The story of Van Halen

From Amsterdam to Pasadena

The story begins in the Netherlands. Alex Van Halen was born in Amsterdam on the eighth of May 1953, and his brother Edward, known to the world as Eddie, followed on the twenty sixth of January 1955. Their father Jan was a Dutch jazz clarinetist and saxophonist. Their mother Eugenia came from the island of Java, in what was then the Dutch East Indies. As a mixed race couple they faced real hostility in postwar Holland, and in 1962 they packed up and sailed for America. On the nine day crossing Jan played in the ship's band, and the two boys played piano at intermission for tips. They settled in Pasadena, California, where the family of four shared a house with two other families.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Money was tight. Eugenia worked as a maid, and Jan washed dishes and worked as a janitor, playing gigs on the weekends. The brothers arrived barely speaking English, and school was frightening. Eddie later recalled that white kids bullied him, tearing up his homework and making him eat sand from the playground, while his first friends in America, Black classmates, stood up for him. At home there was music everywhere. The boys took classical piano lessons from the age of six, travelling all the way to San Pedro to study with an elderly teacher. Eddie never learned to read sheet music. He watched and listened, then played by ear, and still won a yearly piano competition at Long Beach City College in the mid sixties.[1] [2] [3]

Their parents dreamed of two concert pianists, but the British Invasion had other plans. Alex, whose idol was the drummer of the Dave Clark Five, started out on guitar, while Eddie bought a drum kit with money from his newspaper round. The way Eddie told it, Alex practised on that kit while he was out delivering papers, got better than him, and nailed the drum solo from Wipe Out. So they swapped. Eddie's first guitar was a cheap Teisco Del Rey from Sears, and he taught himself Eric Clapton's solos with Cream note for note, sometimes practising for hours behind a locked door. Drinking came early too. Eddie later said he started drinking and smoking at twelve, in a home where heavy drinking was simply normal.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The brothers had played together since elementary school, where their first band, the Broken Combs, performed at lunchtime in Pasadena. By 1972 they had a band called Mammoth, with their friend Mark Stone on bass and Eddie singing lead. Eddie hated singing. There was a flamboyant local frontman named David Lee Roth, born in Bloomington, Indiana, the son of an eye doctor, whose uncle Manny ran the famous Cafe Wha? in New York. Mammoth rented Roth's PA system for ten dollars a night. After a couple of unconvincing auditions, the brothers invited him in, partly to save on the rental. Roth later claimed it was his idea to rename the band Van Halen, because a family name sounded strong and lasting, like Santana.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mark Stone was unsure about a career in music, so in 1974 the band looked for a new bassist. Michael Anthony, born Michael Sobolewski in Chicago in 1954, had grown up in neighbouring Arcadia, the son of a trumpet player. He fronted a trio called Snake, which once opened for Mammoth at Pasadena High School and lent them its PA when theirs broke down. Anthony was studying music at Pasadena City College, where he met Eddie. After an all night jam, the brothers asked him to join, and he said yes. He even dropped out of college just short of his degree. With Eddie, Alex, Roth and Anthony in place, the classic line up of Van Halen was born.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Conquering the Sunset Strip

Van Halen built its audience the hard way. They played backyard parties, school dances and city parks around Pasadena, sometimes drawing two thousand people and plenty of noise complaints to the police. They handed out flyers at local high schools to spread the word. A typical set mixed covers of the Rolling Stones, Bad Company and David Bowie with their own songs, and Eddie already had a guitar showcase that would one day become Eruption. Then came Gazzarri's on the Sunset Strip, where the Doors had once been the house band. The owner had said Van Halen was too loud, but their new managers took over the club's bookings and kept them on stage there through 1976.[1] [2] [3]

