Brothers by Alex Van Halen

Author:Alex Van Halen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Interlude

I think that’s about when our childhoods finally ended.

In a way, we grew up fast, Ed. We started working young; we started drinking young. Before our respective ages had even reached double digits, we’d already become fluent in a second language and a new culture. But looking back now, with the benefit of hindsight—but without the benefit of my brother by my side—I see that we were still very young and, in a way, still innocent when we put out our first record.

We didn’t know the music business. We didn’t know what it was to be married men, let alone fathers. We didn’t know that our bodies wouldn’t always bounce right back from being filled with whatever substance we threw into them—that all the months that turned into years of pushing as hard as we could, never sleeping, never staying in the same place for long, eating fast food on the road, would catch up with us.

At the time it seemed great. You remember how freeing it was to wake up in the back of that bus and find the sun rising over a new city? The slate is wiped clean and you’re reborn in every place—you’ve got a whole new shot at life! Sure, wherever you go, there you are, and so on, but for the audience it’s a whole new you. The gig in San Antonio wasn’t up to snuff? Nobody knows that in Albuquerque. It was like the day before never happened.

This was before the internet, of course, so everyone was just there, in the moment. You didn’t look out at the audience and see a million cell phones held in the air recording you. You just saw a sea of people partying—and any number of the female partygoers without their shirts on! In a way, I wish we had more videos of our early years, because I’d love to watch them now. But you never could have captured what it was really like—the energy, the sweat, the smell, the crowd, the sound.

I think we were always aware that you reach your creative peak in youth. You’re only going to be at the top of your game for a finite amount of time. Then, if you’re lucky, you spend the rest of your career going through what you did when you were at your best, tweaking it, repeating it, riffing on it. We knew that when we were young. But I think you lost sight of it later in life.

I fantasize about an alternate reality where you didn’t torture yourself to your dying day thinking you had to re-create the feeling and the output you had in your twenties.

Dad always told us, you have to have your own sound—when you hear the first few bars of any Van Halen song, you better know you’re hearing Van Halen. We achieved that. It’s something to be proud of. André Gide said that “art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.”

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