In Brothers – Alex Van Halen's eulogy to Eddie Van Halen – the Van Halen drummer captures the push-and-pull dynamic between lead singer David Lee Roth and the two brothers. Among other revelations, he discloses the reason why Roth formally parted ways with the band following the dizzying success of Jump and 1984.
“He couldn’t handle the fact that Eddie was getting more attention than he was,” Alex writes. “He kept asking Eddie to play fewer guitar solos. Dave was convinced he was going to be a movie star.”
And with that, the iteration of the band Alex refers to as “the real Van Halen” disintegrated, just as the album reached No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart – a moment he calls “the most disappointing thing I’d experienced in my life, the thing that seemed the most wasteful and unjust.”
Alex also tells Billboard that despite decades-old tension with Roth, he still acknowledges him as one of the three main components of the band.
“At the time we didn’t recognize it because we were constantly battling things out. That’s why I mentioned [in the book] that the first person I called when Ed died was Dave because I felt like I owed him that, to the work we had done together and the fact that our families knew each other and the fact that everybody was sort of on the same level, if you will, when we first started.”
As for Roth's decision to leave Van Halen, Alex asserts, “I don’t know where things went wrong. I have nothing but the utmost respect for Dave and his work ethic. I just think some of his choices were really strange to me, but that’s not my job to figure it out.”
In other recent Van Halen news, Unfinished, the last song Eddie worked on with his brother before his passing, has now been released in its entirety.