In 1976 the DJ Rodney Bingenheimer persuaded Gene Simmons of Kiss to come and see the band. Simmons was stunned by Eddie's tapping, something he had never seen on a guitar before. When he asked about their plans, the band told him a yogurt company was going to invest in them. Simmons talked them out of that, paid for demo sessions in Los Angeles and at Electric Lady Studios in New York, and even suggested they rename themselves Daddy Longlegs. But Kiss's management and Paul Stanley were not interested. Stanley later admitted he turned Van Halen down to protect Kiss. Simmons let them go, and years later joked that the band still owed him a couple of thousand dollars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The break came at the Starwood in Hollywood in early 1977. On a rainy night, Warner Bros. chief Mo Ostin and the producer Ted Templeman, who had made hits with the Doobie Brothers and Montrose, came to see them. Templeman remembered only about eleven people in the room, and a band playing as if they were in a sold out arena. Roth had insisted on hiring roadies for the first time so the band would not be seen setting up its own gear. Within about a week they met Warner at a diner. According to their future manager Noel Monk, the band's car broke down on the way, so all four ran the last few miles rather than look unreliable.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The contract was hardly generous. Warner paid the band seventy cents for each album sold, and by the end of their first tour they were more than a million dollars in debt to the label. Noel Monk, who had just steered the Sex Pistols across America, became their manager and later doubled that royalty. In the late summer of 1977 the band recorded its debut at Sunset Sound, mostly live, with very few overdubs and small mistakes left in on purpose. The whole album cost about fifty four thousand dollars. Eruption was never meant to be on it. Templeman overheard Eddie rehearsing the solo for a club date and insisted they record it. Eddie always said he could have played it better.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Runnin' with the Devil

Van Halen's debut album came out on the tenth of February 1978. The first single was a cover of the Kinks' You Really Got Me, rushed out because another band, Angel, had heard the demo and was planning its own version. It reached number thirty six. Eddie would rather have led with an original like Jamie's Cryin'. The album climbed to number nineteen and eventually sold more than ten million copies in America. Critics were not all convinced at first. Rolling Stone predicted the band would be fat and self indulgent within three years, while Robert Christgau joked that this was music that belonged on an aircraft carrier. Guitarists everywhere were asking just one question. How was Eddie making those sounds?[1] [2] [3]

The band spent nearly a year on the road. They opened for Journey and Ronnie Montrose, whose band had launched a singer named Sammy Hagar, and then for Black Sabbath in Europe and America. They heard their album had gone gold while they were in Aberdeen, Scotland, and celebrated by trashing their hotel room. It was not the only one. On an early tour they wrecked the seventh floor of a Sheraton in Madison, Wisconsin, with fire extinguisher fights and televisions thrown out of windows, and then blamed it on Journey. Roth's karate kicks, Alex's thunder and Eddie's grin made the shows famous, and the band's chemistry was obvious. It came from Eddie's playing and Roth's charisma, two very different forces pulling together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Just a week after that first tour ended, in December 1978, the band went back into Sunset Sound and made Van Halen II in about a week. It came out in March 1979, reached number six, and gave them their first real hit, Dance the Night Away, which peaked at fifteen. Roth later described that song as the band's Santana moment, learned from years of playing weddings and backyard dances. The back cover shows Roth mid air in a spread eagle jump, and the inner sleeve shows him in a cast. He reportedly broke his heel on the third attempt. Eddie's black and yellow striped Bumblebee guitar appears on the back cover, though he said it was finished just in time for the photos.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Women and Children First arrived in March 1980, the first Van Halen album with no cover songs. It opened with And the Cradle Will Rock, which sounds like a guitar but is actually a Wurlitzer electric piano played through Eddie's Marshall amplifier. It was the first keyboard he ever recorded with the band. The rain you hear on Could This Be Magic is real rain, recorded through two microphones, and the singer Nicolette Larson adds the only female backing vocal on any Van Halen song. That same year Eddie met the television actress Valerie Bertinelli at a Van Halen concert in Shreveport, Louisiana. They married on the eleventh of April 1981, in a wedding swarmed by photographers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fair Warning, released in April 1981, showed a darker side. Eddie wanted heavier, more complex songs in minor keys, while Roth leaned towards fun and pop, and this time Eddie mostly won. He would sneak back into the studio in the early hours with engineer Donn Landee to redo solos that only he could hear were wrong. On Unchained, Templeman interrupted a take by asking Roth to give him a break, and Roth shot back, one break, coming up. The exchange stayed on the record. The cover used details from The Maze, a painting by the Canadian artist William Kurelek about his tortured youth. It became the slowest seller of the Roth era, though it still sold over two million copies.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Beat It, 5150 and Jump

After the Fair Warning tour the band planned a break. Roth suggested putting out a single to keep their name alive, and they recorded Roy Orbison's Oh, Pretty Woman in one day. When it started climbing the charts, Warner demanded an album, and the band made Diver Down in about twelve days. Released in April 1982, it had five covers, which Eddie came to resent. He was still angry decades later that Templeman had made him give up an original keyboard riff for a cover of Dancing in the Street. There was a tender moment too. On the old jazz tune Big Bad Bill, Jan Van Halen played clarinet. It was the only time the father recorded with his sons.[1] [2] [3]

