A lot was made of Van Halen drummer Alex Van Halen’s recent memoir, “Brothers,” and it had more to do with what wasn’t included in the book than what he wrote about. Alex made just one passing reference to the band’s years that followed original singer David Lee Roth’s exit, and he told Rolling Stone that ex-Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar and bassist Michael Anthony “are not doing the band justice” with their “Best Of All Worlds Tour” which was billed as a celebration of all eras of Van Halen in addition to Hagar’s solo material and time with Montrose.
In a new interview with “Bringing It Back To The Beatles,” Alex was asked why he made “the conscientious decision” to end his book in 1984 and not cover anything with the Hagar era or beyond.
“Because the original band was the band that was the driving force,” he said. “That was the connection between the disparate parts of the musical world, if you will. And we were young. The first record going platinum — it’s incredible. That’s something you can really never expect to happen again. Later on, it was different — that’s for another book — but the excitement and the confusion and the groping in the dark, if you will, and all the mistakes that we made, and all the B.S. we had to endure, and then to recognize at the very end, maybe we had one more record in us, it was very… You can’t take it back, but those are the things that are in the back of your head. The old expression of, if you don’t go over the edge, then you can’t come back. You have to go too far to come back in. Does that make sense? Unfortunately, we’re human and we made some bad choices. The US Festival, for instance, was just a clusterfuck. Nobody knew what the hell was going on. All we said was, ‘You make sure you have enough power, and we’ll play.’ That’s it.”
The interviewer added that the Roth era of the band was “true rock and roll.” Alex responded: “Bingo. That’s exactly right,” he said. “You just hit the nail on the head. After that, that’s why the book ends in 1984, because that was true rock and roll. After that, it became much more — I don’t know; I can’t explain it. But it’s not to say that it was not any good. We always did our best at whatever we were doing, but it wasn’t the same.”
Watch Alex Van Halen’s full interview below.
