Brothers

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes substance use and addiction.

“Our dad didn’t need to verbalize his reverence for music. He transmitted that to us through the way he lived. He had records from every composer you could possibly imagine, and all these books about them—he knew the history of all these people.”

Alex Van Halen expresses the influence that his father had on him, not only a professional musician but also a lover of music. Jan regularly took him along to his gigs, and eventually Alex even played drums for Jan’s bands on occasion.

“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.