Brothers

“I never really doubted I’d be in a band, and I never doubted it would be with my brother. But we didn’t know what kind of music we’d play until the British Invasion made it clear.”

Once the Van Halen brothers moved to the US, they saw A Hard Day’s Night, the 1964 motion picture starring the Beatles. At this point both brothers stopped playing piano because they wanted to emulate their idols—the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five, the first two bands to make it big in America in what became known as “the British Invasion.”

“You do whatever you think it takes to create an improved version of yourself—meaning deeper, more articulate, more creative. Every artist, visual or musical, has that itch that can’t be scratched to hit some musical vibration…it’s always just outside your reach, just around the corner, and that’s what keeps you going.”

The Van Halen brothers were always committed to The Pursuit of Artistic Excellence, sometimes in self-destructive ways. In his first childhood band as a kid, the Trojan Rubber Company, Alex Van Halen and his bandmates made “nuclear tea,” seeping numerous tea bags for hours to increase the potency for a better rush, as a way to get amped up to play—a practice that foreshadows later substance use. Less problematically, Eddie quickly learned how to alter his guitar equipment to his liking.

“We knew enough to know that a guy like Dave with his ego and charisma would give us more space to be who we really were. The audience could watch Dave while they listened to us play. He knew that was his role, and he liked it.”

David Lee Roth formally joined the band despite the already obvious mismatch of personalities and completely different musical tastes, as Roth leaned more toward show tunes and blues. Still, the Van Halens recognized his charisma and outlandish stage presence as a benefit to their performance.

“All the lessons our father taught us about music, energy, showmanship, and professionalism are what would eventually turn this bunch of teenagers in a basement in Pasadena into the biggest band in the world.”

Alex Van Halen reflects on his pride that they decided to use the name Van Halen for the band: It was his father’s name, and now it would be attached to “the biggest band in the world,” as befits his love for Jan. He also points out that, because of how much influence his father had on the Van Halen brothers, Van Halen was in some ways his dad’s band.

“For Ed and me, as foreigners without the benefit of much money, we were used to working our asses off and constantly coming up with work-arounds to compensate for the missing resources.”

Being immigrants affected several aspects of the Van Halens’ musical careers—one facet of The Impact of Upbringing on Personal Development. First, because English was not their first language, neither could be the front man for the band. Here, their limited access to resources as “foreigners without the benefit of much money” meant that Van Halen used mostly secondhand equipment and were forced to improvise when things broke—something that Alex heralds as both improving work ethic and leading to creative solutions.

“The beauty of rock ‘n’ roll is that it appeals to everybody. And nobody goes to put on a show and thinks, I hope nobody shows up. You’re there because you’re proud of what you have put together and you want to share it with as many people as possible.”

When the band was just starting out and playing clubs, they were never able to play their own music because they had to cater to what each audience wanted to hear. While they preferred to play their own music, they understood that it was their job to provide entertainment rather than to win fans—an example of the professionalism the Van Halen brothers always tried to adhere to.

“Working the crown in a club is like trying to catch a fish: pull too hard, come on too strong, be too obnoxious, and you’ll lose the fish. But if you’re timid, you’re never going to reel them in, either. You need confidence. Courage!”

In the band’s early days, they were a regular feature in the clubs on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood and became the house band at Gazzarri’s. While playing the clubs, they learned the delicate balance of how to work the crowd and keep them engaged—a dichotomy that Alex Van Halen also explores in his discussions of the different kinds of creativity that Eddie and David Lee Roth brought to the band.

“You kind of knew if you could get two hundred people to get up and go crazy, you could do it with twenty thousand. I’m not saying that out of arrogance, it’s just something we could sense.”

In the band’s days of playing clubs in Los Angeles, their signature became the energy they brought to performances and the way that crowds reacted to them. The desire to “get two hundred people” to “go crazy” explains the way the Van Halens initially conceived of The Nature of Fame—as the result of producing great music that moved fans, rather than as celebrity in and of itself.

“The thing about making music is that when you get to something really good, it doesn’t feel like you created it, it feels more like you found it—like that song or that lick has always existed and was just waiting for you to play it. It’s probably the same way with painting and poetry and every other art form—when you finally hit it, there’s just something about the sound or the look or whatever it is that feels meant to be.”

