Brothers

Alex Van Halen is open about the both the positive and negative aspects of the band’s eventual celebrity. When the Van Halens’ band first gained attention playing clubs on the Sunset Strip in the mid-1970s, their growing popularity was a boon. They got the exposure necessary for their big break, which came in 1977 when an executive with Warner Bros. saw them perform and signed them to a record deal. Their early success also gave them access to musicians they had idolized: On their first tour, they opened for Black Sabbath, whom the Van Halen brothers considered their musical heroes. At this time, fame was only a plus: It allowed Van Halen the freedom to be professionally successful and have debauched fun on their tour, but without the oppressive demands of true celebrity. 

As Alex Van Halen confirms, this soon changed: “in a matter of months our lives were completely transformed. We were ready for the big time musically, but in every other respect we had no idea what to expect or how to handle what was thrown at us” (133). Only when the band returned home to Pasadena after the tour did they begin to understand what being actually famous meant. For Alex, it was disorienting and unpleasant to have to dramatically change his relationship with the outside world: “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” (137). 

The new fame led to intra-band rifts. While Alex and Eddie had always dreamed of their music reaching a broad audience, but no personal ambitions towards celebrity, David Lee Roth loved the new reality: “for Dave it was entirely the opposite: fame was the point!” (140). To Alex, Roth’s hunger for the limelight also led to jealousy: When Eddie started dating and then married popular actress Valerie Bertinelli, their celebrity couple status felt threatening to Roth, who was used to being the band’s center of attention.

Fame frequently leads rock stars to self-destructive behavior, and Van Halen fell into this pattern as well. As the band’s manager Noel Monk points out, musicians often act out because they experience few consequences from it, leading their moral compasses to warp. During the band’s World Vacation Tour supporting their second album, Alex Van Halen contracted a sexually transmitted infection as a result of sexual excess: “I was promiscuous at that time in my life, because I was young and virile and I could be […] Look, it’s understood: guys in a rock band get a lot of women” (151). Alex also had alcohol and drug use disorders, becoming “hooked on benzos” (187) in 1995; he depicts Eddie accidentally overdosing PCP and almost dying after a show. The picture of fame that emerges makes it clear that unlimited access to almost any kind of recreational substance and few boundaries make it difficult for young musicians to rein in their worst impulses.

Writing from the vantage point of mature adulthood, Alex dismisses some of the band’s actions as the poor judgment of fame-addled kids. However, he does take his issues with substance use seriously. Alex credits his wife Stine with saving his life; she briefly left him over his substance use, making him realize that “losing Stine was the only price I wasn’t willing to pay for the drug” (187). Alex Van Halen ends the memoir by explaining that he did finally find a way to shield himself from the negative effects of celebrity: “eventually, I found a way to protect myself—from fame, from the music business, from drugs and alcohol. With Stine I was able to carve out a home, a zone that had nothing to do with work or fame” (188).