Band of brothers

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This article was published 30/11/2024 (669 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Alex Van Halen’s rock memoir Brothers is a heartfelt elegy to and eulogy for Edward, his biological brother, a masterful rock guitarist and bandmate who passed in 2020 at age 65. The brothers were the children of an itinerant musician father from the Netherlands and an Indonesian mother. The family made their way to the United States and settled in Pasadena when the boys were just school age.

Their hardscrabble early life chasing the American dream, chronicled in Brothers, was made particularly notable by their mother’s insistence on the piano lessons that, along with their the influence of their father’s less-than-conventional life as a working jazz musician, provided the foundation that the brothers would build a career on. Alex and younger brother Edward (never “Eddie”) became classically trained multi-instrumentalists with first-hand knowledge of a life in music from their Dad, even before they settled on their respective interests and strengths as players — Ed the inventive rock virtuoso on guitars and Alex the powerhouse force on drums — that predestined their career.

Their band Van Halen would become the dominant hard rock band of the late 1970s and early ‘80s, selling 80 million albums worldwide. Jump, the hit song they are likely to be most remembered for, shows nearly one billion streams on Spotify. Their carnival-like, testosterone-fueled live performances mark them as an icon of the wet t-shirt era of hard rock — long before the #MeToo era made Van Halen’s antics seem out of fashion.

The influence of family and the bond between the brothers stands as the more important reveal of the book than the stereotypical rock career arc and what-happens-on-the-road hijinks. Still, it’s when the rock story of Van Halen gets rolling that the book gets some real traction.

Brothers details the long years Van Halen spent playing the club circuit in Southern California and how David Lee Roth and Michael Anthony became the players that balanced the Van Halen boys’ enormous contributions.

Alex recalls that Gene Simmons of Kiss was one of the first to recognize the potential of Van Halen, flying them to New York to record a demo. “None of it sounded good though: the recording sucked and our performance wasn’t really up to snuff.” He remembers the quartet as being “young, opinionated, full of piss and vinegar” at that time, concluding “We were not a good as we thought we were. But we were better than everyone else thought.”

You can’t have a book about Van Halen without a heaping helping of the band’s preening egomaniacal lead singer David Lee Roth, who grew up in the same neighborhood playing in rival bands. He auditioned for the brothers on numerous occasions before being accepted. The first time? “It was terrible. He couldn’t sing.”

A couple of years later the Van Halens found themselves paying Roth to rent a PA system he owned for their gigs, and they auditioned him again. “Dave convinced me that he should be in the band and I convinced Ed. Ed would never have gotten together with Dave if I hadn’t pushed,” Alex writes. So they hired “the loudest, most obnoxious, aggressive motherf—er on the planet” and he became the face of the band. The bonus was they didn’t have to pay rent for the PA system anymore.

On their first tour of the U.K., Van Halen opened for Black Sabbath 25 times in 30 nights, and as the opener spent every night sleeping sitting up on a tour bus. Ozzy Osbourne was one of their idols and invited them to his country mansion outside Birmingham, where he once interrupted an afternoon of drinking by using a shotgun to destroy a string of duck decoys floating in a little lake in his backyard. “We were all stunned. Nobody said a word. Oz walks back into the house, put the gun away, and comes back out like nothing’s happened.”

There’s an oblique reference to Canada in the book, but it doesn’t concern Rush, BTO or any other Canadian band. Rather, it’s a reference to Canadian-Ukrainian (and Manitoba) artist William Kurelek, who grew up in Stonewall and Winnipeg in the 1930s. Alex discovered Kurelek’s painting The Maze and used part of the imagery for the cover of the 1981 Van Halen album Fair Warning. “Kurelek’s painting of that man, plowing his head against the wall, to me represented the sense of struggle that’s part of being alive,” Alex writes. Did he realize how close the band was to Kurelek’s home in the North End when they played Winnipeg?

Alex Van Halen names 1984 as “the album that came the closest to (the sound) we were looking for.” In 1985, one year after its release, David Lee Roth left the band. That’s where the book ends, although Van Halen would soldier on as a group — most notably with Sammy Hagar as the singer — until the death of Edward more than three decades later.

But the fire of the halcyon years was already behind them once Roth left. Alex doesn’t play the drums anymore and walks with a cane. The “outpouring of grief” he feels for his lost brother is ongoing. There will be no victory lap for Van Halen.

Jim Millican first saw Van Halen in concert at the Winnipeg Convention Centre on Sept. 23, 1979.