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My Brother, Eddie Van Halen: Alex Van Halen Tells All

In his first interview since Eddie Van Halen's death, Alex Van Halen tells all – including the story behind a cancelled tour with David Lee Roth

Eddie Van Halen died at age 65 in October 2020, leaving the world without its greatest post-Sixties guitar hero, and Alex without his brilliant, maddening, agonizingly sensitive baby brother, his best friend and bandmate of five decades, the “sweet guy” he jammed with nearly every day. Just listen to the crazed syncopation he sneaks in under the guitar solo in “Jump,” or the slippery cymbal work on “Outta Love Again.” Alex’s friend Taylor Hawkins of Foo Fighters, who happened to also be a neighbor in theirLos Angeles gated community, played along to the entirety of the latter song when I visited him in 2021, a year before his death. The song, from some time this century, “never became anything.” Alex is playing it to try to explain just what the brothers were up to in their endless, lifelong jam sessions.He also previews another track that he’ll include on the audiobook of his memoir, a winding, Zeppelin-influenced instrumental, an outtake from the final Van Halen studio sessions, for 2012’s A Different Kind of Truth.

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