In 1982 the producer Quincy Jones called Eddie. The Who's Pete Townshend had turned down a guest spot on Michael Jackson's new album and suggested Eddie instead. Eddie thought the call was a prank. Once convinced, he listened to Beat It, asked to rearrange the section he would solo over, and improvised two solos in about twenty minutes. He took no money for it. As he later put it, who was going to know he had played on this kid's record? Just about everyone, it turned out. Thriller became the best selling album of all time. Alex had begged him not to do it, believing their talent belonged to their own band, and he was still furious about it forty years on.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The band reached a strange kind of peak at Steve Wozniak's US Festival in May 1983. Van Halen was paid one and a half million dollars for a ninety minute set, which earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the highest fee for a single appearance. Noel Monk and others close to the band remembered the show as an artistic mess, with Roth so drunk he forgot lyrics. That same year Eddie built his own recording studio at his home in Studio City with engineer Donn Landee. He named it 5150, after the California legal code for an involuntary psychiatric hold. Now Eddie could record whatever he liked, whenever he liked, without asking anyone.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Eddie had written a bright synthesizer riff around 1981, and the rest of the band had turned it down. In 1983 Templeman asked Roth to give it another listen. Roth played the tape over and over in the back of his 1951 Mercury convertible while a roadie, Larry Hostler, drove him around. He remembered a television news story about a man threatening to jump from a building, and imagined someone in the crowd shouting, go ahead and jump. He turned that dark image into an invitation to take a chance on life and love. Jump, played on an Oberheim synthesizer, led off the album 1984, released on the ninth of January 1984. It became Van Halen's only number one single.[1] [2] [3]

The album 1984 was stuffed with classics. On Panama, Eddie backed his 1972 Lamborghini up to the studio and revved the engine into microphones by the exhaust. Hot for Teacher opened with Alex's thundering double bass drums, and its video, full of child lookalikes of the band, became an MTV favourite. The album sat at number two for five weeks, blocked by Thriller, the record Eddie had helped. It went on to sell over ten million copies in America. But the cracks were widening. Midway through the tour, according to Noel Monk, Michael Anthony was pressured into signing away his future songwriting credits and royalties while the other three stood over him. The classic four played their last full concert together in Europe that September.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Roth out, Hagar in

Roth was already stepping out on his own. In early 1985 he released a solo EP, Crazy from the Heat, and his playful covers of California Girls and Just a Gigolo became hits and MTV staples. A twenty million dollar film of the same name was planned. Roth worried about Eddie's work outside the band, and the brothers had just fired Noel Monk. The fights were all about control of the band's sound and direction. Later in 1985 Roth formally left Van Halen, taking dozens of the band's staff with him. The film never happened, but Roth's first full solo album, Eat 'Em and Smile, with the virtuoso guitarist Steve Vai, reached number four in 1986.[1] [2]

Finding a new singer was not easy. Eddie asked Patty Smyth of Scandal, who said no, and Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates was approached too. Then a mutual car mechanic introduced Eddie to Sammy Hagar, the former Montrose singer who had just scored a hit with I Can't Drive 55. Eddie had once told Hagar he was a Montrose freak. Hagar was exhausted after a year of touring, and Ted Templeman had already whispered to him that Roth had quit. He turned to his wife and said they would probably call him. They did, in the summer of 1985. Hagar could also play rhythm guitar, which meant Eddie was now free to play keyboards on stage.[1] [2] [3]

When Warner boss Mo Ostin visited 5150 Studios, the new line up played him Why Can't This Be Love with Eddie on keyboards. Ostin's verdict was, I smell money. He was right. The album 5150, released on the twenty fourth of March 1986, became Van Halen's first number one album, something Roth had never managed. Templeman had gone off to produce Roth's solo record, so Donn Landee and Foreigner's Mick Jones stepped in. Fans started calling the band Van Hagar, some fondly and some not. Hagar later said Warner even asked them to consider making the name official. The brothers refused. On tour, Hagar dropped most of the Roth era songs, a clean break from the past.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the ninth of December 1986, Jan Van Halen died at sixty six. His sons had inherited his music and, as Alex openly admits, his alcoholism. Right after his father's death Alex quit drinking for the first time, and Eddie made his first attempt at sobriety too, though it did not last. The next album, OU812, released in May 1988, was dedicated to Jan with the words, this one's for you, Pa. It was another number one, with the ballad When It's Love reaching number five. Hagar wrote the song Cabo Wabo at his house in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and the name later went on his cantina and a tequila brand that made him a fortune.[1] [2] [3]

