Eleven things we learned from the Alex Van Halen interview, in order of newsworthiness

By STEVE MASCORD

WHEN a celebrated figure does not do an interview for half a decade, there are bound to be revelations when he or she finally shares their kitchen table with a voice recorder.

When there is a cataclysmic event in the meantime, said interview starts to take on enormous importance to those with an interest in the personalities or subjects at hand.

Brian Hiatt’s Alex Van Halen feature on RollingStone.com is one such piece of journalism.

It’s the drummer’s first public utterances since his brother Edward’s death in 2020 and there is an absolute wealth of information – some of it quite surprising or even shocking – in Hiatt’s lengthy piece.

We encourage you to subscribe to RS and read Brian’s piece but if we were writing a news story per day off the feature for hotmetalmag.com, we estimate this treasure trove of would keep us going for a week and a half.

1. David Lee Roth kyboshed the tribute tour by, in the eyes of Alex Van Halen, insulting his brother. The tour was to involve Joe Satriani on guitar and ‘maybe’ Michael Anthony on bass. Alex was not feeling well at the time due to back problems but he consulted Queen’s Brian May about how to honour a dead member during such a tour. It was in his discussions with David Lee Roth that it all fell apart. “The moment I said we gotta acknowledge Ed, Dave fuckin’ popped a fuse.… The vitriol that came out was unbelievable.” The tour was canned. “In retrospect, playing the old songs is not really paying tribute to anybody. That’s just like a jukebox, in my opinion.”
2. Alex broke his back at a shooting range in 2022, the apparent reason he has given up drumming. “The rifle kicked me on my ass and broke my back, instantly. And then I spent a year on the floor. Just staring at the ceiling”, He is considering using a military-developed exoskeleton – something out of Iron Man – if current treatments don’t work
3. Edward took a full bottle of steroid pills shortly before he died – which his brother believes shortened his life. “I didn’t see the bottle, but the bottle had, like, a thousand pills in it.”;
4. Alex still harbours a grudge against Eddie for playing with Michael Jackson in 1982. “And the funny part was that Ed fibbed his way out of it by saying ‘oh, who knows that kid anyway?’ You made the mistake! Fess up. Don’t add insult to injury by acting stupid.”
5. Alex dislikes Sammy Hagar, who has said he has tried to contact him on many occasions since Eddie’s death. “The heart and the soul and the creativity and the magic was Dave, Ed, Mike, and me.”
6. Ozzy Osbourne almost joined Van Halen in 2001. “Eddie and Alex were great friends of mine for a very long time and it’s a regret of mine that we never got it together,” Osbourne is quoted as saying. “The Osbournes got in the way of creating new music at that time, unfortunately.”
7. At the end, Edward’s throat cancer metastasised to his brain, causing a “massive” stoke;
8. Alex wants Robert Plant to sing vocals on left-over Van Halen material. “You’re gonna think I’m out of my fucking mind. But when conditions are right, things will manifest.”
9. Chris Cornell almost joined Van Halen. “This motherfucker got so into it (playing bass) he started bleeding. I said, ‘This is the man you want.’ And then he died.”
10. OpenAI have been consulted in a bid to finish some Van Halen material, using ““the patterns of how Edward would have played something”;
11. A biopic is in the works. “It’s just a long-term plan. I mean, to put things in perspective, the Queen movie took 30 years to make.”