eddie’s then-teenage son, Wolfgang Van Halen. But in those early rehearsals, Alex started feeling numbness, peripheral neuropathy, especially in his feet. He wondered if it was an “omen from above,” a warning not to do the tour.

The plans ended up collapsing anyway, even before his vertebrae did. After several phone conversations with Queen’s Brian May about how that band carries on without Freddie Mercury, Alex came away with ideas about how to proceed. “The thing that broke the camel’s back, and I can be honest about this now,” Alex says, “was I said, ‘Dave, at some point, we have to have a very overt — not a bowing — but an acknowledgment of Ed in the gig. If you look at how Queen does it, they show old footage.’ And the moment I said we gotta acknowledge Ed, Dave fuckin’ popped a fuse.… The vitriol that came out was unbelievable.”

As Alex tells it, Roth simply refused to pay tribute to his brother, found the very idea offensive, for reasons he can’t comprehend. Alex was … displeased. “I’m from the street,” he says. “‘You talk to me like that, motherfucker, I’m gonna beat your fucking brains out. You got it?’ And I mean that. And that’s how it ended.” Alex remains baffled. “It’s just, my God. It’s like I didn’t know him anymore. I have nothing but the utmost respect for his work ethic and all that. But, Dave, you gotta work as a community, motherfucker. It’s not you alone anymore.” (Roth declined to comment.)

Alex has few regrets about the aborted tour, which he would have been physically unable to do, anyway. “It’s too bad on one hand, but it’s fine on the other,” he says. “Because now, in retrospect, playing the old songs is not really paying tribute to anybody. That’s just like a jukebox, in my opinion.… To find a replacement for Ed? It’s just not the same.” Van Halen’s second singer, Sammy Hagar, recently went on tour with Satriani and Anthony, playing those old songs. Alex won’t even utter Hagar’s name. “The heart and the soul and the creativity and the magic was Dave, Ed, Mike, and me,” he says. He’s at least as cutting in his book: “We had a lot of other singers over the years,” he writes, in his only acknowledgment of the Van Hagar era.

To be fair, there were more singers, at least potential ones, than the world knows about. Circa 2001, while the band was between frontmen, the brothers sat down with Ozzy Osbourne’s wife and manager, Sharon Osbourne, and worked out a plan for an Ozzy-fronted Van Halen album. “When you get a dog, you don’t expect it to be a cat,” Alex says. “When you get an Ozzy, you get Ozzy. Play the music, he’ll sing, and it’s gonna be great.” Right before they were set to start work, the Osbournes took a meeting with MTV, and their reality show happened instead. (Ozzy Osbourne confirms the story in an e-mail to Rolling Stone: “Yes, we were discussing it,” he writes. “It is something that if it had come to fruition, would have been phenomenal. Eddie and Alex were great friends of mine for a very long time and it’s a regret of mine that we never got it together. The Osbournes got in the way of creating new music at that time, unfortunately.”)

Another time — Alex isn’t exactly sure when — the Van Halens jammed with Chris Cornell. At one point, Eddie stepped out for a while, and Alex found himself jamming with Cornell by himself. “Chris was in a very fragile part of his life, so to speak,” he recalls. “I got behind the drums, and he started playing bass. We played for 45 minutes. This motherfucker got so into it he started bleeding. I said, ‘This is the man you want.’ And then he died.”

Truth is, Alex got along with David Lee Roth better than anyone else in the band ever did. After Eddie’s death, Alex’s first call was to Roth, and even after that rehearsal blowup, they’re still in touch. Roth recently fired some shots at Wolfgang, Alex’s nephew, calling him “this fucking kid,” but Alex laughs that off. “To me, it’s a sign of respect,” he says, “that he actually thinks that Wolfie’s on the same level as the old master Dave, right? The other thing is that Wolf can easily take care of himself. It’s not a problem.”

For Alex, the end of the original band, the Roth-fronted one that went from backyard parties in Pasadena, California, to Hollywood clubs to the core of Eighties pop culture, was a tragedy. “It was the most disappointing thing I’d experienced in my life, the thing that seemed most wasteful and unjust,” he writes. “Until I lost my brother.”

He’s well aware Eddie took a major step toward the destruction of the band in 1982 when he agreed to play the guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” which, in turn, led Roth to pursue his own solo ventures. Alex believed creativity was finite, and that they owed all of it to their own band. He told Eddie not to do it — if anything, he would have preferred to have Jackson guest on a Van Halen album. His brother went to the studio anyway, unleashing every fretboard-scorching trick he knew in a solo that became even better known than anything he’d played with the band. Two years later, Thriller blocked Van Halen’s 1984 from the top of the charts.