Alex Van Halen describes the band’s creative process, pointing out how frustrating it is to have to wait until your efforts produce the desired result. His depiction of true art as something “found” underscores his dedication to the pursuit of artistic excellence rather than a willingness to accept inferior work to meet deadlines.

“Things started happening—fast. It was like a cascade of dominos knocking each other over. Every obstacle to our dream becoming reality just cleared out of the way.”

The band’s big break came in 1977, when Marshall Berle, who had been an agent and would become their first manager, convinced Ted Templeman, an executive with Warner Bros., to come and see Van Halen at the Starwood. Blown away, Templeman then convinced the Warner Bros. CEO to see them, and Van Halen signed within a week.

“A band is like a gang: you’ve made a commitment to each other that you’re going to do whatever it takes until you reach the end, and that provides the energy and the comradery to get you there.”

Although this memoir mostly eschews settling scores by revealing secrets or trying to undermine reputations, Alex Van Halen does offer some new information as a way of shoring up the band’s loyalty to each other. Here, he opens up about the fact that Templeman was unhappy with Roth’s singing and suggested that the band replace him. The band rejected this by telling Templeman that Van Halen was indivisible. The anecdote becomes indirect criticism of Roth, whose singing Alex doesn’t really defend, and who would later go on to break away from the “commitment to each other” that Van Halen held dear by leaving for a solo career.

“When you’re spending every night playing songs about letting the whole human animal out of its cage—the essence of rock ‘n’ roll—it’s pretty hard to get the beast back behind bars the next day.”

Looking back on the band’s partying, destruction, and childish pranks on tour, Alex Van Halen considers this behavior both typical and the result of the bad judgment of very young men. While Van Halen manager Noel Monk attributes this sort of behavior to the loss of moral compass that often comes with fame, Alex counters with the more simplistic explanation of young guys suddenly having a lot of resources and freedom, and little pushback.

“The greatest thing was finding out that wherever you went in the world, all you had to do was set up your gear and start playing and you could get people partying. That was an amazing feeling. You know you’re bringing it—it doesn’t matter where you go. It doesn’t matter that you can’t speak the language, because music is universal. So is youth.”

On Van Halen’s first tour, as an opening act for Black Sabbath, they toured throughout Europe and Japan. In Japan, the band discovered that despite language and cultural barriers, they were able to find musical commonalities with people that became a more in-depth way of communicating.

“You can’t take fame or money with you when you check out. The greatest privilege in life is getting to create something bigger than yourself—something that has a life of its own, independent of you. All Ed and I can hope to leave behind are our children and our music. Our sons and our songs.”

Van Halen’s debut album went platinum, staying on the charts for three years and surpassing ten million copies in 1996. Here, Alex admits that he still feels pride when he hears his songs on the radio: This work is the legacy that he and Eddie leave behind, and it is almost as important to Alex as “our children.”

“Suddenly, you couldn’t go to a movie, you couldn’t go to a store, you couldn’t go anywhere. It was a very foreign experience, very strange and unnerving. People you’ve never met before chasing you down the street because they want you to sign a piece of paper? That’s some weird shit.”

After returning home from their first tour, Van Halen dealt with celebrity for the first time. Unprepared for the negative aspects of the nature of fame, they experienced a range of reactions to the fact that they were now well-known enough to have trouble doing normal things. Moreover, not everyone was positive about Van Halen’s success: Some people idolized them, others resented them, and their parents were even more bewildered.

“We loved to make music and we enjoyed creating the vibe, the party, for our audience. You realize people don’t just come for the songs, they come to have an experience. And we loved being able to create that almost as much as we loved making music—occasionally, even more.”

Alex Van Halen describes the feeling he gets from playing, which is like no other feeling on earth. He loves creating a unifying communal event for the audience, and the sense that he is contributing to other people’s lives.

“You want to give the audience what they paid for; that was something we took extremely seriously because to us it amounted to our integrity, our professionalism. Ironically, in our line of work, this meant engaging in behavior that would get you thrown out of pretty much any other place of business.”

