AFTER HIS BROTHER DIED,Alex Van Halenfell apart.
He can prove it.
Spend the day with him, and he might play a few.
Alex and Eddie Van Halen as kids.Courtesy of Alex Van Halen
I shut down, he says.
I was yelling and screaming.
I was beside myself.
He took on the project in search of emotional closure, which remains elusive.
I just miss him, he says.
I miss the arguments.
I live with it every day.
And I cant bring him back.
I cant make things right.
He sought out an experimental stem-cell therapy from one of them, with miraculous results.
His other plan was even more exotic.
You know DARPA, the defense arm?
They have robotic stuff that you’ve got the option to do, exoskeletons and all that.
I was looking into that because worst comes to worst, Ill get one of those.
Ill jump in it.
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.
Hes still in pain right now.
Pain is good for you, he says.
When youre looking at the ceiling, lots of times it can be philosophical.
They say life is suffering.
If you dont get what you want, you suffer.
Even when you getexactlywhat you want, you still suffer, because you cant hold on to it forever.
Your mind wants to be free of change, free of pain…. (4.0 was dead, he notes.
Im proud of it.
I wish I had more than one dick, he said in front of aRolling Stonereporter in 1984.
Unlike his brother, Alex was a straight-A student, at least until adolescent rebellion kicked in.
(Have you seen Juniors grades?)
He had his first drink at age six.
His father gave it to him.
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.
There is a part of me thats common sense, Alex says.
If this is going to fuck me up, why would I do that?…
Common sense was not Eds strong point.
Rumors of a planned post-Eddie tour, with Alex back on drums behind frontmanDavid Lee Roth, were true.
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.
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.
Alex was … displeased.
Im from the street, he says.
You talk to me like that, motherfucker, Im gonna beat your fucking brains out.
And I mean that.
And thats how it ended.
Its just, my God.
Its like I didnt 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.
Its not you alone anymore.
(Roth declined to comment.)
Its too bad on one hand, but its fine on the other, he says.
Because now, in retrospect, playing the old songs is not really paying tribute to anybody.
Thats just like a jukebox, in my opinion…. To find a replacement for Ed?
Its just not the same.
Alex wont even utter Hagars name.
To be fair, there were more singers, at least potential ones, than the world knows about.
When you get a dog, you dont expect it to be a cat, Alex says.
When you get an Ozzy, you get Ozzy.
Play the music, hell sing, and its gonna be great.
It is something that if it had come to fruition, would have been phenomenal.
Another time Alex isnt exactly sure when the Van Halens jammed withChris Cornell.
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.
The other thing is that Wolf can easily take care of himself.
Its not a problem.
Until I lost my brother.
Alex believed creativity was finite, and that they owed all of it to their own band.
Two years later,Thrillerblocked Van Halens1984from the top of the charts.
Why would you lend your talents to Michael Jackson?
I just dont fucking get it, he says.
You made the mistake!
Dont add insult to injury by acting stupid.
My wife and I were sitting there, and Im looking at it Whats this shit, right?
And he goes, See?
Little brother can do something after all.
Alex shakes his head.
But at the time, I was more thinking, Ed, what are you talking about?
What more could you want?
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.
When people told Eddie he was the greatest guitar player alive, at least part of him believed it.
In classic sibling fashion, Alexs experience of the same household and the same parents was entirely different.
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?
Ed really took it to heart.
At home, too, Alex shrugged off any trauma.
Our mother was a hyper-overdriven disciplinarian who wanted nothing but the best for her kids, Alex says.
The discipline once extended to hitting Alexs thumb with a wooden spoon so hard that the nail fell off.
She didnt 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.
With Ed, it didnt quite work, as Alex lays out, clapping on each word: He.
To be clear, Alex was always a virtuoso in his own right.
This is really hard to do, Hawkins said.
Cause hes fucking Alex Van Halen!
He doesnt get enough credit.
Im here to say right now that he doesnt 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 Im too busy working with Ed, he says.
I believe in what Buddy Rich said: Im here to make the other guys sound good.
Listen to what he does in between the lick, Alex says.
Theres 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.
This one, for once, feels complete without vocals.
Theyre all little pieces, he says.
A bunch of licks dont make a song.
And he has a singer in mind for this material.
Youre gonna think Im out of my fucking mind, Alex adds.
But when conditions are right, things will manifest.
Its just a long-term plan, he says.
I mean, to put things in perspective, the Queen movie took 30 years to make.
He could have just relaxed a little bit, Alex says.
I dont know what was driving him near the end.
There was something, an itch that he couldnt scratch, something he needed to do.
Up to the very end, he was making music…. Quite frankly, it wasnt very good.
But that wasnt the point.
Thats what he did.
Just thinking of Eddies 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 wouldnt do traditional treatment.
Some of the off-the-wall shit caused such a toxic mix in his body.
And, yeah, you shouldnt drink with it, Ed!
You keep hoping and pretending and living like theres going to be a tomorrow.
Theres 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 Eddies brain, and he died after suffering a massive stroke.
That was our mantra.
He cant help laughing.
It was just so true to form, even if hes convinced it hastened his brothers 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 fathers remains in a necklace, close to his heart.
Wherever he is hes fine.
Additional reporting by Kory Grow
