Alex Van Halen
Brothers
Brothers isn’t just a rock-and-roll memoir; it’s a raw document to a lifelong bond forged in the Netherlands, baptized on the Sunset Strip, and forever altered by loss.
Jason Landry, contributor
You easily get a sense from the preface of the book Brothers by Alex Van Halen, that the passing of his younger brother Eddie Van Halen really left a major void in his life. Having lost my youngest brother, I can empathize with him. The way that Al went about telling the tale of he and his brother Ed was quite beautiful. The Van Halen brothers were inseparable—from children in The Netherlands, to crossing the Atlantic on a ship to America, to selling out stadiums and arenas world wide. As a fan of the band, unfortunately for me I was only able to see them once, at the Monsters of Rock concert in 1988. The sound of their drums and, of course, the guitar is unmistakable.
Moving past those early immigrant roots to their move to California where the famous instrument swap happened, Alex paints a vivid picture of a chaotic, hard-drinking household governed by a complex Dutch father and a protective mother. Early chapters drag us along through the smoke-filled haze of forming their band, the grit of renting PAs from a guy named Dave Roth, and the relentless grind of becoming Gazzarri’s house band, all before being noticed by one Mr. Gene Simmons of KISS. You can practically smell the spilled beer and sweat of the Sunset Strip as the band clawed their way into the path of Ted Templeman at Warner Brothers and signing their first major recording deal.
As the book accelerates into the whirlwind touring years of the late 70s and 80s, the memoir captures the intoxicating, high-octane whiplash of sudden global fame. The boys traded routine hotel rooms for absolute chaos—shattering television sets, blazing through platinum milestones with Van Halen and Van Halen II, and buying their parents a house with the fresh spoils of rock royalty. Yet, underneath the pure excitement and stadium cheers, the fracture lines began to show.
The pressure cooker of relentless album cycles (Women and Children First, Fair Warning, and Diver Down) began to splinter the band. David Lee Roth's unyielding thirst for the spotlight, and the bitter creative frictions that climaxed with the synthesizer-laden album 1984, not to mention Ed's legendary guitar solo on Michael Jackson's "Beat It" didn’t really help things. Alex doesn't shy away from the friction: Roth's solo ambitions ultimately broke the original lineup, ushering in new eras, but the heart of the machine had always been the unique, telepathic bond between the two brothers behind the rhythm and the fretboard.
Ultimately, Brothers documents a musical brotherhood that transcends standard rock autobiographies. It balances the wild mythology of 80s excess with a devastatingly intimate portrait of grief. This book, at least from Al’s perspective reminds us that even guitar gods are human.