Van Halen was committed to making sure their live performances exceeded expectations, as part of their insistence on the pursuit of artistic excellence. From the very beginning, they put their profits right back into the shows’ sound, lighting, and design. They wanted the show to look like the music sounded: loud and larger than life, in ways that allowed audiences to experience a release that was impossible elsewhere.

“He loved to talk but it was rare that he really knew what he was talking about. He usually has a kind of remedial, buzzword-level understanding of whatever matter he was philosophizing on—the state of music, Pop Art, whatever—but I’m not sure he knew there was always more to it. Dave was a pseudointellectual, a dilettante who knew a little about a lot of things but only knew a lot about one thing: himself!”

One of the primary sources of conflict within the band was Roth’s ego. While the rest of the band hated to do interviews, Roth loved being in the spotlight and having attention—according to Alex Van Halen, Roth thrived on camera. On one hand, this helped the other shy members of the band because promotion and publicity is part of the popular music business, but it also made it seem as though Roth was the center of the band. Throughout the memoir, Alex characterizes Roth as musically less gifted—a not very talented singer little interested in the Van Halens’ level of musicianship—and as lacking depth. Here, Alex mocks Roth as a “pseudointellectual dilettante”—ghostwriter Ariel Levy specifically uses these high-register words to more effectively dismiss Roth’s pretensions.

“As the eighties picked up speed, glam rock and heavy metal were heaving their way into the Top 40, invading the mainstream, and whether we liked their music or not, a lot of the bands that were hot in Hollywood had been influenced by Van Halen.”

In this passage, Alex Van Halen discusses how Van Halen fit into the musical landscape in terms of genre. The band was always working at odds to the most popular musical tastes of their times. When they were starting out, it was the era of the singer-songwriter that typically featured softer rock/folk fusion. When they made it big, highly artificial-sounding pop music was popular. However, other bands soon began imitating Van Halen, although in Alex’s estimation, these bands were more successful in copying Van Halen’s look and not their sound.

“All the conflict just drained away when we got onstage. The audience looks at you as something bigger than you actually are, and when you feel that energy coming at you from tens of thousands of people, it overpowers any petty crap you’ve got going on with your bandmates.”

Conflict within the band, primarily between Roth and the Van Halen brothers, escalated after Eddie married actress Valerie Bertinelli, and Roth became jealous of Eddie’s newfound celebrity. However, the whole band was always dedicated to professionalism: Regardless of their issues, they never let personal “petty crap” affect their performances.

“Dave took in all sorts of insane stuff from cartoons and books, movies and musicals, and then put his own distinctive twist on them. We encouraged him to do what he wanted a lot of the time and humored his crazy ideas because we wanted all of him—his whole soul—all in. I didn’t just want him to be the clown!”

Alex Van Halen frequently points out how different Roth was from him and his brother, in terms of musical taste and what he wanted to do artistically. Here, Alex compares the different kinds of creativity that Roth and Eddie embodied: Eddie was more of a divergent thinker, eager to innovate and be original, whereas Roth was a convergent thinker who could “put his own distinctive twist” on a combination of many influences. Alex stresses that both types of creativity were crucial to the band’s success.

“Alcohol became more fraught and complicated than ever for me. On the one hand, I’m sad and maybe even angry that my dad basically drank himself to death. Suddenly alcohol is revealing itself as this poison, this thing that can kill you, kill your father, ruin your life. On the other hand, drinking is what me and my dad did together.”

Throughout his work, Alex Van Halen frankly discusses how prevalent alcohol use was in his family—one way that the impact of upbringing on personal development can be negative. Jan regularly drank with his kids even when they were very young, encouraging this habit in them once they grew up. Once Alex started to notice what alcohol use disorder had done to his father’s mind and body, he began to have second thoughts about his own drinking.

“There was nobody there to tell us keyboards were a bad idea or that Van Halen is supposed to be heavy metal. It was really free, the way it was in our bands as kids, where we could just experiment and jam for as long as we wanted.”

Eddie decided to build a recording studio at his home partly because he no longer felt free to “just experiment” musically, especially since Roth was against Eddie playing keyboards and producer Ted Templeman wanted to steer the band into heavier rock music as a way of recapitulating past successes instead of trying new approaches. Alex Van Halen praises his brother for never resting on his laurels and instead always wanting to pursue new directions for his music.