Hagar wanted to name the 1991 album with a four letter swear word, to protest censorship. A boxer friend, Ray Mancini, told him the word supposedly stood for for unlawful carnal knowledge, which is not actually true, and that became the title. It debuted at number one and won the band its only Grammy, for best hard rock performance. The song Poundcake opened with Eddie holding a cordless power drill against his guitar pickups. The instrumental 316 was named for the birthday of Eddie and Valerie's son Wolfgang, born on the sixteenth of March 1991. Then came Right Now, a serious song about the world, whose video of stark captions won Video of the Year at the 1992 MTV awards.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Balance and breakdown

In May 1992 the band recorded two shows in Fresno, California, for their first live album, Live: Right Here, Right Now. Hagar later revealed that the brothers fixed so much afterwards that he had to stand in a vocal booth with a video of the concert and sing the whole show again. Behind the curtain, a keyboard player named Alan Fitzgerald handled the synth parts every night so Eddie could concentrate on guitar. Then the band lost its steady hand. Their longtime manager Ed Leffler died of thyroid cancer on the sixteenth of October 1993. He was replaced by Ray Danniels, who was Alex's brother in law, and the new arrangement soon caused friction with Hagar.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eddie quit drinking on the second of October 1994, and he wrote the mystical opener The Seventh Seal while sober, with the help of a therapist. The album Balance came out in January 1995 and became their fourth straight number one with Hagar, and their first top ten album in Britain. Its cover showed conjoined twins on a seesaw, one pulling the other's hair. The tour quickly earned a nickname from the band itself, the Ambulance Tour. Hagar had throat trouble, Eddie was suffering from a degenerative hip condition called avascular necrosis, and Alex performed in a neck brace because of damaged vertebrae. Eddie later said the conflicts with Hagar and the new manager got so bad he started drinking again.[1] [2] [3]

In 1996 the band was asked to record songs for the film Twister. Hagar was in Hawaii, waiting for the birth of his child, and was against doing the project. They finished one song, Humans Being, but Eddie was unhappy with Hagar's lyrics and rewrote the melody, which infuriated the singer. The brothers recorded the second piece on their own, an instrumental called Respect the Wind that earned them a Grammy nomination. There was also a fight about releasing a greatest hits album before a new studio record. By June 1996 Hagar was gone. To this day he says he was fired, and Eddie always insisted Hagar quit.[1] [2] [3]

Then came a surprise. Roth called Eddie about the hits album, they got on well, and he was soon back in the studio singing two new songs with producer Glen Ballard. On the fourth of September 1996 the four original members walked onto the stage of the MTV Video Music Awards together, for the first time in more than eleven years, to present an award to Beck. The crowd went wild. But Roth hammed it up behind Beck's speech, and backstage the two men nearly came to blows when Eddie mentioned his upcoming hip replacement. Eddie remembered warning Roth that if he ever spoke to him like that again, he had better be wearing a cup. Weeks later Roth was out again.[1] [2] [3]

Cherone, cancer and the lost years

The third singer was Gary Cherone, frontman of the Boston band Extreme, famous for the acoustic hit More Than Words. He shared a manager with Van Halen, clicked with Eddie, and even moved into Eddie's guest house while they wrote. Van Halen III came out in March 1998. Eddie played most of the bass, with Michael Anthony on just three songs, and on the closing piano ballad How Many Say I, Eddie sang lead on a Van Halen record for the first time. The single Without You spent six weeks at number one on the rock chart, and the tour reached Australia and New Zealand for the first time. But the album only went gold, a flop by the band's standards. Cherone later said they should have toured together before recording.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Work on a second Cherone album began in 1999, but Warner reportedly sent it back twice for lacking a hit single. In November 1999 Cherone left on friendly terms, the only Van Halen singer to go without bad blood. The same year Eddie finally had his hip replaced. Worse news followed. In 2000 he began treatment for tongue cancer, and surgery removed about a third of his tongue. He was declared cancer free in 2002. Eddie had his own theory about the cause. He always held brass and copper picks in his mouth, in exactly the spot where the cancer grew. He admitted the heavy smoking and drugs might have played a part too, but doctors told him his theory was possible.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

