“Ed’s talent was an asset, not just to me but to him. It was an asset to our band; this thing that was bigger than us would be the vehicle for all of our dreams. Of course, the band was more or less imaginary at this point, but if Ed could play guitar like that, we had something nobody else ever could have. I played guitar first, but I didn’t have that. This is you, man. That’s how I felt. Just play, Ed – the rest will take care of itself.”
Alex Van Halen knew from the start that his younger brother had a talent like no one he’d heard before. And he knew that together they could form a rock & roll band around this talent that would knock the lights out of people who came to their concerts or put on their records. And he knew at seventy years old, alone without his brother, that he had to tell a story about this sensitive soul that not a lot of those people ever got to know. He called it Brothers.
Although the title of Alex Van Halen’s new memoir emphasizes the content will revolve around his relationship with his kid brother Edward (who passed in 2020), it can also symbolize the brothership that solidified between four young men as their band sweated and practiced and fought for Van Halen’s ultimate success. Although bass player Michael Anthony isn’t given much ink, frontman David Lee Roth most certainly is. And although he calls the hairy-chested belter an arrogant diva, he also gives credit where credit is due: that Van Halen wouldn’t have been as great without him.
But the pages belong to Alex and Ed, whose voice emanates from previously published interviews more than from conversations between him and his brother. That intimacy has been quietly left out. On the other hand, Alex provides insight into Ed’s thoughts and feelings about the music and the band via these excerpts. If you’re okay with Alex sharing Ed’s already out-there words and not so many original conversations between the two, then you will love this book.
It’s a very entertaining, fast-paced read aside from Alex when others are quoted (some of these are quite hilarious). You get an excellent peephole view into life before they were VAN HALEN, the rock superstars. Alex gives plenty of examples of the early bond he and Ed shared: how coming to a country they didn’t yet understand kept them from spinning off into separate friend groups, how their parents were a steady influence and grounding force for them, how school was a struggle academically but taught them to remain brothers-in-arms while opening their eyes to a world where music could be their destiny.
Once Roth enters the picture, it’s all crazy with endless touring and recording. Again, Alex uses a lot of pre-published quotes to show the ins and outs of recording their albums up to 1984; but he does have his moments describing those times. “Look, we were young, we were opinionated, we were full of piss and vinegar and all that,” Alex wrote about the early days. “We were also delusional because we were not as good as we thought. But we were better than everyone else thought.”
Roth remains a double-edged thorn in his side, even to this day. One minute, he praises the singer’s ability to perform and work up an audience; the next, he shakes his head at the absurdity of the antics Roth can devise. “Dave was a pseudointellectual, a dilettante, who knew little about many things but only knew a lot about one thing: himself!”
Ed is also not immune to some of Alex’s irritations. Alex was NOT happy about Ed recording a guitar solo for Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” He did not believe his brother’s assertions that metal guitar picks caused his tongue cancer instead of all the cigarettes he smoked a day. But through everything, their bond never broke.
The book stops with 1984 and Roth’s departure. Nothing about Sammy Hagar. There is nothing about the rekindled tours with Roth. A brief mention of “Right Now” alongside “Jump” as being their biggest hits, although labeled as “keyboard tunes.” Maybe he has a book two planned or just wanted to publicly reflect on the best times of his life with the original Van Halen. “The point of a band is that you’re in it together; blood in, blood out.”
The final Coda of the book is Alex’s letter to Ed, an intimate remember this tap on the shoulder, a fuss at about not taking better care of yourself, and the admittance of how although life can be good there is still an emptiness without his brother there with him. “We were brothers. We’re still brothers. Even death can’t change that.”
Live photograph by Leslie Michele Derrough
One Response
Alex Van Halen certainly was a force in Van Halen, but at the same time he forgets all the stuff and interviews he said about Sammy Hagar and how he took Van Halen to a bigger audience and the band was better than it was with Roth, I read the book but I was disappointed