The brothers argued about Eddie’s musical infidelity for years, and truth be told, Alex is still furious 42 years later. “Why would you lend your talents to Michael Jackson? I just don’t fucking get it,” he says. “And the funny part was that Ed fibbed his way out of it by saying, ‘Oh, who knows that kid anyway?’ You made the mistake! Fess up. Don’t add insult to injury by acting stupid.”

ONE TIME — ALEX CAN BE VAGUE on chronology and details, forgive him — Eddie came to his brother’s house and threw a side project he had just finished onto the kitchen table. It might have been the soundtrack the guitarist recorded for a pornographic film at a low point in 2006, though Alex doesn’t want to specify. “My wife and I were sitting there, and I’m looking at it — ‘What’s this shit,’ right?” he recalls. “And he goes, ‘See? Little brother can do something after all.’”

Alex shakes his head. “Had I been more receptive to the fact that all he wanted was approval,” he says, “I would have said, ‘That is the greatest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.’ But at the time, I was more thinking, ‘Ed, what are you talking about? What more could you want? You already have the…. You are the king of the…’ You know, it just didn’t make sense to me. And now, when I think about it, it makes me want to cry.” He does, choking up for a minute, and we pause.

Alex sighs, and continues. “To have all that talent was probably the biggest curse he ever carried. The fact was that Ed was an incredible player, but in the end he paid for it with his health, paid for it with his life.” When people told Eddie he was the greatest guitar player alive, at least part of him believed it. “You ate it up,” Alex writes in his book, “and then you were overwhelmed with the burden of it.” A toxic mixture of (justified) near-arrogance, self-doubt, and self-loathing — a sense he was unworthy of his own genius — left Eddie with paralyzing anxiety about his playing. He used drugs and alcohol largely to dampen his insecurities, and Alex is convinced the damage that intake did to his brother ultimately helped cancer kill him.

Eddie traced some of his issues to a childhood he saw as traumatic, where his mother berated him as a “nothing nut, just like your father” (the Dutch term was actually “nietsnut”) and forced him to practice piano for hours a day. In classic sibling fashion, Alex’s experience of the same household and the same parents was entirely different. The family came to America from the Netherlands when Eddie was seven and Alex was eight, trying to escape prejudice against their part-Indonesian mom. The kids arrived knowing a single word in English, “accident,” the first entry on the first page of an English-vocabulary book. They faced some ostracism, in the beginning, for their foreignness and Asian ancestry. “You get treated a little bit differently than all the rest of the people,” Alex says. “But you know what? That’s life. Ed really took it to heart.”

At home, too, Alex shrugged off any trauma. There was definitely some weird stuff, by his own account, like how his mother would enlist him to “knock my dad out” when she didn’t like Jan’s behavior. “Our mother was a hyper-overdriven disciplinarian who wanted nothing but the best for her kids,” Alex says. The discipline once extended to hitting Alex’s thumb with a wooden spoon so hard that the nail fell off. “She didn’t know any other way. She was of color, and had been pissed on the majority of her life.”

The brothers’ alcoholism was part of their legacy, all but preordained. Their father gave them the genes for it, and handed them the bottle. But neither brother ever much blamed Jan Van Halen for it. Instead, they credited him as a musical inspiration and source of wisdom, a soused Dutch Yoda. Alex writes about watching his father work for hours modifying the reed for his clarinet, pursuing a “richer, earthier” tone, which helped inspire the storied “brown sound” of Eddie’s guitar and Alex’s own snare: “His whole world became the reed in his mouth.” Jan was a journeyman musician, the furthest thing from a star, and he tried to inculcate his ethos into his sons: “Don’t believe your own bullshit. Just play.” With Ed, it didn’t quite work, as Alex lays out, clapping on each word: “He. Didn’t. Heed. My. Father’s. Advice.”

To be clear, Alex was always a virtuoso in his own right. Just listen to the crazed syncopation he sneaks in under the guitar solo in “Jump,” or the slippery cymbal work on “Outta Love Again.” Alex’s friend Taylor Hawkins of Foo Fighters, who happened to also be a neighbor in their Los Angeles gated community, played along to the entirety of the latter song when I visited him in 2021, a year before his death. “This is really hard to do,” Hawkins said. “’Cause he’s fucking Alex Van Halen! He doesn’t get enough credit. I’m here to say right now that he doesn’t get enough credit.”

Alex has never been able to absorb the fact that he was a hero to other drummers. “I never had the time to do that, because I’m too busy working with Ed,” he says. “I believe in what Buddy Rich said: ‘I’m here to make the other guys sound good.’” Anyway, a drummer’s acclaim can only stretch so far on its own: “The fact of the matter is, how many drummers do you know who can fill the fucking Rose Bowl?”