For the next few years Van Halen went silent. The brothers jammed with Roth several times in 2000 and 2001, but nothing came of it. They got close to making an album with Ozzy Osbourne, and even worked out a plan with his wife and manager Sharon, until MTV offered the family a reality show and The Osbournes took over their lives. Ozzy later confirmed the story. Meanwhile, in 2002, the two feuding singers went on the road together in what fans called the Sam and Dave tour. Roth summed up the difference between them. Hagar was the guy you'd split a bottle with, and Roth was the guy who'd split your friend with a bottle. Backstage, the two camps stayed strictly apart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2004 Hagar returned for a greatest hits album and a big summer tour. The brothers had not wanted Michael Anthony back, and he only came because Hagar refused to play without him, on a reduced royalty deal. Eddie even played bass on the three new songs himself. The tour grossed nearly fifty five million dollars, but Eddie was drinking heavily, and fan videos showed ragged playing. The two camps flew in separate jets. At the final show in Tucson, Eddie smashed his guitar at the end of the night. Hagar said he was done with Van Halen, and in his memoir he described Eddie in that period as a changed man. Eddie later admitted he had become a very angry drunk.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That December brought a tragedy close to home. Dimebag Darrell Abbott of Pantera, who had worshipped Eddie since childhood and had only just met him, was shot dead on stage in Columbus, Ohio, on the eighth of December 2004 by a gunman named Nathan Gale. At the funeral, Eddie brought his original black and yellow striped guitar from the Van Halen II era and placed it in Dimebag's casket, saying an original should have an original. Eddie's own life was unravelling. Valerie Bertinelli, separated from him since 2001, filed for divorce in 2005, later writing that his cocaine addiction and his refusal to quit smoking after his cancer were the main reasons. The divorce was finalised in 2007.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Diamond Dave returns

In September 2006, on Howard Stern's radio show, Eddie announced that his fifteen year old son Wolfgang had replaced Michael Anthony on bass. Many fans were shocked. In March 2007 Van Halen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and it was a mess. Eddie was in rehab, so neither brother attended. Roth pulled out after a dispute over which song to sing. Only Hagar and Anthony turned up, and they thanked Roth from the stage. Anthony even thanked Gary Cherone. That same month Eddie posted a note on the band's website saying he was in rehab and could not give his best. In May he told fans he had completed the programme.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The long rumoured reunion with Roth finally began on the twenty seventh of September 2007 in Charlotte, North Carolina, with sixteen year old Wolfgang on bass. Anthony said he found out he had been replaced on the internet, and that without him this was not a reunion. Roth's answer was that it was not a reunion but a revision. The band's website even erased Anthony from old album art for a day. Still, the shows sold out, and the tour grossed more than ninety three million dollars, the biggest in the band's history. Eddie later said he had been sober since 2008. In 2009 he married Janie Liszewski, with Alex, an ordained minister, officiating, and Valerie and Wolfgang among the guests.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Next came new music. After the tour, Wolfgang dug through the band's archives and found rough demos from the seventies that had never been released. The first to be reworked, She's the Woman, won Roth over. The band recorded at Henson Studios with producer John Shanks, and several songs came from those old demos, with Roth writing new lyrics. On the fifth of January 2012 they played a tiny warm up gig at Cafe Wha? in New York, the club once run by Roth's uncle. A Different Kind of Truth came out on the seventh of February 2012, their first album with Roth in twenty eight years. It debuted at number two in America and number six in Britain, their highest ever chart position there.[1] [2] [3]

The 2012 tour grossed over fifty four million dollars, but the second leg was cancelled, the band citing exhaustion. That August, Eddie had emergency surgery for diverticulitis, and shows in Japan were pushed back. They made them up in 2013, and a concert at the Tokyo Dome became Van Halen's first live album with Roth, released in 2015. That year they toured North America again and ended with two nights at the Hollywood Bowl. They were Van Halen's final concerts. Eddie was candid about the mood. He loved his brother and his son, he told Billboard, but Roth did not want to be his friend. In 2017 he quietly donated seventy five of his guitars to schools in low income areas.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

After Eddie

In late 2019 Roth told a reporter he thought Van Halen was finished. Eddie was seriously ill. His cancer had returned, and he sought experimental treatments, including trips to Switzerland, taking a guitar effects pedal with him so he could keep playing. Alex said the cancer spread to his brain, and that Eddie died after a massive stroke. Eddie Van Halen died on the sixth of October 2020 at Saint John's hospital in Santa Monica, aged sixty five, with Janie, Wolfgang, Valerie and Alex at his side. Wolfgang broke the news, calling him the best father he could ever ask for. Ten days earlier, Mark Stone, the band's original bassist, had also died of cancer.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Because of the pandemic, there was no funeral or public memorial. Eddie was cremated, and his ashes went to Wolfgang, who wears some of them in a necklace. In November 2020, Wolfgang told Howard Stern the band was over, saying you can't have Van Halen without Eddie Van Halen. He also revealed that before Eddie fell ill, they had talked about a huge reunion tour with Hagar, Anthony and Cherone, and that his father had been excited about it. It never happened. In 2023 Wolfgang said Van Halen doesn't exist anymore, adding that unlike some bands, there was simply too much animosity between the members for a tribute concert to work.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Wolfgang had been working on his own music for years at 5150 Studios. His first single, Distance, written as his father's health declined, came out in November 2020 as a tribute. Eddie had heard it before he died and cried. The album Mammoth WVH followed in June 2021, with Wolfgang playing every instrument himself. The name was a nod to his father's first band. Distance earned a Grammy nomination, and he later played guitar on I'm Just Ken for the Barbie soundtrack, performing it at the Academy Awards. In 2025 the band shortened its name to simply Mammoth and released a third album, The End.[1] [2]

