Sometimes the rock musician doesn’t give a shit. They’d rather be golfing, drinking, or betting on the Raiders. The star’s manager coerces the rock star to write a book. Sometimes, the rock star doesn’t remember all the parts of their story. The passage of time and the decades of debauchery take a toll, after all. Sometimes, the memories are too painful to verbalize to a stranger with a tape recorder (the “ghost” or “co” writer), much less share with the reading public.
If you’re the ghost-/co-writer, you’re the one the publishers, managers, and publicists expect to keep the project on track. So, you fall back on what writers and journalists know how to do when faced with the grudging involvement of the rock star. You research for filler. It’s what you did in high school, composing term papers. It’s what you did for newspapers and magazines when you immersed yourself in interviews and other articles for the public record.
All of this leads to the fact that you, dear reader, could have written Alex Van Halen’s Brothers. If you’re a guitar geek or a classic rock fan, you know most of these stories and read the original texts that prop up this flimsy memoir.
Alex Van Halen has seemingly blocked any number of tributes to the late Eddie Van Halen, who died of cancer complications in October 2020. Alex Van Halen gave few, if any, interviews since his virtuoso sibling’s death and before the marketing for Brothers kicked in. Speculation was that he was too heartbroken to participate. However, Brothers, published in conjunction with the fourth anniversary of Eddie’s passing, was billed to be the most intimate and revealing look at an extraordinary life. The marketing copy proclaims that Alex Van Halen wanted to “set the record straight”. In the Author’s Note, Van Halen writes, “I have mixed feelings about the books by all the Van Halen-ologists because they weren’t actually there…” Van Halen enlisted Ariel Levy, an accomplished writer whose work regularly appears in the New Yorker, to help with this love letter to a lost sibling.
It appears Levy was left to her own devices.
In Brothers, Alex Van Halen doesn’t so much tell his story as he (or the ghostwriter) cites other sources. He quotes from other published books, magazine articles, documentary footage, and speeches in a repetitive drone of references. Over and over, quotes appear, followed by the “he wrote in his book” attribution. Here’s the score from my loose stat tracking from Brothers:
- 43 quotes from magazine articles, interviews, documentary segments, and speeches. And this statistic is considerably undercounted. I only marked examples where Van Halen specifically stated, “as my brother told Rolling Stone” or “as Ed said at the Smithsonian.”
- 31 quotes from Ted Templeman: A Platinum Producer’s Life in Music by Ted Templeman and Greg Renoff, published in 2020.
- 20 quotes from Crazy from the Heat by David Lee Roth, published in 2000.
- 14 quotes from Runnin’ with the Devil: A Backstage Pass to the Wild Times, Loud Rock, and the Down and Dirty Truth Behind the Making of Van Halen by Noel Monk and Joe Layden, published in 2017.
- 10 quotes from Nothin’ But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the 80’s Hard Rock Explosion by Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock, published in 2022.
This is so bad that when Alex recounts Eddie’s introduction, courtship, and marriage to Valerie Bertinelli, he relies on memories from Roth’s book and even Bertinelli’s interviews. The problem with this onerous reliance on third-party texts is that Van Halen doesn’t balance the story out with any great detail of his own experiences, in his own words, in any level of vivid rendering.
Here is how Alex Van Halen sums up his first marriage: “Got married to a girl I’d been dating a couple years after Ed went down the aisle. (For a while we also had a second girl living with us. What was that like? Busy.) Two months after the wedding, we were already getting started on the divorce.” A tumultuous rockstar marriage with a third wheel living in the house would appear to be a rich source for stories, descriptions, and perhaps some broken dishes. But Van Halen doesn’t dish up that level of detail.
Consider how Alex Van Halen describes his first sexual experience, which is usually a profound source of vivid storytelling opportunity. Van Halen’s father was a professional musician who took his boys to gigs at an early age.
“My dad would take us with him to his gigs sometimes. It was my introduction to the ambiance of a dark club – very sexy, very seductive. The women have on all this perfume, and I see the way they’re dancing. It’s not a mystery, what you’re all there for. Even a kid can figure that out. The music is the background for the romance of the evening. And I was very drawn to that from an early age.”
So far, so good for an exotic setting and a boy’s discovery of adult pleasures. The scene is vivid and memorable. The elder Van Halen played the clarinet and saxophone in country clubs, often dressed in a tux. I can imagine drunken car dealers stumbling on the country club dancefloor. But then it falls flat with an offhanded memory and a totally wrong note of a simile.
“When I was eleven I had my first erotic encounter, with an older woman backstage. [Keep in mind: when you’re eleven, everyone is older.] There was so much commotion and carousing; it just kind of happened. It was over sixty years ago, so I don’t remember much… it’s like a vague vision of a doctor’s appointment.”
The first sexual encounter of an 11-year-old in a nightclub, for a man who would go on to rockstar excess and debauchery, and he can’t remember any details? No one expects porn in this memoir or even the Neil Strauss level of sordid decadence we read in The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band. Yet, if Alex Van Halen’s telling of this notable event in his life is little more than “It happened”, and “I don’t remember much”, why mention it?
Probably because he said that in an interview with the writer Levy, and it’s a detail – sexual experience at eleven – even if it’s not a vivid or well-described detail. It’s something she could put down as a milestone… sort of.
The sections about the Van Halen family before Eddie’s fame fair better. Patriarch Jan Van Halen is well-drawn as a parent dedicated to teaching his children. He imparted life lessons – in addition to musical ones – on the brothers. Alex Van Halen shares interesting stories about how pops did that. There’s a memorable scene about Jan settling an argument over a toy plastic shotgun. Later, as Jan’s alcohol abuse gets worse and his health deteriorates, his decline is warmly and movingly documented.
The pre-fame conversations with Eddie are humanly rendered. Alex recalls childhood conversations with his younger brother, and they read vividly and sincerely. Alas, such moments are rare in Brothers because if a published quote from the adult version of Eddie touches upon a subject of memory, that’s what we get instead of Alex’s recollection.
It’s almost as though Van Halen didn’t think he was allowed to recreate conversations. Memoirs, particularly of the celebrity variety, are not expected to be word-for-word accurate. No one had a tape recorder rolling when Prince Harry scrapped his knee or when Britney Spears dressed up with her sister. We accept that memory and reconstruction come into play. We have no problem with a kid saying “Crap!” on the page when he really said “Bullcrap!” 30 years ago in real life.
In Brothers, it’s as is Alex Van Halen is scared to recall conversations if he can instead use a quote. This approach to the memoir removes all sense of intimacy from what was billed as an intimate examination of an intense and unique sibling relationship.
The end of Alex Van Halen’s memoir perfectly encapsulates Brothers. There is a quote from David Lee Roth’s memoir, 1997’s Crazy from the Heat, followed by what should have been a memorable scene in the memoir:
“Dave was the first guy I called after Ed passed, the first guy I wanted to talk to. Just out of mutual respect for what we had done together with my brother, who neither of us will ever get to work again in this lifetime.”
That’s it. There is no indication of what the two performers said to one another, no recollection of how Roth consoled the grieving drummer or recounting memories they shared. “I called Dave”, and that’s all we know. Later, a quote from David Lee Roth’s two-decade-old memoir appears. Three original but not particularly memorable sentences later, Brothers‘ main section ends.
Alex Van Halen’s Brothers is infuriating for fans of the late guitar great because we’ve read all this before. It’s not particularly revealing for non-shredder nerds, either. It’s like a high school term paper. One that you could have easily written when you were in high school.
Disclosure: Brothers is published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, which has published two of my books.