He hits “play” on an audio file on his phone, and an Eddie Van Halen riff no one’s ever heard before jumps out of the little speakers, with Alex’s drums, heavy on the hi-hat, pulsing behind it. The chugging chords of the intro could have been on their 1978 debut, while the arpeggiated verse section sounds not quite like anything the band ever did before. “Listen to what he does in between the lick,” Alex says. “There’s never a dead moment. I tried to set him up in a different kind of rhythm, if you notice.”

The song, from some time this century, “never became anything.” Alex is playing it to try to explain just what the brothers were up to in their endless, lifelong jam sessions. He also previews another track that he’ll include on the audiobook of his memoir, a winding, Zeppelin-influenced instrumental, an outtake from the final Van Halen studio sessions, for 2012’s A Different Kind of Truth. This one, for once, feels complete without vocals.

There’s tons of unreleased music in the Van Halen vaults, but very few finished songs, and even fewer with vocals. “They’re all little pieces,” he says. “A bunch of licks don’t make a song.” That said, there is a group of songs that Alex would like to find a way to release, though he warns it could take years. He’s reached out OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, about the possibility of analyzing “the patterns of how Edward would have played something” so that they could help generate new guitar solos. And he has a singer in mind for this material. “Ideally, it’d be Robert Plant,” he says, though he hasn’t talked to the former Led Zeppelin frontman since 1993. “You’re gonna think I’m out of my fucking mind,” Alex adds. “But when conditions are right, things will manifest.”

The other project Alex is working on, slowly, is a Van Halen biopic, for which he’s currently seeking a producer. “It’s just a long-term plan,” he says. “I mean, to put things in perspective, the Queen movie took 30 years to make.”

WHEN EDDIE VAN HALEN WENT to Switzerland for experimental cancer treatments in the final years of his life, he took a multi-effects guitar pedal with him. “He could have just relaxed a little bit,” Alex says. “I don’t know what was driving him near the end. There was something, an itch that he couldn’t scratch, something he needed to do. Up to the very end, he was making music.… Quite frankly, it wasn’t very good. But that wasn’t the point. That’s what he did.”

Just thinking of Eddie’s multiple health battles can make Alex cry again. “You know, he fought until the end. Anybody who thought he was anything less than that can suck my you-know-what.… If you knew what he had to go through to beat the cancer — he wouldn’t do traditional treatment. Some of the off-the-wall shit caused such a toxic mix in his body. And, yeah, you shouldn’t drink with it, Ed!”

Visiting Eddie in the final months of his life, Alex never told him that doctors were predicting the end around the corner. With Covid at its height, he found himself dressed in full protective gear at his brother’s bedside, hiding the truth. “How do you sit down with your brother and say, ‘Hey, Ed, you ain’t gonna make it’?” Alex says. “You keep hoping and pretending and living like there’s going to be a tomorrow. There’s always the next record. You look at yourself in the mirror and go, ‘Am I lying to him?’”

In the end, the cancer metastasized to Eddie’s brain, and he died after suffering a massive stroke. Before that, doctors performed Gamma Knife surgery to remove a brain tumor, and gave Eddie steroid pills to combat swelling. They made him feel “like Superman,” and the Van Halens always agreed, Alex says, that “if two’s good, twenty’s better. That was our mantra.” One day, Alex recalls, Eddie took every pill in the bottle, not to harm himself, but to chase that feeling. “I didn’t see the bottle, but the bottle had, like, a thousand pills in it,” he says. He can’t help laughing. It was just so true to form, even if he’s convinced it hastened his brother’s passing.

The pandemic meant there was no funeral, no memorial event at all. “It was a very unceremonious thing,” Alex says. Eddie was cremated, and Wolfgang took possession of his ashes. “I gotta say that Wolf did a phenomenal job in handling all that shit,” says Alex. “It was way more than any young man should have ever been in charge of.” To this day, Wolfgang wears some of his father’s remains in a necklace, close to his heart.

For Alex, Ed is even closer. He believes the ghost of Eddie Van Halen is haunting him, albeit pleasantly. “Ed’s been around a couple times,” he says, staring me down. “I can tell you that.” Just today, he felt his presence, or smelled it, really. “He was there this morning.” Alex has come to believe the brothers achieved “what we came here to do,” and he’s convinced Eddie finally figured that out, too.

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“He’s fine,” Alex Van Halen says, turning his thoughts once more to the man he knew better than anyone else in this world or the next. “Wherever he is — he’s fine.”

Additional reporting by Kory Grow