Alex took Eddie's death hardest of all. He told Rolling Stone he was diagnosed with post traumatic stress, and in 2022 he broke his back when a rifle knocked him over at a shooting range. A planned tour with Roth collapsed first, after Alex asked for an on stage tribute to Eddie and Roth exploded. In October 2024 Alex published a memoir, Brothers, a love letter to his brother. He says the vaults hold enough material for three or four albums, and has talked about using artificial intelligence to study Eddie's style, about Robert Plant as a singer, and about a biopic. Meanwhile Hagar and Anthony, with Joe Satriani, kept touring the Hagar era songs from 2024, and were still at it in 2026.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The numbers are staggering. As of 2019, Van Halen had sold fifty six million albums in the United States, twentieth on the industry's all time list, with two albums, the debut and 1984, passing ten million each. They scored thirteen number ones on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. Eddie's influence was even bigger. Rolling Stone ranked him fourth among the greatest guitarists of all time in 2023, and in 2019 the original Frankenstein guitar went on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a replica held by the Smithsonian. A generation of players copied his tapping. As Joe Satriani put it, Eddie put the smile back in rock guitar.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Van Halen

Eddie Van Halen and Alex Van Halen. The brothers crossed the ocean together as boys and were the only two members in every version of the band. They jammed almost daily for five decades, fought constantly, and both battled alcoholism inherited, Alex says, from their father. Alex spent his life protecting his younger brother, and after Eddie's death he fell apart. He called his memoir Brothers, and still says he misses the arguments.[1] [2] [3]

Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth. They met at Pasadena City College and were perfect opposites, the shy guitar genius and the loud showman. Their clash over darker music versus pop, keyboards versus guitars and Eddie's outside work ended the classic line up in 1985. They reunited in 2007 and made a final album, but in 2015 Eddie said Roth did not want to be his friend. Roth admitted that apart, they were footnotes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar. Hagar said that when he walked into the room, Eddie played him a riff and he started singing, and it clicked for years. Together they made four number one albums. Then came the fights of 1996 and the ugly 2004 reunion, when Hagar described Eddie as drunk and changed. Eddie disputed Hagar's portrait, and Hagar replied that there is what Eddie says and there is the truth.[1] [2] [3]

Van Halen brothers and Michael Anthony. Anthony was the easygoing bassist whose high harmonies fans treasure. The brothers treated him as a lesser partner. He signed away future songwriting royalties in 1984, played bass on only three songs of Van Halen III, and was replaced by Wolfgang in 2006. Eddie claimed he showed Anthony every note. Anthony found a new home beside Hagar, in Chickenfoot, the Circle and the Best of All Worlds tours.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli. The rock star and the sitcom actress met at a concert in 1980 and married in 1981, and their son Wolfgang was born in 1991. Eddie's drinking and cocaine use pulled them apart. They separated in 2001 and divorced in 2007, yet stayed close. She attended his second wedding, he attended hers, and she was at his bedside when he died.[1] [2] [3]

Eddie Van Halen and Wolfgang Van Halen. Named after Mozart, Wolfgang did not realise his dad was famous until he saw his face on CDs. The instrumental 316 was named for his birthday. At fifteen he joined the band on bass, and he steered the band's final album by digging up old demos. He handled his father's death and ashes, and now carries the legacy through his own band, Mammoth.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Van Halen and Ted Templeman. The Warner producer signed the band after the Starwood show in 1977 and produced their first six albums, capturing their live energy fast and cheap. He also clashed with Eddie over keyboards and covers, which is partly why Eddie built his own studio. Templeman went with Roth after the split, then returned to produce For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge in 1991.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Van Halen and Gene Simmons. The Kiss bassist was among the first industry figures to champion the band, paying for their 1976 demos in Los Angeles and New York. When Kiss's management passed, Simmons tore up his deal and let them go. The band thanked him on their debut album, and Simmons later joked they still owed him a couple of thousand dollars.[1] [2] [3]

