Great Magazine Reads: The tough recovery of Alex Van Halen

When Eddie Van Halen passed away at age 65 in October 2020, his brother Alex Van Halen fell apart. His spine had been wearing down for a while, but when he was kicked to the ground by his gun at a shooting range, his back broke. “I spent a year on the floor, just staring at the ceiling,” he said.

Quite a bit more philosophical than in 1984 when he gave magazines like Rolling Stone quotes like, “I wish I had more than one d*ck.” (I think the reason for that wish is obvious considering that was the height of the hair-metal era.)

A different, new Rolling Stone article is the first interview he’s given since Eddie’s death, and it takes place at the Ventura County lemon farm that he calls home.

There was one short-lived plan to reform the band after Ed’s death, but when Alex proposed including tributes on the stage backdrop and other homages to his brother, former singer David Lee Roth went absolutely ballistic and that pretty much slammed that book shut.

“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, motherf*cker. It’s not you alone anymore.” (Roth declined to comment.)

The broken back rendered the idea moot anyway. In Alex’s new book, Brothers (high on my to-read list), he’s no kinder to Sammy Hagar, the band’s singer after Roth. He doesn’t even mention him by name, rendering that era not even worthy of detailing. (To be fair, I saw Van Hagar in July 1988 in Kansas City at the Monsters of Rock festival and they put on a heck of a show. I think the albums 5150 and OU812 are classics.)

There have been no shortage of potential VH singers post Hagar, including Ozzy Osbourne (his MTV reality show got in the way) and Chris Cornell of Soundgarden (his dying got in the way).

The beginning of the end for the Roth era was when Eddie stepped away to play on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” It made Roth step away to build a solo career and Alex says Roth never forgave Eddie after Jackson’s album Thriller kept Van Halen’s 1984 from hitting number 1.

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. Alex is convinced the damage that intake did to his brother ultimately helped cancer kill him.

Will there ever be any more new Van Halen material? Alex says he has tons of bits of songs. A possibility he would like is to use AI to flesh out Eddie’s solos in those bits and get Robert Plant as the band’s singer.