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Alex Van Halen’s memoir Brothers is out next week. To promote it, the Van Halen drummer sat down with Rolling Stone for his first interview since the death of his brother and bandmate, guitar god Eddie Van Halen.
The interview reveals that in 2021, Alex was preparing for a reunion tour with original Van Halen singer David Lee Roth, original bassist Michael Anthony, and Joe Satriani on guitar. Those plans fell apart quickly. After speaking to Brian May about how Queen honor Freddie Mercury at their shows, Van Halen floated the idea to Roth that the shows should feature a tribute to Eddie, perhaps via video footage. Roth wasn’t having it.
“The thing that broke the camel’s back, and I can be honest about this now, was I said, ‘Dave, at some point, we have to have a very overt — not a bowing — but an acknowledgment of Ed in the gig. If you look at how Queen does it, they show old footage.’ And the moment I said we gotta acknowledge Ed, Dave fuckin’ popped a fuse,” Alex told RS. “The vitriol that came out was unbelievable.”
Instead, Roth’s replacement Sammy Hagar went out on the road with Anthony and Satriani. In the interview, Alex won’t even say Hagar’s name: “The heart and the soul and the creativity and the magic was Dave, Ed, Mike, and me,” he says. Rolling Stone points out that Hagar is also not mentioned by name in the book; the closest it comes is the line, “We had a lot of other singers over the years.”
One singer they did not ultimately employ was Ozzy Osbourne, who was in talks to make an album with Van Halen right before pursuing his reality show The Osbournes instead. “It is something that if it had come to fruition, would have been phenomenal,” Osbourne told RS. “Eddie and Alex were great friends of mine for a very long time and it’s a regret of mine that we never got it together.” Eddie and Alex also once jammed with the late Chris Cornell shortly before his death. Per Alex, “I got behind the drums, and he started playing bass. We played for 45 minutes. This motherfucker got so into it he started bleeding. I said, ‘This is the man you want.’ And then he died.”
Alex also details the spinal injury that would have prevented that reunion tour from happening anyway, which only recently improved thanks to experimental stem-cell therapy. He suffered it at a shooting range: “The rifle kicked me on my ass, and broke my back, instantly. And then I spent a year on the floor. Just staring at the ceiling. We became best friends.” A recovering addict, he refused opiates for the pain.
It’s a fantastic story, and you should read it here.
English (US) · 