David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar. The two Van Halen singers traded insults for decades, going back to the seventies. In 2002 they toured together, alternating as headliner, but the camps stayed apart backstage and Hagar later called Roth pompous and demanding. Roth joked that Hagar was the guy you split a bottle with, while he was the guy who would split your friend with a bottle.[1] [2] [3]

Eddie Van Halen and Dimebag Darrell. Pantera's guitarist idolised Eddie, and he and his brother used the words Van Halen as their pre show code. The two guitarists finally met in Texas in late 2004 and bonded over being brothers in a band. Weeks later Dimebag was murdered on stage, and Eddie placed his own black and yellow guitar in his casket.[1] [2]

Van Halen and Noel Monk. Monk came from Warner's touring department, fresh from the Sex Pistols' American tour, and managed Van Halen through their rise, doubling their royalty rate in 1979. He saw Roth as the band's real business brain. The brothers fired him suddenly in 1985, months before Roth left, and in 2017 he published a memoir of those wild years, Runnin' with the Devil.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Van Halen

• Eddie Van Halen never learned to read music, yet won a yearly piano competition at Long Beach City College as a boy. He studied classical piano from the age of six but learned by watching and listening instead of reading. He still took first place in the competition in the mid sixties.[1]
• The body of Eddie's Frankenstein guitar cost just fifty dollars, because it had a knot in the wood. Eddie bought the factory second ash body cheaply and added an eighty dollar neck. He wired in a single pickup because he knew little about electronics.[1] [2]
• Two of the pickups and switches on the Frankenstein guitar were fakes, not connected to anything. Eddie stuffed a dead selector switch and random wires into one slot and fitted a non working pickup in another. Only one pickup actually worked.[1] [2]
• Eddie painted his famous guitar red with bicycle paint in 1979, partly because others were copying his stripes. Frankenstein started black and white. Frustrated by imitators, Eddie sprayed it with red Schwinn bicycle paint, creating the red, white and black look fans know.[1] [2]
• The brown sound Eddie described was not his guitar tone at all, but Alex's snare drum. Eddie told Billboard in 2015 that people took the phrase out of context. He thought Alex's snare sounded organic, like someone beating on a log, and brown was an organic colour.[1] [2]
• The rain on Could This Be Magic is real rain, recorded outside the studio. It was raining during the sessions for Women and Children First, so the band set up two microphones to capture it in stereo and added it to the track.[1]
• Van Halen II thanks a hotel whose seventh floor the band destroyed on tour. At a Sheraton in Madison, Wisconsin, the band had fire extinguisher fights and threw televisions out of windows. They blamed it on their tour mates, Journey.[1]
• Van Halen rushed out You Really Got Me because another band planned to beat them to it. The band had been trading boasts with Angel's drummer and played him the demo. Ted Templeman soon heard Angel was cutting its own version, so Warner released Van Halen's first.[1]
• A fan once congratulated the Kinks' Dave Davies on his great cover of the Van Halen song You Really Got Me. Davies said he disliked Van Halen's version, joking that Eddie probably played better drunk. His brother Ray said he liked it because it made him laugh.[1]
• Jan Van Halen played clarinet on Big Bad Bill, the only time he recorded with his sons. The old jazz tune on Diver Down was Roth's idea. Eddie said his father would get tears in his eyes watching his sons play.[1] [2]
• For Little Guitars, Eddie played a miniature Les Paul, and never used it on any other Van Halen recording. A Nashville luthier named David Petschulat built it and sold it to Eddie on tour. The song was inspired by the flamenco guitarist Carlos Montoya.[1] [2]
• The engine on Panama is Eddie's 1972 Lamborghini Miura, revved with microphones at the exhaust. The car was backed up to the studio for the recording. Roth said the song itself was inspired by a race car called the Panama Express.[1] [2]
• American troops blasted Panama at Manuel Noriega while he hid during the 1989 invasion of Panama. Soldiers played the song over and over as psychological pressure, part of a campaign of loud music meant to force the general out of hiding.[1]
• The comic actor Phil Hartman voiced Waldo, the nerdy schoolboy in the Hot for Teacher video. The video was filmed at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles and shows child lookalikes of all four band members.[1]
• The director of the Jump video said they spent more on pizza than on the video itself. Pete Angelus said the idea was a simple live performance that let the personalities shine. It still won an award at the very first MTV Video Music Awards.[1] [2]
• The cherub on the 1984 cover was a real child model holding a candy cigarette. Margo Nahas painted the smoking cherub from photos of a friend's son. In Britain the cover was sold with a sticker hiding the cigarettes.[1]
• Eddie recorded parts of Girl Gone Bad in a hotel room closet so he would not wake Valerie. The song appeared on 1984. The same album closes with House of Pain, a song dating back to the band's mid seventies club sets.[1]
• MTV's Lost Weekend with Van Halen contest drew more than a million postcards in 1984. The winner, Kurt Jeffries, was flown to Detroit to join the band, brought on stage, and had a sheet cake smashed in his face and champagne poured over him.[1]
• Eddie's home studio 5150 took its name from the California code for an involuntary psychiatric hold. He built it in 1983 with engineer Donn Landee. Every Van Halen album from 1984 onward was worked on there, and the 1986 album was named after it.[1] [2]
• The songs on the back cover of OU812 are listed in alphabetical order, not the running order. The front cover was a nod to the Beatles album With the Beatles, showing the band's faces half in shadow.[1]
• Van Halen's Source of Infection was written about Eddie catching dengue fever on holiday in Australia. Eddie and Valerie were celebrating their seventh wedding anniversary in April 1988 when he fell ill and was hospitalised.[1]
• The intro to Poundcake is Eddie holding a battery powered Makita drill against his guitar pickups. The trick opened the 1991 album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, which won the band its only Grammy.[1]
• Valerie Bertinelli shared a photo of Eddie playing 316 on her pregnant belly, before the song had a name. The instrumental was later named for Wolfgang's birthday, the sixteenth of March 1991. The tune itself had been around since the 5150 era.[1]
• For the Balance track Strung Out, Eddie stuffed ping pong balls, batteries and cutlery into Marvin Hamlisch's piano. Eddie had rented the composer's beach house one summer and experimented on the piano inside. Producer Bruce Fairbairn loved the tapes and put one on the album.[1]
• The boy on the Balance cover was widely mistaken for Wolfgang Van Halen, but he came from Denver. Photographer Glen Wexler combined images of the child into conjoined twins on a seesaw. His own daughter was the hand model pulling the hair.[1]
• The man on the Van Halen III cover is Frank Cannonball Richards, a vaudeville act who took cannonballs to the gut. The image was a still from old stock footage. At over sixty five minutes, Van Halen III is the band's longest album.[1]
• Alex Van Halen's hearing loss helped inspire an early in ear monitor, built from pacemaker speakers. In 1995 Alex told engineer Jerry Harvey he could no longer hear the band on stage. Harvey built a monitor using two tiny speakers designed for pacemakers.[1]
• Michael Anthony is naturally left handed but plays bass right handed. His first bass was a Fender Mustang guitar with the two highest strings removed. His father later bought him a copy of a Precision bass.[1]
• Only three of Michael Anthony's famous Jack Daniel's basses were ever made, by agreement with the whiskey company. His bass tech promised the company he would not make more than three. The first appeared in the Panama video and now sits in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1]
• Eddie held a patent for a fold out guitar prop that let him tap with the guitar lying flat like a piano. He was awarded three guitar patents in all, including a tailpiece and a headstock design. The prop patent expired in 2005.[1]
• David Lee Roth became a licensed emergency medical technician in New York and went on hundreds of calls. He said in 2012 that he had over two hundred emergency calls on his record in six years, and that he lived a very different life away from music.[1] [2]
• Roth's uncle Manny owned Cafe Wha? in New York, where Van Halen played a surprise club gig in 2012. The famous Greenwich Village club had hosted Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce. The January 2012 show warmed up the band for A Different Kind of Truth.[1] [2] [3]
• Olympique de Marseille footballers have walked out to Jump before home games since December 1986. The song became a sporting staple around the world, and in 2012 members of PRS for Music voted it their favourite sporting song.[1]
• Van Halen's rider once led to a legend of an M&M riot, but the costliest damage came from their stage. At a 1980 college show in Pueblo, Colorado, the stage was so heavy it sank into and ruined a new basketball floor.[1] [2]
• In 2017 Eddie gave seventy five of his own guitars to students in low income schools. He donated them to the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation, telling CNN that music has to be taught and that most charities only wanted money.[1] [2]
• Van Halen once planned an album with Ozzy Osbourne on vocals, until reality television got in the way. Around 2001 the brothers worked out a plan with Sharon Osbourne. Then MTV offered the family The Osbournes. Ozzy said it was a regret of his.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.